Accessiblity, Formality, and Blogality

Being a brief (?!) diatribe on the concepts of the "literary style"


Dedication to the muses of text:

    Urbs, antiqua fuit Tyrii tenuere,
    Carthogo colonii  
    -- from memory

    Urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni,
    Karthago  
    -- via google: "aenid" "latin text"
       http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/aen1.shtml


    A Tyrian colony; the people made 
    Stout for the war, and studious of their trade:   
    Carthage the name.
    -- via google "aenid" "text" 
       http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.1.i.html


That is:

   There was an ancient city, Tyre, called by the
   inhabitants carthage.

From my old days as a young scholar (of both the sciences
and the arts) -- in the sf way that all inhabitants of
SpaceShip Earth should be.

So, even such knowledge which i attained thru grimace and
hardship has lost its treu balance, order, and harmony. Alas.


Whose Language is it Anyway?

I come again to my old adversarial windmill: The use of 
language as a weapon.

To be literate (and thus "publishible" and "acceptable" to
the community at large, one must adhere to a tradition of
scholasticism that i now find antiquated (to say the least)
and repugnant (when used to oppress people intellectually, etc).

Been there, done that. I've probably written close to 1 million
lines of text; ie, non-poetry. At least that in a technical manner,
probably some 20-50_000 in terms of papers in philosophy, political
economy, history, english (reviews, "term" papers", cf/qv - compare/
contrast (i forget wither cf or qv is which of the they).

So, what now of the post-9/11 era?

How are we to proceed. 

I no longer think linearly. From one point of view, it *could*
be EDITED to look linear. And therefore cogent, well-thought out,
and hence scholarly. This goes back to a story by Johnathon Swift
whereby *anyone* can become an author. A macine is constructed:

https://www.angelfire.com/art3/fleeding/literature/swift-the-academy.html

that allows the author to read off a series of sentences/paragraphs
and piece together any sort of work possible.

On the one hand, we have the traditional way of handling
inter-veining thoughts/ideas/etc by using footnotes. Thus,
we might be talking about aerodynamics and want to make a
point to dispell the myth that "according to aerodynamic
theory" a bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly or that 
the "speed of a humming bird is greater than the speed of
sound".  (These were at one time true "factoids" of the
common understanding (normally refereed to as Reality-Structure-3)).

The reader is then given "glance down" at the foot-note (which
could be totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand) and
then "some-how" regain the original thread of thought that
the point of departure was purporting to put forth.

First off, i (as pointed out above, and on numerous occasions) have
seen the literary style (while quite charming and consistent) to
be not only some-what off-put-ing, but to be exclusionary as well.

I find it most disconcerting that modern day authors *still* 
persist on presenting quotes in Latin and NOT providing a
translation. The same to a less extent of the same, except in
Greek.

(how's that for anti-ambigous anti-sylistic sentence? N'est pas?)
[is it not so?]

So, other than railing against the "advice" (not "advise" - active
verb, as opposed to the noun of which it is the giver of) M/S Word.
(and while i'm at it (Melvin Dewey-wise (ref: Dewey Decimal Library
System (cf/qv Library of Congress Catalog Number (LCCN))) who 
tried to reform Amerkan English speeling: why isn't it "advize" ??)

Alas, i digress; again, still throughly not of that, from whence
the original argument came.

So, does my (or the others') writings devolve (evolve? ascend? 
attempt transcendence (tranzsendents)) into a mish-mash of 
in-coherencie that is on par with ghoti?  (James Joyce's 
"Finnegans Wake" - or, shuld that be:  <em>Finnegans Wake</em> ?

And further to the point. Say, i quote something like:


  But, then she said, "Yes, but then he just left off...".

