"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
If language is changing faster than ever because of the Internet, that could mean that ...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
Labels: Jean Manco, language, language change
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 12:55 AM
This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly. Click here to find an independent bookstore near you.
4 Comments:
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The key is the post's title.
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?
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.
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