What would be even better is a constitutional amendment which would require either that bills be limited to one item and one item alone (no riders, etc.), or that each and every provision to a bill would have to be voted on for it to be included. A great addition to either of those would be a limit on the number of laws allowed. If we fill up the number, an old one has to go. That would rock...
be-fan writes: In a $200m major blockbuster with well-known actors, I expect the acting and dialog to at least keep up with something like Stargate, a series filmed for a fraction of a fraction of that cost.
Exactly. Why not spend the extra $50,000 - $100,000 for a decent screenwriter? That must cost less than the on-set food costs.
Sorry to hear you're missing the boat on Pynchon. Yes, Fowles is a great writer (so long as you stay away from his non-fiction). Heller is a blast. Waugh is amusing. But to say that P. is simply "screw[ing] with your mind" is nonsense.
No sense in trying to convince you. However, these folks ask that you give him another try.
Gravity's Rainbow is well worth reading. It does, however, require that you pay attention. There is no hand-holding in this novel. Give it a chance --- this book is *funny*, while also being a great WWII novel.
Actually, it would be better to say that communism is *a* revolutionary theory of Marxism --- one that comes from an awful misreading of Marx.
The GPL is actually quite *un*Marxist, as a True Marxist cheers on the onslaught of Unimpeded Capitalism (which we plainly do not have, as there are brakes on the economy and safety nets put in place in order to prevent the consequences of Unimpeded Capitalism from driving the 99% to overthrow the 1% feeding off of them, followed by the 99% installing some sort of Workers Paradise (not unlike the Christian idea of the Eschaton, though wholly materialistic and without a Final Judgement, eternal life, etc.). The GPL throws a monkey wrench into the works, as it keeps someone's labors from being stolen out from under them with no recompense. The GPL works well with Capitalism With Governor(s) Installed by acting as a governor on the system.
Thus the GPL is about as far from communism as you're going to get, as it is designed to help keep the capitalist system from destroying itself. This makes those who oppose it suspect, as they seem to be very interested in the self-destruction of capitalism, and work to remove the very mechanisms which allow capitalism to survive.
SuperBanana writes: Answer: because cell phone radiation doesn't cause cancer at any rate appreciable from statistical noise, IF AT ALL.
Not necessarily. Some cancers take their time in developing, and some require a fair amount of exposure to toxins, etc., before a cancer is triggered. It may be that we will see rates soar in the next ten-twenty years, once time of exposure + time for appreciable harm to occur adds up to cancer. It may also be that there are other, much more subtle forms of damage, forms that are not cancer but which lead to equally unpleasant and debilitating diseases/syndromes/etc.
The conflation of "luddism" with "disliking rude behavior" is most curious. Technology at its best ought to discourage bad behavior by design. It isn't mobile phones which are hated; it is rather the callous disregard for the people near whom said mobile phones are used.
For example, it would be ideal for one to be able to have a conversation on such a phone via subvocalization-identification technology. That would allow people to have all the dialogue/communication with others they wanted, without their inflicting themselves/their conversations on others. Such techniques would also perfectly illustrate the emptiness of most people's conversations.
This is by no means a "neo-Luddite" argument. It is instead a plea for the Unixish Approach (or Philosophy) to be implemented even with (x)html tools: a well-made, well-designed tool does its job and then another tool may take over from there. If you want a net-based application, fine. Make a program whose specific function is to serve as the container for such applications. Just don't try to shoehorn code into a space designed for data.
You are right that things are often appropriated for other uses, and that this is the way things often work. Yet, the fact that something does happen, or is the case, does not imply that it ought to happen; Hume made sure we could not dance around that conclusion.
This is not holding technology back. This is instead a reasoned approach to the problem, one which would likely prevent many of the security/performance/stability issues which currently do and which inevitably will pop up because of the tendency to appropriate one tool for another use. Coded tools do not have the same tolerances as do physical tools.
Anonymous Coward: Wrong word there. Commodity means that they're interchangeable and there's no real difference.
Actually, no. Commodity does not only refer to "interchangable" items. Rather, it refers to items which can become exchanged in a commercial transaction.
