An update
- Me: yes
- Me: I painted a kettle and I made my Patrick Dempsey doll into a black man
- Me: it's very handsome
- Ollie: i can imagine
- Ollie: he was handsome enough already
- Me: nobody ever has black dolls
- Me: or black action figures
- Ollie: now you are the trendsetter
- Me: (blaction figures)
- Me: (blaction figures)
Lecteur or Lectured?
Comments I write on pages that are actually worth looking at I →
This is quiiite interesting. I get pissed off when people moan about split infinitives etc. - when a language has multiple ways of expressing something intelligibly it has more possibilities for beauty than it would otherwise. Ambiguity makes me hard.
At this point, arguments in LING 211 last year about “Spanish American history teacher” spring to mind…
or:
or:
?
You be the judge.
Anyway, it brings up an ongoing problem in my life - I love language but I don’t want to prescribe how it should be used based on my own preferences. I do, however, value the incredible shades of meaning each language offers - so I can’t help but wince when variation and ambiguity are removed from languages. Which I why I don’t like expressions like “wellness” which I see as redundant and a bit perverted - but at the same time having no problem with double negatives (of which my syntax lecturer invariably manages to give examples relating to crime … “I didn’t do nothin’”, “I don’t know nothin’ about no killin’” [so-called African-American Vernacular English isn’t just spoken by murderers. Oh, wait, it is, because all blacks are criminals.]). Sorry about that horribly-nested sentence.
So I suppose I can say that I don’t value correctness - what dictionaries and grammar/usage guides prescribe - but I do value expressiveness - the degree, range and qualities of meaning (or lack thereof) that can be conveyed by language. I don’t like foods being called “healthy” when they’re (subjectively - though that’s irrelevant in a post about linguistic prescriptivism, maybe another day when I write about public health or eating disorders) considered to be healthful. But I’m not going to write to the Listener and ask “what’s happened to the Queen’s English?” over it. If anything, language’s most valuable quality is that it is dynamic. I don’t want to be conservative about it, but I don’t want to be progressive. Any attempt in either direction is futile (yes, I’m talking to you, Académie française); language evolves and not in any Lamarckian way - we are the substrate upon which this evolution acts, not the things that evolve.
Keep on speaking,
A
Three pleasures
- finding something lost and since forgotten
- thinking you are getting a cold, but realising that, no, the itch in your throat is simply because you have had a long conversation with a smoker
- guessing correctly
Scratch writ larger
I’m not sure where to begin my criticism of Tony Veitch, New Zealand’s justice system and New Zealand’s journalism. But I will.
So. Tony Veitch was tried by a jury of his peers and found guilty of injuring with reckless disregard. I think, then, it is safe to assume that he beat his then partner, generally fucking her over.
Which happens. Not just at the hands of people with undeservedly-high profiles. Because of his high profile, however, public attitudes towards domestic violence and violence more generally become more vivid - while mainstream journalists get to show off their ineptitude at carrying out their jobs.
Question raised #1: Why did the Crown offer no evidence for the six charges of assault pressed against Veitch? His then partner seems to have given ample evidence of what happened - evidence that points strongly towards his having assaulted her (on six counts?). If convicted of assault, he would most probably be in jail. His imprisonment would doubtless fulfill the detterent effect of imprisonment, encouraging other cats not to beat each other up. His sentence as it stands, on the other hand, looks to demonstrate that It is Okay to smack bitches up (as long as you’re willing to be supervised for a while, do a bit of community work and pay a meagre fine). I doubt that his incarceration would have any other effect, although I’d prefer if someone who, in his own words, “lay there with [his] fingers in [his] ears, pleading for [Dunne-Powell] to stop … and then tried to leave the room” after beating the shit out of her was behind bars and not harming anybody else. He’d get fucked up in prison, though, and come out more likely to screw over people. As a friend of mine repeatedly states, “People go into prison knowing two ways to break into a car; they come out knowing ten.” Rehabilitation is a bit much to ask from a prison.
stuff.co.nz couldn’t stop harping on about how a judge had noted that Veitch is “the author of his own misfortune”. Question raised #2: What misfortune? Oh, okay, the fact that he’s been convicted of a crime. I would suggest that the real misfortune here is the general public and in particular Kristin Dunne-Powell has had to live with someone in its midst who would beat people up and try to pay to keep them quiet. A crime is committed against the society that has established the laws in question, not against the victim of the crime. It is certainly not committed against the perpetrator of the crime. As far as misfortunes go, he doesn’t have much reason to bleat. Question raised #3: Why report a judge saying something so meaningless? It is a deductive fact that Veitch is responsible for his punishment; the “misfortune” is a result of his actions and he was the one who committed the crime, not some other “author”. Question raised #4: Under what circumstances is a criminal not the author of the misfortunes they undergo by way of punishment for their crime?
More questions raised, various: What’s the hand that doesn’t have a wedding ring on it doing? More pertinently, though, this picture does hint at how the treatment of his sentencing and his public perception comes down to class. Here we have a (married) sharply-dressed (married) middle-class (married) white (married) conventionally-heterosexual (married man fending off the press confidently while demonstrating some degree of convincing concern (marriedly). If he were Maaori? I don’t know if we’d be seeing the same. If he were gay? I don’t think people would care. If he weren’t a quasi-celebrity? This wouldn’t be news; nobody would even be surprised. In fact, the main reason why the story seemed so notable when it came out was that he’d tried to pay for Dunne-Powell’s silence.
As an attempt at a convincing aside, once my sister referred to Veitch as “the onomatopoeia of a scratch”. In some way, he allegedly embodies the sound of a scratch wound. I understood her when she said it; the overall impression made sense to me. I thought about it though and the mere existence of a phrase like that forced me to question my own. If such an existence can be called mere, that is.
God bless stuff.co.nz.
Oggi
Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ‘l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore
quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono,
del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono
fra le vane speranze e ‘l van dolore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,
spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono.
Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me mesdesmo meco mi vergogno;
et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ‘l frutto,
e ‘l pentersi, e ‘l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.
Petrarch - Il Canzoniere.
Today in 1327, Petrarch caught sight of his Laura for the first time. Today I caught sight of many people for the first time, but didn’t think anything of it.
To think - what you lose every time you pass someone by!
On the upside, though, today hasn’t resulted in years of despair about the person I’m frantically in love with being with somebody else - and years more of misery once that person dies. Yet.
All the same, I can’t help but agreeing with Frankie … though maybe more del mio general tendency to embarrass myself è vergogna il frutto.
