Sadly, looking over that post, it seems like very few of the apps mentioned there have any staying power. Most of them might remain on my hard drive, and I might keep an eye out for updates, but many of them have nevertheless been superseded. One thing that remains true is that I do use applications for these; Jesse Wolf commented on my last one that he uses a web browser for almost all this stuff, but I still do vastly prefer the OS integration, the responsive, native UI, and the deep functionality of a proper Cocoa (in most cases) app to the convenience and universality of a web app. The cloud, however, has definitely made a big appearance in my life since that post was written.

Here's a quick list of those that have dropped off the leader board since then:

• Copywrite and Jer's Novel Writer are both still great pieces of software, but these days, any fiction or long-form writing I do, I do in Scrivener. It's incredibly well-put together; it has the flexible document- and project-level categorization and management of Copywrite, with the long-form editing features of JNW, and a whole lot more stuff. But when it comes to these applications, it's such a personal decision, necessarily attuned to one's personal writing style, that I would strongly recommend any writer--of fiction, of articles, of technical documentation--to download a demo of all three. And try out Ulysses, while you're at it. It's expensive, and in some ways terribly uncompromising; but for people whose preferences slant in the same direction as the Ulysses developers' there might be nothing else that comes close.

• Nisus Writer Express has been succeeded by Nisus Writer Pro; same app, more features. But that too has been feeling some competition recently, in the form of the venerable Mellel. My main problem with Mellel was always--and I am not ashamed here--the weird UI. But many of the kinks in that have been straightened out by now and it is undeniably fast and powerful. To be honest, though? I try to stay out of a word processor as much as possible. They are big and clunky, yes, but they also as a rule are way too much what-you-get and way too little what-you-mean, if you get my drift. The word processor--a single stream of text, with visual formatting metadata--is simply a completely out-dated way of working with long documents, and therefore the Nisus/Nisus Pro/Mellel war is a very very cold one, as I simply try not to think about it too much.

• Notational Velocity has finally kicked the can. This is a really new development; just a couple weeks ago I finally removed it from my login items. But the truth is I hadn't been using it at all for some time before that. It had been relegated to the most-instant-capture stage; that is, if someone is on the phone and starts telling me something I need to write down, I can open NV very quickly. But I could also grab a pen and paper. Once it gets into NV, there's not a whole lot you can do with it. What has replaced it, I will discuss below, as the answer is far from simple.

• Text Editing, on the other hand, has simplified itself nicely, I am glad to report. Pretty much every item in that list--Smultron, Textwrangler, Textmate--has improved itself and become more appealing in the past 3 years, and more options have come into existence as well. But as I said at the bottom there, I am a vim man. And the most important new text editor to come into the OS X world, as far as I am concerned, is the new, shiny, well-updated, well-integrated, Cocoa version of macvim. It's got everything you'd want a Cocoa version of vim to have. Native file dialogs, native tabs, terminal and useragent and services integration. The list goes on. I use it exclusively.

• Ecto has also dropped off, in fact, because of the aforementioned. I'm writing this post in macvim, using the vimpress plugin. It's barebones--it's got a New command, a Send command, a List command and maybe a Save command, and that's it. But it's also vim, so for instance it's trivial to add automatic Markdown syntax highlighting whenever you start a new blog post. There's a couple out there, but this one has worked the best for me.

• Azureus is done, done, thank god, gone from my computer; its massive Javaness has been replaced by Transmission. It's fast and it lets you select individual files in a torrent not to download; what else does one need?

• irssi, while still very close to my heart, has finally also been replaced by a fancy Cocoa client, called Linkinus. Some people will balk at the notion of paying for an IRC client; I can understand that but it doesn't bother me. Colloquy, anyway, while still not preferred by me, has gotten significantly better since we last spoke.

• Sbook5 is much lamented but it has gone away. Its developer ceased maintenance on it and it is now defunct. It is missed.

• remind/Geektool have also finally given things up to iCal. It's a matter of playing nice; if all the applications I use can send their information to all the other applications, my digital life works much more smoothly.

• Tofu is still around--it actually just was updated for the first time in an awfully long time--but it's just as likely these days that I'll be doing my reading in Stanza. They both have their dis and advantages, but Stanza's big ad is that it can sync with the iPhone.