To ring a change on my original point: I don't mind the statue being something which can be bought or sold; instead, I find the control demanded over even the representation of that statue to be objectionable.
This is simply what happens when (and these are not necessarily related):
Everything becomes a commodity,
Representations of things become somehow more valuable than the things themselves.
The first issue expresses itself most clearly in societies where money is held to be both the highest value and the Most Powerful Thing: whoever contols it, and can get their hands on it, clearly has The Power. Thus people seek to control the flow of commodities (which now include ideas, representations, waveforms, etc.) so as to tap into the flow of power, i.e., money.
The second issue...well, the second issue is troublesome in its own special way. It also has been dealt with by Baudrillard time and time again. Just check out some of his essays...they're certainly not the final word on the subject, but they cover far more ground that may sensibly be covered here. One might perhaps want to begin with some of the essays in The Transparency of Evil or in Screened Out.
Wow. Step away from the coffee. Step back from the coffee. Good. Good ranter. The only reason TeX output looks bad to you is that you're jittering so much...
Two points:
Wanting things done right and then going out and doing them is frightfully unusual. O that we would all be so devoted to our work.
Check out the vast number of unfinished pieces of art in the world: many of them are so shockingly good that their unfinished nature does not harm their value. Read The Faerie Queene or The Man Without Qualities, and this idea might start to make sense (or else check out the article on The Ocean of Story in Barth's The Friday Book, to get an idea of a project that prevents itself from being finished by its very nature. One might even say those storytellers anticipated Incompleteness). Some works simply cannot be finished, as a particular plan/structure may be such as to generate more and more of itself. A never-ending fugue, indeed.
Actually, AppleWorks is still bundled with the miniMac. Take a look at the "Technical Specifications" page for the mini. It's not Pages + Keynote, but it at least gives the people a basic package to start with.
On another note, what would be great as a result of all this is a crash in used-Mac prices. This could bring that dual 800 I've been wanting in to my financial neighborhood...isn't paying for past schooling wonderful?
Yes...but one of the biggest problems is heading off those who profit from the arrests and incarcerations. Guard unions and for-profit prison corporations give huge sums to politicos so that there will be more and better-filled prisons (just google guard.union california for a taste). While 'the government' would come out ahead on the deal, it isn't 'the government', but the politicos, who decide who gets what $$$. Just follow the money...
Let me second the above comment: take something you've written in another application, and LaTeX it. Play with packages, figure out what you need to do. It's the best way to learn, and you can make things work the way you want them to. Learning the internals will be the best thing you can do---LyX is cool and all, but nothing beats knowing how to do it without WYSIWYG.
The links already given here are great. LaTeX rocks; enjoy it!
brwski
Clear metrics, eh? Still not good enough. Anything that involves judges is *not* a sport. End of story. Objective criteria for victory are essential for a competitive event to be considered a *sport*.
That's not enough to knock out NASCAR, however, and that, while clearly competitive, with objective criteria for victory, just IS NOT a sport. Sitting while turning left over and over again doesn't cut it. I can do that in front of my PS2 while playing GT....
Has anyone actually tried this? Have the legal departments actually read the EULAs for their *own* boxen?
Perhaps a little enlightenment of legal would cause Corporate America to scream and cower under their desks---for about ten minutes before they order all the computers in the company wiped...
Yes, "embrace and extend" is certainly part of MicroSoft's plan---but they also want to keep their fingers in each and every pie just in case one of those pies becomes the Most Important Pie. They don't want to become a WordStar or Lotus. So they make passable programs in most categories, hoping that if that category of software becomes important, their program can spring into the lead.
Yes, Dolby and Co. were pretty great. However, Byrne and the Heads came in with the Punk movement---a fringe element of it, but still along with it and strongly influenced by it. They were more the weird uncle for the US New Wave bands than contemporaries.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
GISGEOLOGYGEEK (708023) wrote:
The part I don't understand is where you think the people have the right to bare arms.
No, no no. This amendment has been misread from the get-go. Think of the circumstances the founders remembered from before the war: oppression through the use of British troops.
