tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post1053426545391497212..comments2024-03-19T07:48:54.021-06:00Comments on Gus Van Horn: Equal Tyranny for All?Gus Van Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-56277259766875748552010-07-25T05:16:35.820-06:002010-07-25T05:16:35.820-06:00Heh! And I'll cringe right along with them the...Heh! And I'll cringe right along with them the next time I'm in L.A.Gus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-47008617120104676142010-07-25T01:13:57.952-06:002010-07-25T01:13:57.952-06:00Late to the party here, but my favorite of the &qu...Late to the party here, but my favorite of the "stacked redundancies" from other languages is "La Brea", which means "the tar" in Spanish.<br /><br />I imagine the Spanish speakers around L.A. cringe when they hear the tourists say that they are going to visit "the 'The Tar' tar pits".<br /><br />A double-double decker decker!Jim Maynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-65335427169514222192010-07-22T18:18:57.601-06:002010-07-22T18:18:57.601-06:00Steve,
Good points all, especially the one about ...Steve,<br /><br />Good points all, especially the one about there being a threshold above which the speed of change could accelerate.<br /><br />That threshold for the positive direction could be relatively low, if we consider the disproportionate power of minority groups within the electorate.<br /><br />The key, of course, is not to sequester ourselves in a third party, and thus end up being ignored by the other two.<br /><br />GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-90519850424059414732010-07-22T17:54:12.749-06:002010-07-22T17:54:12.749-06:00I may have made this point before but as far as se...I may have made this point before but as far as securing our liberty is concerned elections are almost completely irrelevant. So long as the culture remains as is today, they will be mostly counterproductive for reasons you have explained. At the best under some circumstances (e.g. Obama) they might buy some time by eliminating a particularly bad politician. However, once the culture changes for the better (due to increasing acceptance of Objectivist ideas, especially ethics) elections will still be mostly irrelevant as all of the political parties will improve (think of them as a choice between freedom and more freedom). In fact I can imagine almost the opposite trend from today. Instead of the battle being between altruism and capitalism with altruism winning we will have a welfare state/socialist politics struggling against ever increasing ethics of selfishness becoming dominant in the culture. In either of these battles we can predict that eventually the prevailing politics will lose as it slowly comes to match the prevailing ethics. <br />Perhaps in the future the politicians will compete for how fast they can reduce spending, how many freedoms they can restore etc. <br />“This is a long road that each of us must travel and it will take years, if not decades, to bear fruit.”<br />Perhaps, but I also suspect there is some threshold (in terms of numbers of people who hold the philosophy or how strongly they do) beyond which this will occur very rapidly. Unfortunately, this also works in reverse and I think we very close and perhaps even past this threshold in the direction of fascism. <br /><br />“just goes to show you how concrete bound the culture is. when you get guys talking about term limits and the likes of such measures”<br /><br />Completely true. Also, how does having had a position now disqualify you for it? Not only are term limits concrete but even at that level they don’t make sense.Steve Dnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-48020175587665835852010-07-21T04:25:24.806-06:002010-07-21T04:25:24.806-06:00It is more difficult, in many respects, to fight a...It is more difficult, in many respects, to fight against pragmatism than against Marxism or religion. Some examples: in the latter case, it is at least clear to people in your "audience" what you're fighting against, whereas a pragmatist will often go so far as to pay lip-service to your ideas, if it suits his purposes, while posing as more practical than you, the "idealist" (whose reputation as such has already been injured by idealists who adhere to bad philosophies). And then, for anyone whose psycho-epistemology has been affected by it, there's the whole matter of their being less able to deal with principles as such. It is a very frustrating set of problems.Gus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-21617843384165575862010-07-21T02:00:54.653-06:002010-07-21T02:00:54.653-06:00yeah we must be pragmatic. kinda like our prime mi...yeah we must be pragmatic. kinda like our prime minister. Very pragmatic fellow compared to the previous who was a principled marxist. It really is an ugly philosophy and I now find myself going back to rand's eloquent notes about itMonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-36729852526825735852010-07-20T21:07:34.787-06:002010-07-20T21:07:34.787-06:00The kicker is that many people would read this pos...The kicker is that many people would read this post and regard my suggested course of action as completely ... impractical.Gus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-75805859314012200582010-07-20T20:45:47.350-06:002010-07-20T20:45:47.350-06:00just goes to show you how concrete bound the cultu...just goes to show you how concrete bound the culture is. when you get guys talking about term limits and the likes of such measuresMonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-57911439619040865732010-07-20T16:29:29.348-06:002010-07-20T16:29:29.348-06:00"An amusing example in non-standard English i..."