Quicksilver also deserves a special mention; up until about a week ago I hadn't touched the thing for a year. It had gotten too bloated, to unmanageable, it hung itself at all the wrong times. I was using Launchbar, and I strongly recommend anyone interested in app launchers to check it out. It's stable and quick. But I guess I got restless, or I guess it wasn't quite quick enough, because QS is back on probation. We'll see if it can stay around. Its development status is in some serious limbo right now, which is not heartening.

Wow, so that leaves, what--NetNewsWire, Adium, and DEVONthink? That's not a very encouraging track record. Especially when we consider--well, NNW is now free, and still great, and Adium is chugging along marvelously. But the DEVONThink situation has itself been complicated.

I wouldn't say that it's been retired, because it hasn't. But the truth is that I haven't been using DEVONthink very much at all these days. The interface and the mechanism of the app are very outdated, and its delightful indexing abilities aside, it doesn't make it very easy or pleasant to get information in or out. In short, it's not something you want to work in. So I've got it indexing a couple folders on my drive, and every so often I automatically sync it up with them and it has a nice corpus for me. That's about it.

And what takes its place? What is the 'junk drawer' app of choice? That is a question for the ages. The place where you go to be able to drop information--text, links, images, webpages--and find it later, or have it be suggested to you, is one of the most actively developed fields in the OS X software realm. Zillions of them have sprung up. My own favorite is EagleFiler. It's completely filesystem-based, ie, all of the stuff it stores is organized in directories on your drive where any other app can read them; it's got a global automatic capture hotkey that can talk to the application you're working in--Finder, Mail, Firefox--and automatically import whatever it is you're working on; it's got Smart Groups; et cetera.

I've tried pretty much every app in that field, and I like EF the best. The file-based storage is what does it for me. It makes it extremely modular, so that I can have it also indexed by DEVONthink for free, or synced with all my other computers.

Yes, the Cloud. one thing that wasn't around in 2005 was the expectation--unless you were working in a web browser all day--that your data and settings would be synced to all of your computers, automatically, gratis. But it's the future now. Two apps take care of all of this for me (in addition to IMAP, whose praises we should not stop singing).

First, get fruux. It's free, it works pretty well. It's a prefpane that automatically syncs your Safari bookmarks, contacts, and iCal events over the web, through OS X's own sync services. Next is dropbox. This is, again gratis, 2GB of storage to sync and backup over the web. It's got a great tool for OS X that will automatically sync up anything that's written in its directory. So my active working folders, I just create a file in there, start working on it, and whenever I save it dropbox beams it up. And because EagleFiler stores everything as normal files, I just have dropbox pointed at my Eaglefiler directory and now whenever I open EF on any of my three computers I get the same library. Pretty good.

So, let's see what else I've found myself using these days.

I would recommend that anyone teaching themselves a language--or anything else that can be expressed in n-dimensional flashcards, I guess--go get Anki. It's Java, but it's not too clumsy. It uses these fancy algorithms to time repetition of facts based on how well you learn them for optimal retention, I think.

There's another field that I never actually find myself using that much, but nevertheless am consistently interested in. Both DEVONagent and Selenium seem designed to do the same thing--to help you do research on the web--albeit coming from different directions. The former basically consists of a series of very sophisticated web scrapers that will search a very wide range of web resources, then parse the resulting data and, using the same algorithms as in DEVONthink (it seems), present it to you in the most useful manner. Selenium has less fancy web scraping tools, but--and I haven't used it very much--sets up research projects for you, and lets you assemble web searches and web pages of interest, while annotating them or organizing them into notes. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has more experience with either app.

Nocturne is another program from Blacktree--the same guy who wrote Quicksilver. Quite simply, it lets you put your screen into a low-light, low contrast mode, inverting the screen (but keeping the hue accurate, smartly), pulling down the whites and blacks, covering the desktop, and tinting everything for a more eye-friendly experience. I find it invaluable at night time.

