Saturday, August 15, 2015

If anyone complains, you can tell them I said so

Literacy may slow the process of [language] change, as people then gain vocabulary partly from accumulated literature."
Jean Manco, The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings
If language is changing faster than ever because of the Internet, that could mean that ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

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4 Comments:

Blogger ktford said...

...?

August 15, 2015  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

The key is the post's title.

August 15, 2015  
Blogger Unknown said...

Why do I think of this Yeats poem?


The Second Coming



Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

August 15, 2015  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

Hah! It's like that joke about the old lady unimpressed by Hamlet because it was so full of cliches. In any case, Yeats had more important problems in mind that the grating use of "partner" as a verb or "they" as a neuter singular.

August 15, 2015  

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