Words words words
I love words. I subject most people to too many of them, especially when writing. My hubris is probably my lack of brevity. Then again, my hubris might be assuming I know what my hubris is at all. :)
The beauty of language, to me, lies in its mutability. Soft, hard, slow, smooth, angry, dark or kind. Murasaki Shikibu, Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Joni Mitchell, Juno Diaz - all of them changed language, crafted it, brought it something new. Gustave Flaubert believed that if you sought the perfect word (le mot juste) your meaning would transcend the page. Joss Whedon creates entire lexicons for his shows, marrying a new twist on language to situation and characterization.
There's a reason conquering cultures generally try to strip language from the defeated - language is power.
What scared me most about the most recent Bush president was the manipulation of language. His grasp of English was limited, but what he did use deliberately targeted how we thought. Where before the word "terrorism" had been sufficient, they chose Terror. A war against which we handily won because he proclaimed we did. On a big banner. There are more examples than I care to revisit, but I will forever remember his 2001 speech where he mocked his own verbal idiocy. Everyone laughed and laughed when he said things like "In my sentences I go where no man has gone before...I am a boon to the English language." Hmm. Funny. Especially when he slipped in at the end "You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." Did no one hear behind the words?
I have digressed. Surprise. My point is that I'm in love with the lyrics of the song Snuff by Slipknot, none more so than when the music reaches for another crescendo and he sings:
So break yourself against my stones
And spit your pity in my soul
*swoon*
How utterly delicious. The object of the song (IMO) becomes a ship to be broken against the shoals of the singer; he is the danger of what is hidden from site or ignored until too late. Pity turns into something you can discard into another person's spirit in a tactile show of denigration. It's a dark little ditty, and isn't even my general taste in music, but sweet baby Jesus. Language is power indeed.
Umm. That is all.
The beauty of language, to me, lies in its mutability. Soft, hard, slow, smooth, angry, dark or kind. Murasaki Shikibu, Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Joni Mitchell, Juno Diaz - all of them changed language, crafted it, brought it something new. Gustave Flaubert believed that if you sought the perfect word (le mot juste) your meaning would transcend the page. Joss Whedon creates entire lexicons for his shows, marrying a new twist on language to situation and characterization.
There's a reason conquering cultures generally try to strip language from the defeated - language is power.
What scared me most about the most recent Bush president was the manipulation of language. His grasp of English was limited, but what he did use deliberately targeted how we thought. Where before the word "terrorism" had been sufficient, they chose Terror. A war against which we handily won because he proclaimed we did. On a big banner. There are more examples than I care to revisit, but I will forever remember his 2001 speech where he mocked his own verbal idiocy. Everyone laughed and laughed when he said things like "In my sentences I go where no man has gone before...I am a boon to the English language." Hmm. Funny. Especially when he slipped in at the end "You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." Did no one hear behind the words?
I have digressed. Surprise. My point is that I'm in love with the lyrics of the song Snuff by Slipknot, none more so than when the music reaches for another crescendo and he sings:
So break yourself against my stones
And spit your pity in my soul
*swoon*
How utterly delicious. The object of the song (IMO) becomes a ship to be broken against the shoals of the singer; he is the danger of what is hidden from site or ignored until too late. Pity turns into something you can discard into another person's spirit in a tactile show of denigration. It's a dark little ditty, and isn't even my general taste in music, but sweet baby Jesus. Language is power indeed.
Umm. That is all.