Dterm is a great single-use app that makes my life easier. As simply as possible: if you press a hotkey, it will pop up over the active window and let you run terminal commands. It can automatically take you to the working directory of the frontmost window, which is neat. It's great for every time you need to drop into the terminal for a moment but you don't want to open up a whole new shell, and then close it when you're done, just to md5 something.

File Management is a sore subject. It's one that's not really resolved for me right now. As of right now, I am using Path Finder. It is a full Finder replacement. I used it for a long time, then stopped when Leopard came out; but they recently released Path Finder 5 and so I'm back on it. It's got a zillion features that are lacking in Finder and a few things that make me wonder if I'll stay with it permanently. Some of the former are a proper trash can on the desktop, a drop stack (drag and drop files from anywhere into the same little target in your window, then manipulate everything on the stack at the same time or pop them off FILO-style), constant Info and Preview panes in every view mode, built-in terminal, and many more. As of PF5 it's got a dual-pane mode, too--and I love dual-pane. Which is why I am not yet totally satisfied, because Path Finder's dual pane mode is definitely inferior to [Forklift][fl], which is a full, cool Commander-style dual pane file manager. So I am torn. Path Finder replaces every part of the Finder, and does it well. Forklift does what it does much better than how Path Finder does the same thing, but is also more limited. I think they both need a little more time. In the meantime, what's the best app in the world if you: a) love dual-pane file managers, and b) love vim? vifm, of course! It's a curses-based dual-pane file manager that obeys vim key commands. vifs, have my mouseless baby.

Disturbingly, my file management exploration doesn't end there. For good measure, I also love Leap, a file manager that basically takes all the Spotlight metadata of all your files and presents your entire filesystem as a series of filters or metadata views, rather than a hierarchical system of folders. Very cool.

For email I use Gyazmail rather than Apple Mail. It's an odd choice, and there's no one killer feature in it that makes it a must-have, but there's just a thousand interface things in Apple Mail that drive me nuts. If you feel the same, check it out. It's never failed me, which is more than I can say for the Apple offering.

For watching videos, I am a huge fan of Movist. I have all of them on hand, of course: VLC, Quicktime, Mplayer--the world of codecs gives me little choice--but Movist has a great interface, and most nicely, can switch between the ffmpeg engine and the Quicktime engine in one app. And really pretty subtitles, if that's your thing.

There's a bunch of applications that I don't actively use very often, but that I like to have around because I think they approach their space in an interesting or distinctive way. Here's a non-comprehensive list: ASCII/edit, Eddie, Flow, MindNode, Name Mangler, Nifty Box, Shovebox, Rita, Shelf, Stapler, Tinderbox, Typeset.

Popchar is great if you find yourself employing a lot of Unicode characters and the like. It sits in the menubar and gives you quick access without having to load the whole character palette.

And that looks like it, for now. I've not mentioned every single app on my computer; FTP programs, for instance, are passed by, for the reason that there's a lot of them, they're all pretty good, and I haven't used any one for so much to have developed a preference. To be honest, though, the world of OS X software is pretty healthy. There's a lot of enthusiastic developers out there, they've got good aesthetic taste, and Apple has given them good tools to write code with--and most of it's not too pricey either. It is a sickness I have; I spend my time watching the applications, downloading them, playing with them. I hope that some of my labor may be of use.

In the spring of 2004, Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Evanston, Illinois, told me a funny story about startling President Bush during a visit to the White House. She was wearing a big, blue "OBAMA" button. This was in the early days of Barack Obama's campaign for the U.S. Senate. Bush "jumped back, almost literally," Schakowsky said. "And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a 'b.' And I explained who he was. The President said, 'Well, I don't know him.' So I just said, 'You will.'"

Everything else has already been said and will continue to be said. So I will say merely this: four years.

via

When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he aimed to make a clean break from all things Clinton. The acrimony, much of it stemming from the 2000 Florida recount and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, apparently went both ways. Reports of office vandalism and thievery made their way into the press soon after the Bush team moved in.

