An Elephant of One's Own

Can't remember who said it: it was in a YT video on l'affaire Peterson , and we even got "they're a part of me, like an organ of my body", or some such. Cute or cringe, you decide. Hearing this, I reflected it was time someone put out a compilation of 21st century Magical Thinking superstitions, of which this proprietary nature of personal pronouns could be one, along with, say, The Patriarchy, or the Male Gaze - you know, the one which causes things and people evilly ogled to burst into flame, crinkle, self-destruct, be objectified, and all the other Planet Krypton stuff those remarkable laser eyes get up to as soon as you let them off the hook. Is the proposed extension of the set of English pronouns achievable as a long-term goal? I would say yes, in principle, if restricted to a single additional set of non-gendered third person singular pronouns. However, I don't think it's either necessary or desirable, and I also don't think it will probably g...

"Tell the truth - or at least don't lie," enjoins J Peterson, in his latest poetry collection  12 Elegies for the Mass Funeral of the Bleedin Obvious . I agree. Readers of this blog (that still-empty set) will have noticed I take this commandment rather seriously. I don't know what he finds to say as a gloss to his version of the age-old injunction (haven't bought the book, nor plan to) but if it was me, I'd probably find it useful to examine, one by one, all the ways in which people are tempted to lie and the (emotional) reasons they have for doing so. Also, as an addendum, the reasons why some of us are unable to tell the truth about certain painful things in our own experience, and, so as not to lie, have to settle for just keeping those things under wraps until we die. That too. One of the forms of lying I'd mention is the one exhaustively picked apart by Orwell in Politics and the English Language , viz. letting the pret-a-porter cliche steer your t...

Es cierto, se me da por escuchar a un personaje público con ínfulas de intelectual, y soy capaz de seguir la pista de migas de pan un buen rato por los vericuetos de YT, sobre todo, hasta aburrirme o desengañarme. Tal me sucedió con el Scruton ése. Me sigue cayendo bien. Me gusta su manera entrecortada de hablar, su acento resueltamente sub-RP (insiste en no ser del todo  posh , para entendernos: de memoria, puede que esa resonancia sea del Oxfordshire rural, o del West Country, o hasta un alambicado Cockney, no recuerdo bien), su disposición a musitar la pregunta sin decir nada (es decir, se piensa las cosas), y hasta su modo de parecerse a Johnny Lydon (eso de no tener cejas, v.gr.). Bien por todo eso. También siento una especie de servil agradecimiento por el hecho de poder escuchar la palabra "belleza" de boca de alguien que no sea periodista. Cuando ¡un filósofo! dice beauty, como que se te derrite algo adentro. En algún lugar entre Kant y Kardashian, el concepto se ...