Comments for Works and Days

Comment on The Awful German Language by The Viking

The Viking — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:19:57 +0000

There’s a reason for the lady being sexless – the German words “Mädchen” and “Mädel” (girl) are diminutive forms of the lesser-used “Magd” (maid), and German diminutives are always neuter. “Magd” and “Frau” (woman), however, are both grammatically feminine. So whether the beautiful English maiden is a she or an it varies on the word you use to describe her, which means her gender can change from one sentence to the next.

Also, “its” and “his” are identical in German, as are “it” and “him” in the dative case, making possible sentences like “the beautiful English maiden asked for his handbag, so I passed her to him”. As you can imagine, this makes German prose a delight to read.

Comment on You say mihi, I say michi by Edward Yong

Edward Yong — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:05:39 +0000

suggestion: tuscan dialect (not the later form that became ’standard’ italian), till this day, tends to pronounce ‘ch’ as an aspirated h, which meant that ‘michi’ was ‘miHi’. perhaps the Hs went silent at some point, and the ‘ch’ was inserted to reëmphasise the ‘H’ sound, and later this was mistaken for standard italian ‘ch’?

Comment on The Library in the New Age by evovae

evovae — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:20:09 +0000

“According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books”

Hmm…I’d be very interested in finding out the details of that survey.

Comment on Kafka on books by evovae

evovae — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:24:50 +0000

“bite and stab”, hmm…maybe Bruce Campbell was on to something with those false Necronomica in “Army of Darkness”.

Comment on Two More by Look, but don’t touch… « Tota Nostra Est…

Look, but don’t touch… « Tota Nostra Est… — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:02:40 +0000

[...] but don’t touch… While reading this article on bordom (thanks to Works and Days!), my eyes wandered over to the sidebar leading to further pieces on the site. Much to my [...]

Comment on Garfield minus Garfield by evovae

evovae — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:49:03 +0000

Hmm…this could spur a whole new line of “without” comics. I’m thinking we could have “Dennis the Menace” without Dennis. It could just be called “The Menace”…kind of creepy! Or the “Wizard of Id” could just be “Id”.

…is it just me, or does this all somewhat smack of far out literary theory, like, the displacement of the subject et al. ? Either way, someone ought to write a high-falutin’ dissertation on it.

Comment on Garfield minus Garfield by someone pondering May

someone pondering May — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:47:11 +0000

Have you read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman? I can’t remember.

Comment on Esolen on Piety by evovae

evovae — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:49:41 +0000

Interesting…I would suggest that our contemporary banality stems also from a species of psychological determinism that forbids us to believe in the possibility throughout life for continuous conversions of the heart as a species of progress towards our mature selves, since that would bluntly contradict contemporary dogma that spontaneity equals authenticity, which in turn has lead to the widespread adoption of the mask of irony as a defense mechanism. In other words, in an age that moves as fast as ours the premium is set on swift, predictable categorization with no looking back, “no regrets” often being shorthand for an unwillingness to examine the past or consider it as a relevant touchstone to the future changes–had he died today, Lazarus would be in the ground before Jesus knew he was dead, and the prostitute stoned to death while the Savior stooped writing in the sand. Christians cannot make final judgments on people because people can and do change in ways and for reasons we cannot foresee, and this is what underscores the strangeness of “office notes” by “liturginators” and of reforms tailored to popular demographics, namely, they seem to assume that the individual human spirit functions according to some sort of spiritual inertia dictated by character sketches and modulated by the zeitgeist. It’s as though the art of inspired interior religion has been replaced with color-by-numbers.

Comment on Hmm by evovae

evovae — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:55:30 +0000

Based on my own experience, I by and large agree with Chesterton’s analysis of these ‘code words’. But I think a fair case can be made for the usefulness of “liberty” insofar as it may be defined as an avoidance of discussing what is good; therein lies the basis of the liberal democratic society, which takes as it’s fundamental premise that significant portions of the human population will disagree intractably on the question of what is good, such that the path of least resistance is to let them each carve out their own social spheres wherever and however they will.

But I suppose this runs into more problems according to the greater degree of cultural pervasiveness/mobility, i.e., “How ya gonna keep’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree[or TV, for that matter...]?” In other words, in terms somewhat analogous to economic monopolies, what do we do about the fact that there comes a point at which technological innovation, by virtue of making the world “smaller”, hampers our freedom to live without constant pervasive interference from those outside of our directly chosen society who have made radically different decisions about what is good? (yes…this is my hippie commune side asserting itself)

Comment on If the characters are not wicked, the book is by evovae

evovae — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:00:35 +0000

Interesting. I don’t know enough about the content of Greco-Roman novels to locate it within the field of these comments. But I do get the impression that Theophrastus’ Characters is a good example of what Chesterton is talking about. Beyond that, one might broaden his argument to say that whereas modern conceptions of morality tend to be defined according to radical individualism (i.e., immorality as inauthenticity, or “not being (true to) yourself”), previous conceptions of morality understood behavior as an observable social phenomenon classifiable into types.

Of course, this lays any moral framework open to the charge that it’s temporo-spatially dependent (yay, SF!) and therefore not nearly as absolute as we’d like to think. But that argument holds water tightly from a radically individualistic perspective, that is, only if we’re trying to argue that morality is some self-contained, abstract system that can be quasi-scientifically atomized down to the individual actor acting in isolation from all potential social constraints–the method works great for preliminary theories of particle interaction (e.g., derivation of the ideal gas law)…but when taken to it logical conclusions, you get the manifestly inappropriate Categorical Imperative.

Anyway, that’s all to say that moral stereotyping isn’t a totally bad thing since it at least takes into account that morality is a fundamentally social phenomenon whose basic unit is not the isolated individual, but rather the pair of I and Thou, both observing and observable, yet neither telepathic (Topic for a different day: The serious idea of God’s omniscience as the religious basis for radical individualism…hmm).