Councils ban ‘elitist’ and ‘discriminatory’ Latin phrases. (ok BMEWSers. Outdumb this one)
on 11/02/2008 at 12:20 PM
But I love sticking foreign phrases into my sentences!
It adds a certain style, that special Le désir d’insérer un boa de plume vers le haut de votre passage arrière to a person’s writing - don’tcha think? It’s soooo sophisticated.
...And now that I did it, please be aware that the above French phrase translates basically to:
The desire to stick a feather boa up your back passage.
I’ve snuck that phrase - and other equally stupid ones - into my comments several times. No one has ever called me on it. Everyone assumes any foreign phrase is automatically relevant.
I do dearly love Babblefish!
I’ll tell what needs banning. Authors who find the urgent need to write lines in books in foreign languages without translations.
You mean like this?
Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
They probably banned this one too!
And who can forget Christopher Walken’s famous:
Les yeux sont la fenêtre au visage !
Hrm… banning words from public use… Newspeak anyone?
I keep saying that if Obama wins the US will be like Germany in 1938 in no time. The two redeeming aspects to this are a)The journalists who manipulated the asshole into office are gonna be sooooo sorry, and b) it’ll be quite interesting to live in Socialist US - for a little while. Interesting as in an execution or a fatal car wreck. Horrifying but hypnotic.
illigetimi non carborundum
So write a letter to those councils demanding the ban on any words from any OTHER foreign language, as well. Pitch a screaming bitch about how “algebra”, “gesundheit”, “Ciao”, et. al. are all “elitist and discriminatory”. If they are going to insist on this absurdity, demand they take it to its logical conclusion.
Oh and by the way, I have a new quote to add to the title line about Nov. 6th or so, after McCain and Palin have won the election and the Democrats and the MSM are bitching about how it was “stolen”:
“You fought them, they fought you, everyone knew the rules, and if you got your head cut off you jolly well didn’t blub about it afterward.”
- Terry Pratchett, “Jingo”
/snark
Latin is too elite??
Well, Uckfay emthay!
Posted by TimO
11/02/2008 at 10:57 PM
Препятствуйте им съесть их собственных детенышей! And that’s what I have to say to them!
Possono scortecciare alla luna! And their little dog too!
You folks really are damn well brilliant no kidding. And with a sense of humor to boot.
Thanks all.It really is bothersome though when you’re reading a pretty good book and suddenly come up on a phrase or for that matter, even a group of English letters, and you sit there scratching your head trying to figure it all out.
And it isn’t like you’re on top of a computer where you can run for a translation and might not anyway. Or what’s the point of reading the book?Hey, let me share something I have discovered lately and I believe it to be somewhat of a fad.
For a very long time the odd word in Yiddish has cropped up here and there but the meanings have always been pretty clear. Ah but lately I find a heck of a lot more and just can’t help but wonder if the average person reading it will know what it means.
With my background, I do. But I have run across a word or two here and there where I’ve actually had to hunt the meaning myself, the word has been so obscure.
I just don’t think it’s really necessary to a good story but no matter, if the story is good we can always skip over that odd phrase or word.I find that it’s a pretty rare word/phrase that you can’t pick up the meaning of from its context. So for me at least, spotting some unknown word in a book I’m reading ends up serving much the same purpose as looking it up in the dictionary… only I get to be entertained or informed while I’m learning it.
And the downside of this is *what*, exactly?oh to be sure you can sometimes tell the meaning. I didn’t mean it was always impossible.
But lots of times it isn’t in some form that can be easily figured out.Sometimes a line ends with, “and this was” ...............? (or some other group of words)
and a foreign phrase and I’m wondering, huh? “and this was” What? It doesn’t say.
To make matters worse, the next paragraph goes on to something else with no reference to the above. So no clue there.Reading a history book recently and there was an entire paragraph in French. ?? It was a quote of some kind and no reference whatever as to it’s meaning. In fact, it’s throughout the book.
Well yes, that’s true enough. But since I have seen that mostly in books for sale to the general public, I figure it’s largely self-correcting. Someone who shows a consistent tendency to throw crap into his books that can’t be understood by his readers ends up not being able to make a living selling his books.
Call it literary Darwinism.It appears that the West continues its obsession with Panem et circenses…
And we know what happened the last time that occured…
Posted by Turtler
11/04/2008 at 03:58 AM
11/02/2008 at 05:45 PM
