I heard once that in Sweden or Norway (curse the porosity of my memory) there was an organized campaign to stamp out an offensive second-person pronoun, with buttons proclaiming “I don’t say ___!” Unfortunately, the person who mentioned it did not remember what the offensive pronoun was.
Now I read in languagehat how the Swedish formal pronoun Ni faded after 1968.
So inquiring minds want to know: did the writers of Monty Python and the Holy Grail know about all this?
Apparently Mr Bush has created something called the President’s Council on Bioethics. Now, I’ve never heard that term except in connexion with some chin-puller’s opinion that it’s naughty to tamper with God’s Will Nature by curing infertility or whatnot; so it comes as no surprise to read that one Leon Kass, appointed to chair the Council, has written a book in praise of Death. Continue reading
When Greece won independence from Turkey, romantic foreigners set about reshaping it to a Classical ideal; among other things they destroyed any nonclassical buildings on the Acropolis, which was most of them, because the Acropolis was once a living town. languagehat has the sad story.
A year later I find that Hat wrote three more entries on the same subject.
Plaintiff’s Consolidated Opposition to Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss in Gilmore v Ashcroft. Related items here. John Gilmore is challenging the secret regulation which supposedly requires passengers to either show an official annotated photograph (internal passport) or submit to search.
As things stand now, it seems the only ways to travel with one’s privacy rights intact are on foot (forbidden on most highways), on a bicycle (ditto), on a horse (?), or in a chartered private vehicle (putting the burden of identification on the driver/pilot).
An interesting item from the faq:
In 2000, scheduled air carriers carried almost 632 million passengers. If the same number of passengers fly in 2002, but instead of arriving at the airport 30 minutes before their flights, they arrive 2 hours before their flights, those passengers will have collectively spent more than 100,000 years sitting uselessly in airports or standing in line to be searched.
Contrast this to the lost lives of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks. If each of the approximately 3,300 people who died lost 35 years that they would have otherwise lived, then in total they lost about the same amount of time. Government-imposed searches waste as much life every year as the lifetimes that the attack wasted.
Here in the ogre’s cave we get only a few television channels. One of them shows, each weekend, an astonishingly bad movie; not merely the dull-witted clutter that fills up the hours between infomercials for other stations, but atrocities approaching Ed Wood standards.
We generally have no way of knowing what the flick is, but this week, my housemate said, “Oh, it’s the Bad Movie. Oh, Robert Vaughn is in this one, and I think that’s whatsername who was in Last Tango.” In a minute or two I was able to say, “The only movie with Robert Vaughn and Maria Schneider from Last Tango is The Babysitter. The mini-review at IMDb says this director’s films got worse and worse until, after The Babysitter, he had the sense to retire.”
Wonderful times, ennit?
Why aren’t more servers this clever?
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