The problem is when there is not a well-regulated militia. The only way to have a well-regulated militia is to have an armed populace, so as to check those who might otherwise misuse their power.
Everything follows from this: the right of a people to bear arms must not be infringed, for if it is, there will be no check on official armed power.
And if political suppression is your goal, then by all means come into my chosen subgroup and tell me my dialect is "wrong".
Everything else aside, I think this is the keystone. For someone to tell speakers of a functional dialect that their dialect is somehow "wrong" is not right. We are in agreement about that.
What I am objecting to (and I don't think this is your position) is the idea that the dialect can be used in common discourse outside its home and have the one using that dialect expect to have their speech be automatically treated by those not in their group as worth listening to. Use the dialect, I don't care. Just don't expect everyone you run into to recognize what you have to say as being important. Use l33t speech for your article on the editorial page. Go for it. Just don't expect to be accorded the same level of interest as someone who doesn't. Speaking so as to be understood by one's audience isn't "selling out" --- it's common sense!
Is that right? Probably not. But I know that I have the tendency drilled into me from too many years of school to put down something I come across that is badly written. If the grammar is sloppy, odds are the thinking is as well, and I'm not going to spend my time on something that will probably not pay off. It's a bias, and likely an unfair one. There's no denying that. It's not always accurate, but it is the filter that I and many others use.
This is not about political suppression. This is about political realities. The dominant group does use their language as a club. But that club can be picked up and used just as well by those who are not dominant, and is often the only weapon that will get the attention of those in charge. Demonstrate in the street all you like --- fill your sign with obvious spelling mistakes and you've lost from the get-go.
2.
I've been enjoying our discussion so far, but that 's just such an unneeded, unsupported, and arrogant claim that I think I'm about finished.
Too bad. It was something of an overstatement, certainly. But it does reflect much of what I've seen as a teacher --- many, many students have been taught how to read words but they have not been taught how to read. Give them an article of some sort and have them spell out the argument of the author. On average (from my experience), seven out of ten will have an awfully hard time piecing the whole together. They will more often than not latch onto a portion of an argument instead of paying attention to the whole thing, which can lead to some interesting misunderstandings. Literacy is much more than reading words and sentences. It's learning the mental skills to put it all together. Oftentimes this is related to their being stuck in their own "dialect", if you will: if something is presented in a way they are unfamiliar with, they just don't know how to deal with it.
If thinking that makes me a Grammar Nazi, then you haven't met a real one yet. I think that there are standards that can be set and can be met, standards that are not too difficult to meet if one wants to be heard. Does that mean you can't use a dialect, or a slangset? No! It just means that as a writer, it is important to know one's audience and how to communicate with them. One can't expect a audience to bend to the author's will unless they have been given an aufully good reason to do so.
[For example, no one would have paid a whit of attention to Joyce if Finnegans Wake would have been his first book. He started with perfect English, but his stories were what was interesting. Then he began to play and play with English, and his audience was overjoyed to go along with him! But it took convincing, and he did not convince everyone that his direction was right. No one, however, would have been convinced if he had started there, instead of worked towards that place.]
It all comes down to whether or not someone wants to be understood or not. Some
Yes, you will be kept down. This is not, however, because people are "afraid of losing control". It is because there are standards, and those standards --- especially when they have to do with communications and how one appears to peers/potential clients/etc., etc. --- are learnable, usable, and chosen for the purpose of facilitating communication.
Have you ever had to grade a paper? Have you seen first hand just how terrible the writing of most college students (not just high school or grade school students) is today? When they cannot differentiate between "they're", "their", and "there" it does not fascinate me. It saddens me. These students are the students who come to me complaining that their reading is too difficult, that they are being asked to do terribly hard assignments, such as writing a three-page paper. They have already placed themselves in the position of being unable to partipate in the public arena as citizens other citizens will listen to.
[Side note on homonyms: this is not a "blending into one word": this is the result of reasserted orality in our culture. They cannot tell the difference amongst the three forms of the word that sound just like `there' not because they are changing in meaning, becoming one word that somehow can mean any of the three, but because they can barely make out differences amongst any of the words on a page. Changes in the oral use of language are fascinating. Illiteracy is not.]
