Sunday cat pix

Incidental thoughts on being oneself

The last few weeks the word ‘slowly’ has popped into my thoughts at intervals, usually in between thoughts I consider my own. The phenomenon doesn’t seem different in kind from that of a persistent melody or fragment of music recurring in thought as a kind of background music. The occurrences of the word seem to have little to do with what I’m thinking at the moment; they just happen.

Sunday cat pix

Transcending into the future

[Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) on appointing a new director of the CIA:] We need someone to take charge and make it a five or six year [stint]. Someone who transcends into the future without politics.

Alexander Bolton, “Rep. Goss has no chance of heading CIA: Roberts ”, The Hill

This seems to be a portmanteau of “transcends politics” and “sees beyond the present”.

Sunday cat pix

Psychopathology in everyday life (“press gaggle” edition)

What would your diagnosis be if in conversation someone responded to you as Scott McClellan does to the press? (The rest is below the fold because I must quote at length to exhibit the phenomenon I’m interested in.)

Ecto

The program I use most of the time for postings to Typepad is ecto, which I strongly recommend. The interface beats Typepad’s own six ways to Sunday. The feature I like best is a glossary, called “HTML Tags”, using which you can insert bits of text with a single keystroke. It’s quick to set up and works flawlessly.

I have lamented the occasional crash after a failed attempt at posting. Were it not for that, I would have no criticisms of the program. I see now that Adriaan Tijsseling is working on ecto 2.0, an upgrade that looks like it deserves to jump right to 3.0.

Any Mac user1 writing a weblog in Typepad or with Moveable Type (to mention just two of the APIs supported by ecto) ought to give ecto a try. And if you use it, buy it! There’s a lot of labor in evidence here.

1. An ecto for Windows is under development.

Language & Politics

Since I seem to be talking about language & politics quite a bit, here are some works I’ve found useful.

Lakoff

George Lakoff has been writing for over twenty years on metaphors and their use in the framing of questions. Naturally he has something to say about political discourse:

Bonnie Azab Powell, “Linguistics professor George Lakoff dissects the "war on terror" and other conservative catchphrases”, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, 26 August 2004

Bonnie Azab Powell, “Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics UC Berkeley” NewsCenter, 27 October 2003

Books

Now some books. Those with ISBN numbers are still in print.

Every man for herself

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber has re-opened the question of the generic third-person pronoun in English. He says he has been convinced by Geoffrey Pullum that there is no dialect of English in which ‘he’ is a generic third-person pronoun. Perhaps there isn’t, but I think that’s beside the point. The question gets its edge only in reference to written English, or better yet the written English of people who wish to be regarded as well-educated, well-read, etc. It hardly matters whether written English in that sense is a proper dialect.

L’école n’est pas le monde réel? Tant pis pour le monde…

[Q:] Et l’école est-elle en phase avec son temps ?
[Michel Serres:] J’espère bien que non ! L’actualité, c’est la répétition. C’est l’ennui absolu rabâché en même temps par tous les journaux et toutes les chaines de télévision, et ce depuis la fondation du monde. Qui a tué qui ? C’est Cain qui a tué Abel, c’est une nouvelle qui a 40 000 ans d’âge. En revanche, nous, dans l’enseignement, nous disons du nouveau tout le temps. C’est pourquoi l’idée d’adapter l’école à la société est une catastrophe. La société aujourd’hui est tellement morne, normée, formatée, ennuyeuse que la perspective d’adapter des esprits jeunes donc créateurs, intelligents, rapides, souples, vivants, à cette espèce de bétonnage des consciences et des intelligences est un projet mortel. Il serait urgent d’adapter la société à l’école pour qu’elle respecte le savoir et la beauté.

Françoise Ploquin, «La langue avance comme un glacier»,

entretien avec Michel Serres, Le français dans le monde

nº 333 (mai–juin 2004), via Accent grave