An initial 2001 General Services Administration audit found little to the story, other than wear and tear when "tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." But GeorgiaRep. Bob Barr pressed the matter, and the General Accounting Office began a deeper probe. A year later, the GAO released a report that found between $13,000 and $14,000 worth of damage. The vandalism included missing items like doorknobs, a presidential seal and "W" keys from nearly 60 computer keyboards. The 215-page report said the damage amounted to a "criminal act" but didn't specifically blame anyone. Clinton spokesmen acknowledged that there may have been pranks done in jest, but attributed the majority of the damage to normal wear and tear. In the end both sides claimed vindication, but the bitterness was a symbol of the entire 2000 election.

fun http://www.newsweek.com/id/167691

Anyway. Fry now, on a slightly unfocused but still quite enjoyable essay on language on his blog, takes direct aim at the self-appointed language mavens and usage experts about whom I have here bitched in the past, and it's gratifying. It does seem that these folk are more prominent and more influential in England. I guess that ironic, dry, intellectual culture that we Americans love so much to delineate also bears within it a greater proportion of cranky, humorless, obnoxious people. Fry says, among many other things, this:

For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don't enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people's usage and in which they show off their own superior 'knowledge' of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I'm on their side. When asked to join in a "let's persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their 'five items or less' sign" I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between 'less' and 'fewer', and between 'uninterested' and 'disinterested' and 'infer' and 'imply', but none of these are of importance to me. 'None of these are of importance,' I wrote there, you'll notice - the old pedantic me would have insisted on "none of them is of importance". Well I'm glad to say I've outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: "I'll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c." Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don't you think?

He goes on after this to squarely put his own emphasis on pleasure, and I am much gratified for it. For him the point of this is not communication, or correctness, or even art as much as pleasure; the unencumbered and unnumbered proliferation of idiolects and expressions.

That is a position that I have myself taken here at times, and I'm glad to hear it taken up in other places. I am, as my readers will know, not a linguist. I have a healthier-than-usual interest in the arts linguistic, and I think, a greater-than-average command of the facts and principles of the matter, but my interest and pleasure have always been more aesthetic than, say, the members of Language Log. And that's sometimes a hard needle to thread. It seems like the bulk of aesthetic treatments of language tend towards the prescriptivist; that if one cares about and delights in the sound and substance of the stuff, in a way obviously inappropriate for academic study, then one tends much more often than not towards prescriptivism--towards a deep concern about the quality of one's language, about its degradation, about its aesthetic quality and purity, and about its proper use. But Fry says,

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don't have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy's little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy's little bubble. So if you've got it, use it. Don't be afraid of it, don't believe it belongs to anyone else, don't let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to.

and I am inclined to agree. It's a bit high-flown, of course, and the you-can-do-it populism has little shine for me (forgive the man; I am told he has just spent an extended period of time in America), but the important part there is the fierce assertion that language, in its naturally occuring form, in its variations and permutations (not warts and all, but with every shape of it and instance its own well-formed, legitimate standard), is beautiful, and it is already beautiful, and moreso ceases to be beautiful immediately upon being constrained and deformed by committee and focus group of pedants. Indeed, as I have also mentioned in these pages, I have a pretty severe aesthetic hard-on for variety itself, and for that most perfect musical exercise, the Variation; so for me the very penumbra and pleroma of language family, language, dialect, regionalism, accent and idiolect is a work itself to be savored. Maybe Stephen Fry agrees; but I'm sure he would have more interesting things to comment on than my punctuation.

"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said. Such things as 'Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.' Well the correct answer is 'He is not a Muslim, he's a Christian, he's always been a Christian.' But the really right answer is 'What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' The answer is 'No. That's not America.' Is there something wrong with some 7-year old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she can be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

"I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo-essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in you can see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have a Star of David. It had a crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Karim Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American, he was born in New Jersey, he was 14 at the time of 9/11 and he waited until he can go serve his counrty and he gave his life."

Since then we've been practicing and writing new songs, but we haven't played out or done any recording--until now! Late last month we started finally laying down tracks for a four-track demo, designed to get something on tape and maybe get us some shows.

Well, the recording went really well. Well enough, in fact--with dearly appreciated help by my friend James at the mastering console--that we have upgraded it from a demo to an EP. We called it Abigail1 and we have released it, for free, through the very nifty band hosting site bandcamp.mu. We've got our own website, of course: http://flamingtusk.com, a little number I drunkenly cobbled together over a weekend; but with bandcamp we've got great streaming, multi-format downloads, and embeddable players, and it's free for you and us. You can access the music at http://flamingtusk.com, but you can also go straight to the album at http://tusk.bandcamp.mu.