Being concerned about the young folks is anything but "a load of crap". If these illiterates are going to make any difference at all in the future, they are going to have to be able to communicate their positions effectively. Look at Malcolm X --- he was, if anything, more articulate than his opponents. Did he simply reject that way of speaking because it was "of the man"? No! He spoke to "the man" in his language, and with skill "the man" couldn't match. Was he happy about that? Hard to say. But he certainly would not have had the audience he did on both sides of the issues he dealt with if he had not used the dominant language-form. It comes down to audience: do you want to speak only to your sub-sub-culture, or do you want to your speech to have a (possibly) wider effect?
The localized dialects argument is relevant: though these dialects function perfectly well within villages, cities, or provinces, they fail as means of effective communication outside of their home areas. Therefore a common tongue is needed, promulgated, and used. If you want class/social/economic barriers between language groups, then by all means move to the UK, take on a low-class dialect, and then try to get yourself a job in a top-flight company. Best of luck. It's unfair, but it is how the world works. You make it clear that you know this yourself when you write: "If a generation of 1337 speakers manages to gain social, political, or economic control, then you may suddenly find yourself no longer speaking the 'official' dialect." Precicely so. Then everyone else would be in the position of the "l33t" today, and we could be having this same arguments, but perhaps we would switch sides.
If obfuscation is your goal, then by all means communicate solely in your chosen subgroup's dialect. If clarity is your goal, know how to communicate well in both, if for no other reason than that it will broaden your horizons more than a little. Dialects are not bad things, to be stomped out. At the same time, however, they ought not be the limits of one's language.
Get off your high horse already. Unless you use English like that below, then (by your rules) your grasp of English is also "ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE":
Er...yeah. Methinks you missed the point of the post to which you responded. "l33t" speech:
belongs to a small subculture of a subculture;
is used for either quick communications (shorter phrases, etc.) or obfuscation for the uninitiated;
does not lend itself well to documents longer than a few sentences;
is not used as the preferred form of language for newspapers, magazines, or their electronic equivalents.
Knowing and using a dialect or a slangset of a language is not a bad thing. In China, for example, there are dialects that vary considerably from village to village, even if they are only five miles apart. They like their hometown way of speaking, as that is what they are comfortable with and it is a perfectly fine means of communication. That, however, does not mean that those who use those dialects do not know and use the commonly-agreed-upon official "dialect" (known as putonghua). To know only one's home dialect is to be left out of the loop and isolated from the rest of society.
The same is true for native English speakers. All it takes is one generation of functional illiterates for a good number of citizens to be left in the dust economically and otherwise. Students who due knot no how two distinguish between homonyms and students who cannot spell properly will not be hired by the people who do know how to distinguish between homonyms and by those who do know how to spell properly, no matter the l33t skillz of the l33tsp33krz.
Good language skills pay off all across the board: they give access to books that might otherwise be impenetrable; they demonstrate that you are more than a wildling; they also remove barriers between yourself and those who read what you write. Often poor grammar or spelling gives the reader reason to toss what they're reading to the side and pick something else up. If you want to be read by those who are not just from your chosen subgroup, give grammar a chance.
Agreed...Blake's Seven was one of the cheapest looking shows ever, especially considering when it was made. Perhaps it was spent on screenwriters --- the scripts were pretty good.
This show interested and amused me. It was pretty much (big announcer voice) "Socialists in Space!". Hey --- maybe that's why it looked so cheap! They evenly distributed the funding amongst the cast and crew... hmmm...
brwski
The word is charagma, and Louw and Nida define it as: "a meaningful mark, whether engraved, imprinted, or branded -- 'mark, brand.' "
Another use of the term cited by Louw & Nida is: "an object (not necessarily three-dimensional) which has been formed to resemble a person, god, animal, etc. -- 'likeness, image' "
Arndt and Gingrich define it as "a mark or stamp engraved, etched, branded, cut, imprinted."
Brighton's commentary on Revelation notes that it was common in John's day for slaves to be branded by their masters, and devotees of certain deities to be branded with the mark of their god.