<i>An amusing example in non-standard English is 'childrenses,' a triple-decker you can hear, for example, in Lightnin' Hopkins' 'How Long Have You Been Gone?' and in other blues songs, which is historically a quadruple-decker: In Old English, the original plural was childer (same historically as German Kind/Kinder), or more precisely spelled cilder, which was such an unusual plural formation eventually that the more common plural ending -en was added to it (it didn't hurt there was already the model of 'brother/brethren'), so that 'children' is already a double-decker.</i>"<br /><br />You had to dig deep, but I knew you had it in you!<br /><br />The hijacked thread was worth it!Gus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-20776917360637230992010-07-20T15:07:32.437-06:002010-07-20T15:07:32.437-06:00Yo, Gus, you write: "We (may still) have a l...Yo, Gus, you write: "We (may still) have a linguist in our midst. Perhaps he can find something even more redundant." Heh! Totally hijacked this posting...<br /><br />There are many examples I can think of of what you might call "etymological redundancies." Those would be words which lose their meanings or whose pronunciations change enough that native speakers add what are historically redundant--besides <i>de donde</i> a nice pair of examples in Spanish (and Portuguese) is <i>conmigo</i> and <i>contigo</i>, in which Latin <i>mecum/tecum</i> had reduced to <i>migo/tigo,</i> so to emphasize the sense of accompaniment, <i>con</i> was prefixed to a word originally already containing it (this was helped by the fact that postposed <i>cum</i> was rare in Latin and nonexistent in Romance).<br /><br />In French there's <i>aujourd'hui</i> "today," which is from <i>au</i> "to the" (masculine singular, <i>ad illum</i> historically) <i>jour</i> "day" (from <i>diurnum</i>) <i>de</i> "of" <i>hui</i> "today" (from <i>hodie</i>), so literally "on the day of today."<br /><br />An amusing example in non-standard English is "childrenses," a triple-decker you can hear, for example, in Lightnin' Hopkins' "How Long Have You Been Gone?" and in other blues songs, which is historically a <i>quadruple</i>-decker: In Old English, the original plural was <i>childer</i> (same historically as German <i>Kind/Kinder</i>), or more precisely spelled <i>cilder</i>, which was such an unusual plural formation eventually that the more common plural ending <i>-en</i> was added to it (it didn't hurt there was already the model of "brother/brethren"), so that "children" is already a double-decker.<br /><br />That's different from misinterpreted borrowings, as well as reanalyses. That last is the technical term for changes the form of a word when another word falls out of use--a good example there would be "bridegroom," which was originally <i>bridguma</i> "bride's man," where <i>guma</i> was the original Old English word for "human," cognate in fact with Latin <i>homo</i> and <i>humanus</i>, but was later replaced by <i>mann</i> or <i>monn</i> (depending on the English dialect); it was replaced by "groom" in "bridegroom" after <i>guma</i> was lost because that made it make more sense.Mike1noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-55745083176074914182010-07-20T14:33:19.019-06:002010-07-20T14:33:19.019-06:00Mike #1,
Ah! leave it to me to regale a linguist ...Mike #1,<br /><br />Ah! leave it to me to regale a linguist with my knowledge of classical languages, only to find out that it might not really BE knowledge!<br /><br />Mike #2,<br /><br />Indeed it does, and we think alike. I very nearly brought up <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome" rel="nofollow">RAS Syndrome</a> in my first reply to the first Mike.<br /><br />Andrew,<br /><br />We (may still) have a linguist in our midst. Perhaps he can find something even more redundant.<br /><br />That said, my head is close to exploding already.<br /><br />GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-65709540449546264282010-07-20T13:10:11.910-06:002010-07-20T13:10:11.910-06:00Gus -
Those kinds of redundancies can make their ...Gus -<br /><br />Those kinds of redundancies can make their way into the standard grammar of a language.<br /><br />In Spanish, the word for "where" is <i>donde</i>, which is a contraction of the Latin words <i>de</i> ("from") + <i>unde</i> ("from where"). So the Spanish phrase <i>de donde</i> ("from where") is, etymologically, equivalent to "from from from where."<br /><br />http://rudhar.com/etymolog/dedonde.htmAndrew Daltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11001665674703307354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-48261086902612374882010-07-20T12:23:24.897-06:002010-07-20T12:23:24.897-06:00Grilled carne asada steak.
ATM Machine.
