Posted on 01/21/2007 2:15:56 PM PST by shrinkermd
Eric Arthur Blair died in 1950 of tuberculosis shortly before Streptomycin became available.
1. meaning inflation;
2. unconjugated verbs.
The first would be a mortal wound if not treated; the second is merely obnoxious.
What be the problem with them?
Actually, I can't stand people who end sentences with prepositions. That is habbit up with which I cannot put.
heh heh.. reminds me of that guy on the west coast, some unviersity person, maybe berkely, was talking about how the democrats can progress their agenda by changing the language by which they talk about things. Conservatives do it to, (R)nold's 'taxes' vs 'fees' language and all sorts of vaguery. I think it comes down to the people themselves having strong reasonings and sorting through superficial semantic dances and definitions and understanding that just cuz a law has 'child' in it doesn't mean it protects children or is good.
SPELLING
I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me, there is such a breezy unfettered originality about his orthography. He always spells Kow with a large K. Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.
- speech at a spelling match, Hartford, Connecticut, May 12, 1875. Reported in the Hartford Courant, May 13, 1875
Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus dance with wooden legs.
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, December 9, 1907
...simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.
- The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling speech, December 9, 1907
I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is wages earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God and not by your own effort transfers the distinction to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction but it leaves you naked and bankrupt.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
...ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
That's another one. The commies have stolen 'progressive' from TR and got it without a fight.
The Business Roundtable is hip. To wit
Don't say Protectionism say Isolationism. You, you 1930s Isolationist! Nazi lover!
Don't say World trade say Working with the world. Who's against working with the world?
Don't say Global trade say Trade. It's only trade, dummy!
After that, what is there left to say?
Oh, well, only this: I like Orwell cause he writes real good and stuff. ;-)
I like "(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous" especially. I have used that on more than one occasion for ending a sentence in a preposition! (or splitting an infinitive, for that matter.
I once used ameliorate when describing my repair of a toilet. It just seemed nice to dress up such a disgusting process, "...attempting to ameliorate the decrepit fixture..."
Was it pretentious of Lincoln to start the Gettysburg Address with "Four score and seven years ago"? Why didn't he just say "Eighty-seven years"? The answer is obvious. The former rings; the latter flops. Adhering to Mr. Orwell's "rules" would rob language of its color and most of its impact.
The Groton influence of Endicott Peabody showed in a speech Roosevelt gave at the People's Forum in Troy, NY in 1912. There he declared that western Europeans and Americans had achieved victory in the struggle for "the liberty of the individual," and that the new agenda should be a "struggle for the liberty of the community." The wrong ethos for a new age was, "every man does as he sees fit, even with a due regard to law and order." The new order should be, "march on with civilization in a way satisfactory to the well-being of the great majority of us."
In that speech Roosevelt outlined the philosophical base of what would eventually become the New Deal. He also forecast the rhetorical mode by which "community" could loom over individual liberty. "If we call the method regulation, people hold up their hands in horror and say ‘un-American,' or ‘dangerous,'" Roosevelt pointed out. "But if we call the same identical process co-operation, these same old fogeys will cry out ‘well done'.... cooperation is as good a word for the new theory as any other."
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i'm going to bookmark
BUMP!
it's been downhill for the "muvver tongue"...
I heatrily agre. I aslo despize bad speling.
on danling prepositions:
Have you heard the one about the little boy upstairs sick in bed who asked his mom, "What did you bring that book I wanted to be read to out of up for?"
5, count 'em, 5
er, danling propositions are bad, dangling ones are even worse...
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