Put these together, and it seems clear that the mark spoken of by John is one with distinct religious significance, and visibly signifies whether one is with the Beast or not. So while implanted GPS units are a Bad Idea, they likely do not fit the criteria for whatever the "Mark of the Beast" would be.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be even better is a constitutional amendment which would require either that bills be limited to one item and one item alone (no riders, etc.), or that each and every provision to a bill would have to be voted on for it to be included. A great addition to either of those would be a limit on the number of laws allowed. If we fill up the number, an old one has to go. That would rock...
brwski
be-fan writes: In a $200m major blockbuster with well-known actors, I expect the acting and dialog to at least keep up with something like Stargate, a series filmed for a fraction of a fraction of that cost.
Exactly. Why not spend the extra $50,000 - $100,000 for a decent screenwriter? That must cost less than the on-set food costs.
brwski
Sorry to hear you're missing the boat on Pynchon. Yes, Fowles is a great writer (so long as you stay away from his non-fiction). Heller is a blast. Waugh is amusing. But to say that P. is simply "screw[ing] with your mind" is nonsense.
No sense in trying to convince you. However, these folks ask that you give him another try.
brwski
Do not listen to this advice!
Gravity's Rainbow is well worth reading. It does, however, require that you pay attention. There is no hand-holding in this novel. Give it a chance --- this book is *funny*, while also being a great WWII novel.
Actually, it would be better to say that communism is *a* revolutionary theory of Marxism --- one that comes from an awful misreading of Marx.
The GPL is actually quite *un*Marxist, as a True Marxist cheers on the onslaught of Unimpeded Capitalism (which we plainly do not have, as there are brakes on the economy and safety nets put in place in order to prevent the consequences of Unimpeded Capitalism from driving the 99% to overthrow the 1% feeding off of them, followed by the 99% installing some sort of Workers Paradise (not unlike the Christian idea of the Eschaton, though wholly materialistic and without a Final Judgement, eternal life, etc.). The GPL throws a monkey wrench into the works, as it keeps someone's labors from being stolen out from under them with no recompense. The GPL works well with Capitalism With Governor(s) Installed by acting as a governor on the system.
Thus the GPL is about as far from communism as you're going to get, as it is designed to help keep the capitalist system from destroying itself. This makes those who oppose it suspect, as they seem to be very interested in the self-destruction of capitalism, and work to remove the very mechanisms which allow capitalism to survive.
SuperBanana writes: Answer: because cell phone radiation doesn't cause cancer at any rate appreciable from statistical noise, IF AT ALL.
Not necessarily. Some cancers take their time in developing, and some require a fair amount of exposure to toxins, etc., before a cancer is triggered. It may be that we will see rates soar in the next ten-twenty years, once time of exposure + time for appreciable harm to occur adds up to cancer. It may also be that there are other, much more subtle forms of damage, forms that are not cancer but which lead to equally unpleasant and debilitating diseases/syndromes/etc.
Anonymous Coward wrote: Hopefully Firefox and/or IE will switch to MDI in their next releases. (Browser developers, are you listening?)
Ack! MDI is just so...primitive. Why hash up perfectly well-behaved programs with something so unpleasant?
brwski
The conflation of "luddism" with "disliking rude behavior" is most curious. Technology at its best ought to discourage bad behavior by design. It isn't mobile phones which are hated; it is rather the callous disregard for the people near whom said mobile phones are used.
For example, it would be ideal for one to be able to have a conversation on such a phone via subvocalization-identification technology. That would allow people to have all the dialogue/communication with others they wanted, without their inflicting themselves/their conversations on others. Such techniques would also perfectly illustrate the emptiness of most people's conversations.
This is by no means a "neo-Luddite" argument. It is instead a plea for the Unixish Approach (or Philosophy) to be implemented even with (x)html tools: a well-made, well-designed tool does its job and then another tool may take over from there. If you want a net-based application, fine. Make a program whose specific function is to serve as the container for such applications. Just don't try to shoehorn code into a space designed for data.
