Came across the following while rooting through the archives of a particularly fine web site:
The pessimistic will recall that corruption of thought goes hand-in-glove with corruption of language, and cast a dubious eye upon context without content.
-- Cosma Shalizi
I'm going to take the first part as renewed justification for my ridiculous habit of being a language crank.
[Added] Here's another fun bit found on Cosma's site: a link to the definition of fukayama.
To his credit, the source of the eponym seems to have backed off from some of the views that provoked this coinage. Nonetheless, it's pretty funny, and deserves to be filed right next to the entry for jonanism.
2 comments:
Thanks for the link. And the observation that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer but by another ancient Greek with that name.
I too am a language crank, however, in my case, it is especially ironic as I can't spell or punctuate.
Note this ultracrankdom
http://tinyurl.com/3dm4d8
Robert:
Delighted to have linked to your site, and now that I've looked around some more, I expect it will happen again. I did like your rant "On the negative concavity of sentences with improperly nested prepositional phrases of jargon and discussing complex issues." I would hate to have to say which bothers me more, language errors or obfuscation.
(For others, that's what Robert's tinyurl points to. It expands to this. Go read.)
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