It just ...Grilled carne asada steak.<br /><br />ATM Machine.<br /><br />It just never ends... :)Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10125745545009130612noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-61191927601203909422010-07-20T12:11:30.386-06:002010-07-20T12:11:30.386-06:00Yo, Gus, you write, "Sorry to jar you!" ...Yo, Gus, you write, "Sorry to jar you!" Yeah, well, I'll leave it to you to imagine how far my tongue was in my cheek on that count.<br /><br />"My personal favorite in the category of phrases like this is 'by Jove,' of which 'Jove' is the ablative case in Latin for 'Jupiter,' and can be translated to mean 'by Jupiter,' meaning that the phrase would really mean, but for centuries of usage, 'by by Jupiter.'"<br /><br />Prima facie at least. It's possible that it has a different source, however, but I'd have to do some digging to be sure: It could well be that "by Jove" is in turn just a loan translation of a medieval French equivalent of <i>pro Jovem;</i> in general French generalized the accusative singular (and this was in turn the form regularly borrowed into English), but since the final <i>m</i> of that case was lost in all of Late Latin (a development already attested in Pompeii graffiti), <i>Jove</i> is the expected French form. (But given the universal hold of Christianity on medieval French culture, it would still be a fairly learned word. This is what makes it necessary to dig around in the dusty tomes.) There are lots of English phrases, by the way, that are loan translations of that type--"it goes without saying," for example, from French <i>ça va sans dire.</i><br /><br />"The ones that I really can't stand are the French ones."<br /><br />Agreed. I might add that I get a chuckle out of the odd shifts some French phrases underwent in English--for example, "marriage of convenience" is essentially a mistranslation (though an evocative one) of French <i>mariage de convenance,</i> "marriage of agreement," or literally "marriage of covenant," and thus having essentially the opposite connotations of "covenant marriage!" (And <i>lingerie</i> just means "linen goods.")Mikenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-29745113177295282932010-07-20T11:41:38.559-06:002010-07-20T11:41:38.559-06:00Mike,
Sorry to jar you! I must admit that I grind...Mike,<br /><br />Sorry to jar you! I must admit that I grind my teeth a little when I use the phrase myself, knowing as I do that "hoi" means "the" in that phrase.<br /><br />My personal favorite in the category of phrases like this is "by Jove," of which "Jove" is the ablative case in Latin for "Jupiter," and can be translated to mean "by Jupiter," meaning that the phrase would really mean, but for centuries of usage, "by by Jupiter."<br /><br />The ones that I really can't stand are the French ones. I won't say "with au jus" or "please RSVP" since RSVP already includes the abbreviation of the French equivalent of "please" as its last three letters.<br /><br />GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-28643535983667023132010-07-20T10:44:57.063-06:002010-07-20T10:44:57.063-06:00Yo, Gus, you write: "Making Congress think h...Yo, Gus, you write: "Making Congress think harder about how to avoid the yoke it's making for the hoi polloi..." Urgh, <i>hoi polloi</i> is a troublesome phrase; it already means "the many" in Greek, so "the <i>hoi polloi</i>" is technically redundant, rather like Lake Malawi and Sahara Desert, and in a weak sense Gobi Desert. (<i>Gobi</i> actually means "semi-desert," not "desert," which would be <i>tsöl</i>--if I have it aright, <i>gobi</i> is dry land that's still able to support shrubs and marmots.) And just sad is ordering roast beef "with <i>au jus</i> sauce."<br /><br />So there's reason just to say "<i>hoi polloi</i>," but what trumps that for me is that eschewing "the" was the usage urged on pain of being <i>hoi polloi</i>, in <i>Dead Poet's Society</i>. Since the last thing I want is to be mistaken for one of the intellectually soft-shelled soft-skulled critters who lap up that pretentious, precious piece of what bears leave in the woods, I prefer to avoid the phrase entirely and go with "the great unwashed," which (for me at least) captures the same sentiment with the same range of ironic uses. (And I'll just leave off by pointing out the irony of pretentious lefties for whom that film is a gateway to better-washed-than-thouness thoughtlessly incorporating as a codeword for boorishness a phrase that in ancient Athens was the proud label for the democratic political ideal. Unthinking or simply conventional use of the term doesn't bother me, but when combined with certain political opinions frequently and overtly expressed, it <i>is</i> rather jarring.)Mikenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-73086972736462929282010-07-20T10:24:51.783-06:002010-07-20T10:24:51.783-06:00Thank you, sir!Thank you, sir!Gus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-57796542560772096502010-07-20T08:10:57.934-06:002010-07-20T08:10:57.934-06:00Great post.Great post.The Rat Caphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06641716225847901280noreply@blogger.com