Languages – What Extinction Can Mean

John McWhorter, the linguist, is always a bit of a maverick. And he is also quite often right. In “Dying Languages”, he argues:

In the end, the proliferation of languages is an accident: a single original language morphed into 6,000 when different groups of people emerged. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.

However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the world’s people will speak one language — is one I would welcome. Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There’s a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.

(Thanks to A&L, as usual.)

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Leave Me Alone, I Can Do It Myself

In Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw,” the narrator asserts something that most small businessmen, farmers, and self-employed artists know: “No slave in the Roman galleys could have toiled so frightfully and lived, for this man thought himself a freeman, and that he was working for his wife and babes.” Well, yes. And such workers fight collectivization because it takes from them purpose – a heavy work load is a lot easier to sustain than alienation.

How we make a living is not the only place where we are both more active and more sacrificial than we would be if we merely met other’s requirements. Several articles in the last few days have pointed to that; I suspect these arise from the fact America is an outlier — with our emphasis upon self-reliance, we see our selves defined by the internal & personal choice rather than the social & fulfillment of custom. This leads to misunderstandings – by us and of us. Europeans, for instance, are less likely to understand how we approach religion, culture, and society’s “safety net.” Of course, this post just notes new sources that substantiate old generalizations.

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Remembering Mancini on the Little Tube

Well, hot women’s groups attract Lex, but here’s a cool note: V. 1, first 8 episodes of Peter Gunn. (Netflix) For those of you of a certain age or a certain temperament, this may reverberate.
In 1989, Blake Edwards tried to revive the series (with Pearl Bailey as “Mother”!); apparently it wasn’t bad, but film noir only worked in a kind of postmodernist way by then. Tonight I forced my youngest daughter to watch episodes from the old series (1958-1961) and she found herself captivated (as I knew she would be) by the music and the poetry reading in smoky bars. This seems like a foreign world to her. I try to convince her that we were cool, then – but she doesn’t believe me. Of course, we weren’t. I was younger than she is now. And she laughs at much of it – the smoking, for instance, seemed so cool and now seems so absurd.

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Gerald Ford

Alav hashalom (RIP).

Ford’s presidency looks better with time and Jimmy Carter’s looks worse. Yet I remember the sense of disappointment with Ford, and enthusiasm for Carter, before the 1976 election among my parents’ contemporaries. (I’m sure that I would have voted for Carter if I had been old enough.)

At the time it seemed natural to frame any evaluation of Ford or Carter mainly in comparison to Nixon rather than in terms of urgent national issues. Ford came across, unfairly, as dull and clumsy and was prone to malapropisms. Carter, with his pious demeanor and then-novel southern political background, seemed to many people to be a sort of anti-Nixon. But Carter turned out to be seriously inept, while Ford’s judgment looks pretty good in hindsight, particularly if you consider his many vetoes, and the bad decisions he avoided by being essentially a practical politician rather than a zealous man.

Times change. Time clarifies.