Watch Your Language

30/10/24 LemmyKilmister 20

I’ve got a few more things on my mind, so let me get them off my chest. That still doesn’t make any sense, but neither does twisting your arm to convince you to go break a leg. In any case, I’m going to bend your ear for a minute.

I once met a guy who was maculately dressed. We were trying to get into the same club, but our access was fettered. When the bouncer hit him, it was clear that he was pervious to pain. I know you think I’m bullshitting, but I’m being totally ingenuous. Those are all words, but for some reason, we only use their opposites anymore. Anyway, the entire incident was a shitshow of consummate unprofessionalism.

No one does anything just to be on the safe side anymore, they do things Out Of An Abundance Of Caution, which sounds like one of those Needlessly Pretentious Attempts To Sound Extra Professional. Ironically, doing things Out Of An Abundance Of Caution is the conservative approach, but lately it does not seem to be what self-professed “conservatives” actually do. How about me, literally using “ironically” correctly again?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes a word can mean a thing and its opposite? It’s good to fix things, as long as you don’t get yourself in a fix. Life is a bitch, but not if you’re driving a bitchin’ Camaro. The former can be shit, but the latter is the shit. On the other hand, sometimes a word and its opposite can mean the same thing, like some cool wheels on a hot car or, if you’re hep to the youngsters’ lingo, some chill rims on a whip that’s fire.

Sometimes I don’t know what the fuck is going on: it’s better to be above board than underground, but it’s bad to go overboard? Who came up with that shit? Getting on board is usually good, but so is getting off. Getting off is good, but wising off is bad. Getting wise is also bad, even though learning and wisdom are both good. A kid who gets wise may need to smarten up. Showing off can be either good or bad, but either way no one likes a showoff. Would you rather be pent up, or up in the penthouse?

My intent, as always, has been to create potent content without portent. To the extent that I have not, I am penitent. I appreciate your attention, however tentative.

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

20 Comments

  1. …it was cracking wise the way I used to hear it….mind you…a thing could be cracking in a good way…the way you could be a cracker like a corker rather than a way of talking about skin tone

    …but you could also be cracking in the sense of cracking up…which wouldn’t be good…or to really confuse you…someone…generally irish…might just ask you not “what’s cracking?” but “how’s the crack?”

    …only that’s just the homophone thing…the spelling kind of meandered about but “the craic” is…well, it’s not illegal for a start?

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/26/whats-the-crack-on-the-origins-of-craic

    …so… apparently if I finally crack…I just need to adjust my spelling & it’ll be…a good thing?

    …maybe not as good as this post…but…we can’t all be perfect or it’d get boring…& I think leonard cohen said that’s where the light gets in

    …so I suppose the real trick is not going to pieces after you crack up

    …unless it’s the sort of cracking up that just means laughing…in which case going to pieces might be preferable to wetting your pants?

  4. The gap between spoken and written language is always going to be a mess, and lot of it has to do with how spoken language is so much more flexible.

    There are tonal languages like Mandarin where the meaning of a word changes completely depending on the intonation, and English plays around with that a bit where you can convey sarcasm with tone, so depending how you say “really” in “he’s really smart” you could be emphasizing smart or completely deemphasizing smart.

    The thing about written Chinese is that the huge number of characters means you can avoid a lot of ambiguity, but there is still a lot that depends on just knowing how usage happens. In languages that use alphabets it’s a whole lot harder to convey intonation. You might try writing “he’s really smart” but that can still be confusing.

    A lot of it depends on context, so when someone says “I’m afraid that’s impossible” in a Jeeves story, you know it’s not only completely possible but someone is going to find it irresistable to try it. And then you’ll get a final twist where it doesn’t actually work out because the one person who tries it is the only one who can’t manage it.

    A really skilled actor will be able to convey all of that meaning in a line reading of “I’m afraid that’s impossible” but there’s no way to do it at purely typographical level in English. Even when things are supposed to be clear in context in written English, you can get a lot of argument about the precise meaning of a word or sentence.