Anyway, I hope you listen, and I hope you like it. We're going to start looking for some shows, so maybe you'll see us soon, too.

Hail tusk.

1. King Diamond, please call your office.

And one of its many interesting features is its orthography. Like many, but certainly not all, other languages, Yiddish went through a relatively vigorous process of standardization and tumult; like perhaps not quite so many that process has been very well-documented, and is still discussed with great... interest by a very good portion of its speakers and writers.

One of the aspects of the orthography which interests me at the moment is its treatment of what is known as loshn-koydesh, the portion of the vocabulary which derives from Aramaic and Hebrew. Hebrew, as you may know, is an abjad, which doesn't under normal circumstances write out any of its vowels. Yiddish is not. Germanic languages not being particularly suited to that sort of shortcut, it has developed pretty stable letters for all of the vowels--except when it comes to writing any word that was borrowed into the language from the Hebrew or Aramaic, like toyre, ganef, oylem, et cetera.

So what we end up with is very interesting: it's almost like there are two parallel orthographies in any given Yiddish text. One is highly phonemic, totally explicit, and very European, and one is totally semitic, rather oblique, and derives straight from a language that has no genealogical relationship to Yiddish, but nevertheless informs it and filters through in just about every context. And depending on the origin of the word in question, you use the same alphabet to write it in two utterly different ways, according to two different sets of rules.

Have you ever heard of such a thing, lazyweb? I guess the eastern scripts, Japanese in particular, have a similar thing going. Kanji for the bulk of the words, and then Kana for anything you need to spell out. Almost a reverse situation. Any more?

But my interest has, ever since that point, periodically swelled back, and I've periodically gone around the web to see what other roguelikes there are to find. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that in the last 7 years web searching technology has also gotten much more effective. Now there's roguelike wikis, roguelike blogs... and surprisingly, a very active roguelike community.

So I've found a couple new ones and I've been enjoying the heck out of them. The best two are Incursion and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The former is based pretty deeply on the D20 Dungeons and Dragons system, and so it has a lot of the same monsters and classes and stuff. It isn't chock-full of crazy creatures and items and flavor text, but the really thorough, well-thought out nature of the system makes up for it. Crawl is kind of the opposite; it has far fewer weird actions and isn't really concerned with the ability to, you know, dip a knife in a potion and then put the knife in a trap and automatically have a monster trigger it and get stabbed or whatever, and only three attributes (ST, INT, DEX), but it's got a really good, low-barrier, combat-centric system worked out, and a really satisfying array of stuff, like crazy gods and classes and species. A little more Diablo/Gauntlet-y, I guess.

But in both cases, what's probably the one reason that I've actually been playing them is that they natively support rogue-style navigation keys (HJKL), which means you can play them on a laptop. And as a vim-man, it's an easy step for me. One of these days I'm going to stick my toes back in the Angband pool and see how it feels.

Giles Coren, to his editors at The Times (London) for removing the word "a" from the closing sentence of his review:

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Coren is, of course, correct. The sentence was mutilated.

He's incorrect, in fact. The sentence might have been mutilated semantically, but metrically--his ultimate, dramatic thrust about a lost stressed syllable--is simply and demonstrably wrong.

Simply:

The resulting final feet are a series of simple iambs. Short-long, short-long, with a single anapest thrown in around "wondering."

 -   /   - -   /     -  /  -   /  
 and wondering where to go for nosh

"For a nosh" is an anapest, a short-short-long. So in both cases the piece ends with a stressed syllable, and you can claim that one is more metrically pleasing than the other; but his dramatic lead-up sadly ends flaccid. He can be pleased, anyway, that he has maintained his claimed record of never ending with a stressed syllable; though his scansion thus far leaves me with little confidence in the claim.