I (sorry about the caps, but we *do* have to maintane *some*
standards, and NOT starting a sentense with a capital letter
is something (like Sir Winston) up with which i shall not put),
would sey that the above sentence can *only* properly punctuated
by having the final period (terminating the sentence "in toto"
[in total; en masse]) outside the quotes-marks [terminating
quotation mark].  After all, the quote [quoted phrase, phrase
enclosed in quotation marks)] has 3 [three, tres, Drei] periods
already, does any reight-mindted person believe it is entitled
to four??  [Actually, the three dots (periods) are "just one
symbol" -- formally known as "an ellision" which is used to
implie and interruption or a pause, or in quoted segements in
a paper that something has been "left out" or "elided" (or is
it "ellided"?).

This concludes the dedication to the muses, and now back to the
normal world as you have come to know it; ie, [Note 1] The Matrix.

Notes
(this section only)

[1] "ie" - formally "i.e", more foremally:   

     A sentence; i.e., suplimentary text

"ie" indicating the Latin [Note 2] <em>ibi est</em> which in Latin
means "that is" or "that is to say".

[2] As regards *all* languages, the first letter of the
    language name (eg, French [Francaise [Note 3], Spanish, etc.)
[Note 4] 

[3] My appologies to the French, but my French is Nicht zo gut 
    [Note 5] [Note 6]

[4] This is cause for *considerable* concern, for grammarians, as
    well as linguists, philosophers as well as the common man in
the streen [sic] [Note 7] [Note 8] [Note 9], since many languages
do *not* have the upper/lower case distinction. Thus in Korean,
"Hangul" -- as it is written in Englush, using upper/lower case
can not literally be written that way. Thus, while avoiding the
self-referential paradox [don't *even* get me started on THAT!],
it non-the-less fails the so-called "reprocessity test" of
language translation; ie, if we take "Everything is madness"
and translate it into (eg) French, a *literal* translation 
actually fails, since the re-translation of the French phrase
back into English doesn't make sense. Thus, the *meaning* of the
phrase (as well, as context (tips towel to Umberto Ecco "Context
is King") and intent) must be taken into account, thus rendering
the verbum citato [word just sited] as "C'est la luh folie" [i'm
ever so un-clear as the spelling in English, so again: [Note 3]

[5] German for "Not so good"; approximately.
    German for "Not so good;" approximately so.

[6] See Note 3, but change "French" to "Germans" (first occurence)
    and "French" to "German" [or Deutch]  (second occurence)
[Reference to Lisp, as well as Symball computer programming
languages].

[7] "sic" Latin for "thus". --or-- <em>sic</em>: Latin for "thus".
    In editoial usage [ie, common practice], "this is how the 
original author has written it (eg, "streen" [Note 10]

[10] "eg" - Latin for "exemplum gratia" (i think), meaning 
     "for example"; liternally "[an] example is given" [Note 11]

[11] Latin (as well as Russian) doesn't have an article for
     "a", "an", and "the".

[12] If i'm not mistaken, that's either a gerundive verb form,
     or some sort of past-particle subjective, reflexive, or else
it's an example of bad form.

******************************* BONUS TRAX ************************

For having had to endure the above... [Note 12]


So there's this sign painter see. And she/he/ne paints a sign that 
sez:

      King and Queen Inn

But, she/he/ne paints it like this:


     King   and     Queen Inn

Sez, the barkeep: 

"You've got too much space between "King" and "and" and "and" and "Queen".

(and i refuse to put the period inside the quotes marks!
After alls, the sign doesn't read"

    King     and     Queen. Inn


now does it?

**** TRACK TWO ****

Now leaving for Balitimore, Tuscaloosa, and Tea Neck...


START AGAIN

So the prof (of English) is seying:

"In English a double negative is actually taken as
 a positive, while this is not the case in many other
 languages. The double negative merely re-enforces
 the negative. And of course, a double-positive 
 never means a negative."

(from the back of the room)

Yeah, right.

[which is in common-Americanese taken to mean a sort of
 disagreement; ie, a "negative"]

(Where-upon the left-leaning, and much hobbling half-wit
 poet/artist got off of his soap box, and carefully 
 decerning in a timely fashion a quite recently deposited
 load of forse hockey, didn't fall face first into it.
 This caused such a stir in literary circles that the
 would be art cricket was forced to take up air hockey
 instead)

--42--