"Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant
nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins
weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are
candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that
quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is
neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't
groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the
plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index,
2 indices?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you
comb through annals of history but not a single annal? If you have a bunch
of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preacher praught? If a vegetarian eats
vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If you wrote a letter, perhaps
you bote your tongue?
Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum
for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and
play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that
run and feet that smell? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and
wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while
quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell
one day and cold as hell another.
Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are
absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a
sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who
was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those
people who ARE spring chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house
can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out
and in which an alarm clock goes off by going on.
English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the
creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That
is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are
out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but
when I wind up this essay, I end it." __________________
4 comments:
rerun?
conquest!
he was out to make a conquest
didn't care what harm was done
just as long as he won
the prize
conquest!
she was just another conquest
didn't care who's heart was broke
love to him was a joke
until he looked into her eyes
AND THEN IN THE STRANGE WAY THINGS HAPPEN
THEIR ROLES WERE REVERSED FROM THAT DAY
THE HUNTED BECAME THE HUNTRESS
THE HUNTER BECAME THE PREY
conquest!
now you know who made the conquest
she, with all her female guile
led him helpless down the aisle
she had finally made a conquest
a-a-a-aaaaah!
AND THEN IN THE STRANGE WAY THINGS HAPPEN
THEIR ROLES WERE REVERSED FROM THAT DAY
THE HUNTED BECAME THE HUNTRESS
THE HUNTER BECAME THE PREY
conquest!
now you know who made the conquest
she, with all her female guile
led him helpless down the aisle
she had finally made a conquest
~sta7ker76
Nevertheless, even here we come upon the crucial difference between Barth's poststructuralist vision of language and Wallac's Wittgensteinian one, and the difference lies in the terms "game" and "play." A language-game in Wittgenstein must be played by more than one participant, whereas "play" in Derrida is a dynamnic property of language itself. If signs could be shone to correspond directly to their referents in the outside world, then we would have no trouble determining the meaning of a sentence or a paragraph, since we would merely need to know the "things" to which all the words in the text refer. Conversely, Derrida arguse that there is no way to shut down the play of meanings along the chain of signifiers, because meaning is not grounded in a stable outside reality but rather generated by the interaction of the signs themselves, wherein a dizzying (Derrida would say "infinite) number of possible interacting combinations can be detected, brought out, and interpreted. Signs also carry with them "trace" elements of unintended meanings and defining oppositions, of past texts and ideological underpinnings, all of which increase the text's potential for play. Amid all this multiplicity and fecundity, however, the one thing that is lost is the world itself: rather, the text displaces teh outside world in exchange for the self referential universe of signs. For all its dynamic energy and instability, the text in Derrida's vision remains always shut off and alienated, helplessly incapable of saying what it tends or of intending what it says.
Wittgenstein--if he were alive now to address Derrida directly--might object that language is not a "chain" but rather "as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing." Our primary, even primitive relations to one another give rise to the game of language, and this game involves, as critic Michael West puts it, "a shared, or sharable, way of taking certain expressinos which consists partly in agreeing as to teh truth of a certain range of judgments." These shared ways of expressions represent the rules of the game, and the rules are justified by their results. One can, in Wittgenstein, arrive at a final justification for the meaning of some expression, but only through an exhaustion of the possible available justifications; this final justification, however is not a center or an essence but a merely a provisional end for that particular rule. The point here is that for Wittgenstein, language does not displace us from the world but rather takes place "in" that world, specifically among people in language-game situations. Far from alienating us from others, language can only exist as a product of communal agreement between others.
In the board room, the quiet man
Takes a second to think what do
He's out of his seat and he's starting to speak
And he hears his own voice
For years and years he's done nothing but bow down
And put up with their demands
She sits like a viper and offers the clock
Without giving a damn
He takes it
"Honour forbids me, but honour be damned
You have whined until you got what you want
I did the work and when things were going badly
You left us to rot"
He locked the door of the board room
And turned like the scene from the old country song
Towering over the table he's lost
He is drunk with it all
"You only come back to us when we'd turned it around
When we'd rescued your arse from fire
Your contribution to all that we did
Was to say it was dire
Night after day after night I've been working
Despite of you fucking us all
Now I'm going to die, I don't care if you cry
Just please leave me alone
And spare those tears for yourself
We've had those until we're sick
You should leave while you still have the chance"
The others were shocked at this shameful disgrace
At the end of an honoured career
He paused in the silence to pull down his tie
And observe the melee
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