    It’s a good reason why people who trying to communicate with large audiences need to cut out the special effects. P.G. Wodehouse could pull it off because he was extremely skilled, he worked really hard, and he was aiming at a limited subset of English readers. But there are far too many sloppy wannabe stylists who only make sense to themselves, and only if they don’t pay attention.

    • …if you flip the context of the chinese characters to the japanese language you get kanji…but there’s also hiragana & katakana

      …the kanji were (iirc) mostly just “borrowed” from chinese script but used to write japanese…the whole system of how the written form works is pretty spectacularly different from the way languages that employ a roman alphabet roll

      Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, and miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose.[5] Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author’s preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.

      There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.

      [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana]

      …turns out…even though latin script is used most…the second most used script either by number of users (chinese) or number of countries that use it (arabic) don’t think writing works like that…so…it’s entirely possible it’s actually us that are doing it wrong

      …mostly, though…I just think it’s cheating when it comes to how much you can cram in a haiku

      • …this has had me…pondering?

        …maybe it’s not as interesting as it seems to me…but as I understand it written arabic is to some degree standardized such that most of the time it’s mutually comprehensible…but that doesn’t go for spoken language…so you could write a thing that two different people would both understand to say the same thing but they could both say the same thing & the other one wouldn’t understand them…at least that’s how someone once explained it to me…imperfectly remembered & possibly paraphrased in some way that makes it wrong

        …meanwhile english..which is a mongrel tongue…is sort of the same at a level we call dialect rather than language…so I’m guessing in some academic contexts maybe that’s how the mutually incomprehensible bits of spoken arabic are framed

        …& yet there’s some stuff that sort of seems like it’s by convention but gets a bit chicken/egg…like…the “royal order”

        https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/599423/why-do-we-order-our-adjectives-in-certain-ways-big-blue-house-rather-than-b/599424#599424

        …does it only sound wrong because we get used to it & the deviation from the norm makes it discordant…or is that norm just a codified construction that describes something that feels right because there’s a sort of linguistic order of operations that exists at lower orders…possibly even down to the order that synapses fire or something?

        …that we even think we understand one another is sort of miraculous when you think about it

        • Turks used to write in Arabic but one of Ataturk’s modernization policies was to switch to a version of the Latin alphabet. Pronunciation follows spelling very closely, so you never have to worry about something like ough in tough or enough – the switch was less than a century ago, so there hasn’t been much time for drifting.

          • …there’s even a supposedly universal phonetic script in the latin alphabet

            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

            …but it’s probably not even as close to being a universal language as esperanto

            …at least anecdotally though one of the reasons the berbers have historically been good interpreters is that their language involves making more individual sounds than possibly any other so they have the biggest toolbox when it comes to making the right ones in someone else’s

            …one of their vowels is considered sub-phonemic…& they have less of those than english…but they have, like, *all* the consonants…bilabial, dental, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, laryngeal…& interdental

            …so

            …now I need @farscythe to make youtube provide a berber beatbox act?

                • solid bet methinks

                  problem is….i cant really tell berber apart from a bunch of other languages i also dont speak

                  means im limited to things labeled berber…or facing serious odds i pick another language entirely

                    • truthfully could be my algorythm would do the work for me

                      tho i did try berber beatbox and it wasnt very succesful

                      but you know….i really cant tell it apart from the other arabic languages

                      makes me unwilling to post anything id call a berber beatbox if i dont actually know its berber…lol

              • …I don’t know for sure that none of these boys have some berber in the family tree

                …but maybe where I’m going wrong is that to that phonetic background…beatbox is child’s play?

          • Same reason why King/Emperor Sejong is revered in Korea as the “inventor” of Hangul. Instead of 30450000 characters, it was a true alphabet… and the basis for Kanji (not that the Japanese will admit it.)

Leave a Reply