I've been a huge fan of Hollenthon for a long time; they put out two records, one in 1999 and one in 2001, that were just thoroughly fantastic. Really groovy, well-written death metal with a fantastic array of samples (and keyboard parts? never can tell). I've never seen anything else like them, really; Amon Tobin-style strings, chants, Yat-Kha, a lot of Leonard Bernstein or Holst-esque orchestration. Of the two, one focuses more on 'world-music' style folk and chant, and the other on huge string and brass ensembles. Really, some of the only symphonic metal of any stripe that's worth listening to.

And then they took 7 years to make a new one, partly while Martin Shirenc worked with his other band, Pungent Stench. At some point last year I became aware that they were working on a new album, and became suitably excited. But my repeated visits to the Hollenthon homepage for any scrap of new information, my high hopes, my love of the original albums, and their incredible distinctiveness also left me a little nervous that the new record wouldn't be as good.

It's almost inevitable, after all, that over 7 years a band that so clearly works from a position of originality and creativity would change up, and then who knows whether it would be good or not? And I watched 30 seconds of a Youtube video of the new single, "Son Of Perdition", and was not buoyed. It was pretty simplistic and lacked the texture and layering that made Domus Mundi and With Vilest Of Worms To Dwell so rich.

So now that I finally have the album, I can say that all my fears were unfounded. It's a little glossier, as recording techniques have become marginally nicer in the last seven years, but (the first half of) "Son Of Perdition" is a definite outlier; its simple, slightly boneheaded main riff is unlike anything else on the album. The rest of the songwriting on the album is incredibly vital; if Shirenc needed to wait 7 years to write songs that didn't sound tired or overworked, I won't begrudge him them.

The sample work on this record kind of splits the difference between the orchestral and the world-music sides. But the nice thing is that the riffwork is awfully catchy, and very much in Hollenthon's characteristic style. And at first listen the rhythm section has everything very much nailed down; with all the chants and horns, pretty much every track has a monster groove to it.

???????? During a tour of Germany in 1958, Marx, accompanied by his then wife, Eden, his daughter, Judith and Robert Dwan, climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's death, and performed a two minute charleston.

wikipedia

Normally I wouldn't bother with a comment myself, given the repetitive nature of this kind of grousing. But an excerpt from Mr. Bierma's column caught my eye:

Brockenbrough reprimands pop stars for grammar gaffes in song lyrics, including Bryan Adams for singing "if she ever found out about you and I" (it should be "you and me," she says) -- even though that's the best way to rhyme with the line before it: "She says her love for me could never die." And she takes Elvis to task -- is no one sacred? -- for singing "I'm all shook up" instead of the proper "all shaken up."

I think the bolded part (my bolding of course) is actually quite interesting. Because I think it brings up a point in this whole debate that is often overlooked. Often when people piss and moan about these supposed solecisms, their complaint is that through inaccuracy, inconsistency, change and inattention we diminish communication; that if we let our standards droop pretty soon we will all be talking different monkey languages at each other1. Their opponents disagree; people are always speaking different regional and class dialects at each other and communicating pretty well; no one who has heard 'I could care less' has actually taken that at its literal face without trying; and communication is actually a pretty tricky act of interpretation and pas de deux anyway, and avoiding sentence-final prepositions is a laughably minor gesture in one direction or the other. These are all true assertions.

But what that quote brings to mind is, in my mind, a better counter-argument: people have better things to do with their language than simply convey facts. In the imaginations of the dryest of grammarians, perhaps, language--not speech, though; written language--is simply or reductively the tool that we use to transmit and record factual information. Everybody else, though, and I mean everybody, is answering to a series of more pressing concerns. Even when speaking prose, we are participating in aesthetic creation. Every utterance obeys rules of meter and rhythm as fundamental to language as its grammatical structure. Every utterance also, as DFW notes, bespeaks of its speaker, and so in reality the only people who are going to be careful to only use 'decimate' in its Latin sense are people to whom it is important that they are seen as people who care about the true meaning of 'decimate'.

Sometimes it makes a body really want to rap these critics on the head; don't you see that people are speaking here? Do you really imagine that people who say 'between you and I' don't have anything better to do with their words than see that they conform to some superficial notion of grammar? Can you allow in your worldview the possibility that the greengrocer or urban youth has his own sense of language, and is actively wielding it, rather than simply trying and failing to follow all the rules?