You are right that things are often appropriated for other uses, and that this is the way things often work. Yet, the fact that something does happen, or is the case, does not imply that it ought to happen; Hume made sure we could not dance around that conclusion.
This is not holding technology back. This is instead a reasoned approach to the problem, one which would likely prevent many of the security/performance/stability issues which currently do and which inevitably will pop up because of the tendency to appropriate one tool for another use. Coded tools do not have the same tolerances as do physical tools.
brkwski: Everything becomes a commodity.
Anonymous Coward: Wrong word there. Commodity means that they're interchangeable and there's no real difference.
Actually, no. Commodity does not only refer to "interchangable" items. Rather, it refers to items which can become exchanged in a commercial transaction.
To ring a change on my original point: I don't mind the statue being something which can be bought or sold; instead, I find the control demanded over even the representation of that statue to be objectionable.
This is simply what happens when (and these are not necessarily related):
- Everything becomes a commodity,
- Representations of things become somehow more valuable than the things themselves.
The first issue expresses itself most clearly in societies where money is held to be both the highest value and the Most Powerful Thing: whoever contols it, and can get their hands on it, clearly has The Power. Thus people seek to control the flow of commodities (which now include ideas, representations, waveforms, etc.) so as to tap into the flow of power, i.e., money. The second issue...well, the second issue is troublesome in its own special way. It also has been dealt with by Baudrillard time and time again. Just check out some of his essays...they're certainly not the final word on the subject, but they cover far more ground that may sensibly be covered here. One might perhaps want to begin with some of the essays in The Transparency of Evil or in Screened Out.Wow. Step away from the coffee. Step back from the coffee. Good. Good ranter. The only reason TeX output looks bad to you is that you're jittering so much...
Two points:
brwski
Actually, AppleWorks is still bundled with the miniMac. Take a look at the "Technical Specifications" page for the mini. It's not Pages + Keynote, but it at least gives the people a basic package to start with.
On another note, what would be great as a result of all this is a crash in used-Mac prices. This could bring that dual 800 I've been wanting in to my financial neighborhood...isn't paying for past schooling wonderful?
brwski
Yes...but one of the biggest problems is heading off those who profit from the arrests and incarcerations. Guard unions and for-profit prison corporations give huge sums to politicos so that there will be more and better-filled prisons (just google guard.union california for a taste). While 'the government' would come out ahead on the deal, it isn't 'the government', but the politicos, who decide who gets what $$$. Just follow the money...
brwski
Let me second the above comment: take something you've written in another application, and LaTeX it. Play with packages, figure out what you need to do. It's the best way to learn, and you can make things work the way you want them to. Learning the internals will be the best thing you can do---LyX is cool and all, but nothing beats knowing how to do it without WYSIWYG. The links already given here are great. LaTeX rocks; enjoy it! brwski
Clear metrics, eh? Still not good enough. Anything that involves judges is *not* a sport. End of story. Objective criteria for victory are essential for a competitive event to be considered a *sport*.
That's not enough to knock out NASCAR, however, and that, while clearly competitive, with objective criteria for victory, just IS NOT a sport. Sitting while turning left over and over again doesn't cut it. I can do that in front of my PS2 while playing GT....
Has anyone actually tried this? Have the legal departments actually read the EULAs for their *own* boxen?
Perhaps a little enlightenment of legal would cause Corporate America to scream and cower under their desks---for about ten minutes before they order all the computers in the company wiped...
Yes, "embrace and extend" is certainly part of MicroSoft's plan---but they also want to keep their fingers in each and every pie just in case one of those pies becomes the Most Important Pie. They don't want to become a WordStar or Lotus. So they make passable programs in most categories, hoping that if that category of software becomes important, their program can spring into the lead.
Yes, Dolby and Co. were pretty great. However, Byrne and the Heads came in with the Punk movement---a fringe element of it, but still along with it and strongly influenced by it. They were more the weird uncle for the US New Wave bands than contemporaries.
brwski
GISGEOLOGYGEEK (708023) wrote:
No, no no. This amendment has been misread from the get-go. Think of the circumstances the founders remembered from before the war: oppression through the use of British troops.
