An Elephant of One's Own

I've blogged elsewhere on semantic degeneration (to adopt the Bloomfield typology ). It's a depressing fact of life: just as the quaint sweetshop you used to buy pontefract cakes or wine gums and marbles at on the way home from school closes down, sooner or later, to make way for a Tesco or Asda, so the unique, precise meaning you used to ascribe to a particular word ceases trading, to be replaced by a vaguer, bewilderingly stupid meaning under which the formerly low-frequency word suddenly acquires a new customer base. It's "progress", of course, and unimpeachably democratic, so we'd be dumb to oppose it or try to turn the clock back. All we can allow ourselves in conscience (especially if we are linguists) is to sulk, and not like it, and be all crotchety and passive-aggressive about it. So, on that note and in no particular order, here goes. "Avatar". I never saw the movie, but well before it appeared I was using the word in my newsgroup posts t...

I've talked about and narrated dreams elsewhere in this blog. If I don't do so more often, it's simply because I rarely remember them. Experience has taught me that if I cared to remember more, I would have to pay 150 bucks a month for biweekly appointments with a floor-lamp , and I don't have that kind of money. So it's only ever going to be the one or two per year I actually remember, owing to fortuitous circumstances like waking up at the end of it and then staying awake long enough to retell it to myself a couple of times, to fix it in my mind. But I certainly wish I could remember more. Dreams are interesting. As I always say, though, it's not what happened in the dream, it's how you felt about what happened. That's generally the most interesting aspect. In this case, as usual, the beginning of the dream is lost to me. At the point I begin to remember, I am alone, walking along a road in Durán, near where I used to live, though later it turns ou...

Back in January I rejoined Twitter after several blissful years of absence. Damn fool notion: it's like that thing they do here in the Andes, getting yourself whipped with nettles by village elders to "purify" yourself. Don't know if I want to be limpiado that much, not at my age, or at least, not by anyone who doesn't look good in stilettos. Still, if there's one thing you can say for the platform, it provides you with a daily dripfeed of gratuitous controversy: National pride has evil consequences. Prefer pride in humanity. German pride gave us Hitler, American pride gave us Trump, British pride gave us Brexit. If you must have pride, be proud that Homo sapiens could produce a Darwin, Shakespeare, Mandela, Einstein, Beethoven. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 30, 2019 Thus Dawkins. The popular response to the tweet was, as far as I cared to read, "how can you mention Brexit in the same breath as Hitler": fair enough, but let's be...