Some things I'd like to see in the next 30-40 years...(Grotesquely yours, Clarence)

Click to enlarge: "The Judgement of Solomon," Antoine Coypel (1661-1722), oil on canvas.

Heard on the Today Show today during the second half of the first hour that thieves are targeting the homes of those who are away at funerals, since times and names are public.

That's been happening since I was a kid and old enough to understand what grownups were talking about.

I wonder at what point you get old enough that nothing you hear is entirely new?

I know Solomon already covered this, but it doesn't really sink in until you experience it yourself.

[2013-06-13]

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Click to enlarge: This is Nim Chimpsky, the subject in Project Nim, a controlled animal communications study. "Nim Chimpsky" is a play on sounds, evoking famous linguist Noam Chomksy, who shifted linguistic studies with his Syntactic Structures in 1957. More on Project Nim >

Some new things I'd like to see in the next 30-40 years (Lord willin' and the creek don't rise), in no particular order:

* Reconciliation of Rome with Protestants
* Tolerance among religious fundamentalists of all faiths (ie, stop killing each other)
* Linguistic animal communications with humans.
* Decriminalization of drugs
* An end to abortion, euthanasia, and executions.
* Gay rights as normal as any other right.

 

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Click to enlarge: George C Scott talks to Dolphins in Day of the Dolphin (1973), considered silly by critics, but at the age of 10 I ate that stuff up, along with Erich von Däniken, Sasquatch and the Devil's Triangle. (Which is to say, those subjects share a crypto-phile attraction, though animal communications is a serious subject.)

I was turned on to linguistics as an undergrad by Prof VandeKoppel at Calvin College. I entered Michigan State University with the intention of studying animal communication systems and pictured myself something of a more introverted George C Scott from Day of the Dolphin. At MSU, I studied under Prof Lockwood, a prominent Cognitive Stratificational linguist (who had studied under Lamb, IIRC), and was diverted to that field, which, however, lost my interest.

I've been privileged to work with language most of my life, in one capacity or another.

If I could do it differently, I'd be a novelist. Not a best seller, just a guy that writes one good book a year, has some readers, and makes a living at it.

I was told while shopping around my first book that it was filled with "grotesqueries." Since I'd never heard that word before, I asked the acquisitions editor what she meant. She explained that a grotesquery was an abysmal and embarrassingly bad error that often goes unnoticed by poor writers but is easily seen by others.

(She got the definition wrong but was successfully insulting.)

She did pull out an example where I mangled a little grammar to remain conversational, so I guess he had a point.

Grotesquely yours,

--Clarence


[2013-06-13]

 

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