The problem is when there is not a well-regulated militia. The only way to have a well-regulated militia is to have an armed populace, so as to check those who might otherwise misuse their power.
Everything follows from this: the right of a people to bear arms must not be infringed, for if it is, there will be no check on official armed power.
'Nuff said.
brwski
1.
And if political suppression is your goal, then by all means come into my chosen subgroup and tell me my dialect is "wrong".
Everything else aside, I think this is the keystone. For someone to tell speakers of a functional dialect that their dialect is somehow "wrong" is not right. We are in agreement about that.
What I am objecting to (and I don't think this is your position) is the idea that the dialect can be used in common discourse outside its home and have the one using that dialect expect to have their speech be automatically treated by those not in their group as worth listening to. Use the dialect, I don't care. Just don't expect everyone you run into to recognize what you have to say as being important. Use l33t speech for your article on the editorial page. Go for it. Just don't expect to be accorded the same level of interest as someone who doesn't. Speaking so as to be understood by one's audience isn't "selling out" --- it's common sense!
Is that right? Probably not. But I know that I have the tendency drilled into me from too many years of school to put down something I come across that is badly written. If the grammar is sloppy, odds are the thinking is as well, and I'm not going to spend my time on something that will probably not pay off. It's a bias, and likely an unfair one. There's no denying that. It's not always accurate, but it is the filter that I and many others use.
This is not about political suppression. This is about political realities. The dominant group does use their language as a club. But that club can be picked up and used just as well by those who are not dominant, and is often the only weapon that will get the attention of those in charge. Demonstrate in the street all you like --- fill your sign with obvious spelling mistakes and you've lost from the get-go.
2.
I've been enjoying our discussion so far, but that 's just such an unneeded, unsupported, and arrogant claim that I think I'm about finished.
Too bad. It was something of an overstatement, certainly. But it does reflect much of what I've seen as a teacher --- many, many students have been taught how to read words but they have not been taught how to read. Give them an article of some sort and have them spell out the argument of the author. On average (from my experience), seven out of ten will have an awfully hard time piecing the whole together. They will more often than not latch onto a portion of an argument instead of paying attention to the whole thing, which can lead to some interesting misunderstandings. Literacy is much more than reading words and sentences. It's learning the mental skills to put it all together. Oftentimes this is related to their being stuck in their own "dialect", if you will: if something is presented in a way they are unfamiliar with, they just don't know how to deal with it.
If thinking that makes me a Grammar Nazi, then you haven't met a real one yet. I think that there are standards that can be set and can be met, standards that are not too difficult to meet if one wants to be heard. Does that mean you can't use a dialect, or a slangset? No! It just means that as a writer, it is important to know one's audience and how to communicate with them. One can't expect a audience to bend to the author's will unless they have been given an aufully good reason to do so.
[For example, no one would have paid a whit of attention to Joyce if Finnegans Wake would have been his first book. He started with perfect English, but his stories were what was interesting. Then he began to play and play with English, and his audience was overjoyed to go along with him! But it took convincing, and he did not convince everyone that his direction was right. No one, however, would have been convinced if he had started there, instead of worked towards that place.]
It all comes down to whether or not someone wants to be understood or not. Some
Yes, you will be kept down. This is not, however, because people are "afraid of losing control". It is because there are standards, and those standards --- especially when they have to do with communications and how one appears to peers/potential clients/etc., etc. --- are learnable, usable, and chosen for the purpose of facilitating communication.
Have you ever had to grade a paper? Have you seen first hand just how terrible the writing of most college students (not just high school or grade school students) is today? When they cannot differentiate between "they're", "their", and "there" it does not fascinate me. It saddens me. These students are the students who come to me complaining that their reading is too difficult, that they are being asked to do terribly hard assignments, such as writing a three-page paper. They have already placed themselves in the position of being unable to partipate in the public arena as citizens other citizens will listen to.
[Side note on homonyms: this is not a "blending into one word": this is the result of reasserted orality in our culture. They cannot tell the difference amongst the three forms of the word that sound just like `there' not because they are changing in meaning, becoming one word that somehow can mean any of the three, but because they can barely make out differences amongst any of the words on a page. Changes in the oral use of language are fascinating. Illiteracy is not.]