Oy.

1. sometimes they also try to bring up--David Foster Wallace, I'm looking at you--that people judge you by the words you use, and pretend that 1: this is a fact descriptivists do not thoroughly accept and assume, and that further 2: descriptivists actually believe some vein of hippie-dippy anarchism, where either i: there are no rules, man or ii: everyone should just go around talking like how they want all the time, and nobody would/should ever draw any conclusions from their choices

On the way back from the LSA meeting, having finished the light reading that I had brought with me, I bought Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link. At pp. 418-419 we read:

These words were chiseled into the granite below.

CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA

"Prudence is the guardian of things," he said, translating, but his Greek was good enough to know that the first word could also be read as "wisdom". Either way, the message seemed clear.

Now, I don't expect very many people actually to understand Greek, or even Latin, but is it asking too much for at least one of the people involved in the production of a book, if not the author perhaps an editor or proofreader, to know the difference?

I also appreciate, though, that this author's notion being particularly adept at Greek translation is being able to swap 'wisdom' for 'prudence'--without even having to look it up!

Anyway, among them were these two short notes that have something to say about the way my mind and my aesthetic sense works. Neither of them is particularly publishable, but for a couple hundred words written two years ago there's a bit of interest there. I don't remember how many days separate them when they were written, but they relate well enough.

Consider the example of calculus:

If any given function is a body of information, then that function's derivative is a body of the same class (ie it can be represented by the same method), but one order higher, describing the original function.

By that same token, one may effectively or usefully apprehend some arbitrary set of information--say, a family of languages, or some body of music--by examining the variation within it; in this way, the phonetic relationships among Eastern European languages or the differing uses of harmony among the Minimalist composers can achieve a sort of beauty of the same class (if not equal to) the actual compositions or speech they describe.

This is why one may view in the same aesthetic light the relationship between a text and its instantiation as they do the literary aspect of the language, or the visual aspect of the letterforms.

The next one has an interesting point, but it's ridden with quite a few pseudo-scientific buzzwords. Please excuse them.

The scored composition is best understood not as a set procedural instructions, but as a set of probabilities; the score maps to the set of extant recordings (and performances, though this is not demonstrable) like the Lorenz attractor or the current [nyamic--dynamic?] model map to the phenomena they describe; as probabalistic predictions of note choice, dynamics, rhythmn, timbre, etc.

The score is a superposition of probable instantiations of the piece. If we compare each performance they will probably correspond in each aspect that is defined by the canonical text, with error-correction increasing with the number of samples. The picture will get might be said to be the ideal of text; however the areas where they differ will provide what's perhaps the most precious or rarified information, the shading, texture and timbre, so to speak, which have no written form. The oft-invoked dialogue between composer and audience shares a musical space with the dialogue between composer and performer.

Much of the problem is apparent in the rhetorical stances of many of the authors in this volume. They are preaching to the choir in a church full of dull-witted pagans from another, very wicked planet. [...] Apart from a few asides about the necessity for Americans to know second languages in the global village, [one author] nowhere explains to his readers WHY the USA would be a better place if the primacy of English were less than it is today, or WHY the apparent gradual death of Yiddish (his example) is such a great national loss [...] Students--and liberal humanities professors, for that matter--know in their hearts that the linguistic melting pot has always been the great American tradition, and that it has been viewed almost totally positively by everybody but linguists, and that there are powerful common-sense arguments in its favor. Dismissive scolding has little effect against such engrained ideologies.

My answer to that question has always been simple: it is, like many other things about which I feel strongly, essentially a matter of aesthetics. Diversity is a simple aesthetic, for me--density and richness and variety resonate with my sense of beauty. I love language, and the more languages there are being spoken, the richer the linguistic biosphere, the more beauty and diversity I get to enjoy.

Of course this is self-serving, but what else is there? We all fight for our own vision of the world. I might note, however, that this reviewer's dismissal of tribal languages might make sense to the desire for a world where everyone can communicate perfectly with everyone else--but even those people who would be served by more perfect acquaintance with the dominant language tend to feel a sense of loss--of culture and identity--as their languages die. So it's not just the linguists, but also the speakers of those languages. Presumably they have some right?