Being concerned about the young folks is anything but "a load of crap". If these illiterates are going to make any difference at all in the future, they are going to have to be able to communicate their positions effectively. Look at Malcolm X --- he was, if anything, more articulate than his opponents. Did he simply reject that way of speaking because it was "of the man"? No! He spoke to "the man" in his language, and with skill "the man" couldn't match. Was he happy about that? Hard to say. But he certainly would not have had the audience he did on both sides of the issues he dealt with if he had not used the dominant language-form. It comes down to audience: do you want to speak only to your sub-sub-culture, or do you want to your speech to have a (possibly) wider effect?
The localized dialects argument is relevant: though these dialects function perfectly well within villages, cities, or provinces, they fail as means of effective communication outside of their home areas. Therefore a common tongue is needed, promulgated, and used. If you want class/social/economic barriers between language groups, then by all means move to the UK, take on a low-class dialect, and then try to get yourself a job in a top-flight company. Best of luck. It's unfair, but it is how the world works. You make it clear that you know this yourself when you write: "If a generation of 1337 speakers manages to gain social, political, or economic control, then you may suddenly find yourself no longer speaking the 'official' dialect." Precicely so. Then everyone else would be in the position of the "l33t" today, and we could be having this same arguments, but perhaps we would switch sides.
If obfuscation is your goal, then by all means communicate solely in your chosen subgroup's dialect. If clarity is your goal, know how to communicate well in both, if for no other reason than that it will broaden your horizons more than a little. Dialects are not bad things, to be stomped out. At the same time, however, they ought not be the limits of one's language.
brwski
technothrasher wrote:
Er...yeah. Methinks you missed the point of the post to which you responded. "l33t" speech:
Knowing and using a dialect or a slangset of a language is not a bad thing. In China, for example, there are dialects that vary considerably from village to village, even if they are only five miles apart. They like their hometown way of speaking, as that is what they are comfortable with and it is a perfectly fine means of communication. That, however, does not mean that those who use those dialects do not know and use the commonly-agreed-upon official "dialect" (known as putonghua). To know only one's home dialect is to be left out of the loop and isolated from the rest of society.
The same is true for native English speakers. All it takes is one generation of functional illiterates for a good number of citizens to be left in the dust economically and otherwise. Students who due knot no how two distinguish between homonyms and students who cannot spell properly will not be hired by the people who do know how to distinguish between homonyms and by those who do know how to spell properly, no matter the l33t skillz of the l33tsp33krz.
Good language skills pay off all across the board: they give access to books that might otherwise be impenetrable; they demonstrate that you are more than a wildling; they also remove barriers between yourself and those who read what you write. Often poor grammar or spelling gives the reader reason to toss what they're reading to the side and pick something else up. If you want to be read by those who are not just from your chosen subgroup, give grammar a chance.
brwski
Agreed...Blake's Seven was one of the cheapest looking shows ever, especially considering when it was made. Perhaps it was spent on screenwriters --- the scripts were pretty good. This show interested and amused me. It was pretty much (big announcer voice) "Socialists in Space!". Hey --- maybe that's why it looked so cheap! They evenly distributed the funding amongst the cast and crew... hmmm... brwski
The word is charagma, and Louw and Nida define it as: "a meaningful mark, whether engraved, imprinted, or branded -- 'mark, brand.' "
Another use of the term cited by Louw & Nida is: "an object (not necessarily three-dimensional) which has been formed to resemble a person, god, animal, etc. -- 'likeness, image' "
Arndt and Gingrich define it as "a mark or stamp engraved, etched, branded, cut, imprinted."
Brighton's commentary on Revelation notes that it was common in John's day for slaves to be branded by their masters, and devotees of certain deities to be branded with the mark of their god.
Put these together, and it seems clear that the mark spoken of by John is one with distinct religious significance, and visibly signifies whether one is with the Beast or not. So while implanted GPS units are a Bad Idea, they likely do not fit the criteria for whatever the "Mark of the Beast" would be.
brwski