I picked up one of Wodehouse's earlier novels, Psmith Journalist, a few days ago. (I didn't literally pick it up, because it was on the Kindle.) I felt as if I had been neglecting that genius. Where would I be without his prose, without his humor? I blatantly copied his style in some of my older fan fiction, to lesser effect obviously. (Whose style am I imitating now, I wonder?) This will be the 31st Wodehouse novel I've read. Now isn't that something? I'm almost done with Gore Vidal's Hollywood, my fourth book in his Narratives of Empire series, though not the fourth in the series itself. I've been reading them in no particular order, which doesn't significantly affect the experience, considering that they weren't written in chronological order, either. In some cases, it might even be more useful to read them in a different order. Other than that, and other than the occasional Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith story, I haven't been reading much lately. It's too bad. There are so many venerable, ponderous classics that need to be read in order that I can boast to people of how well read I am. Or maybe not.
As it happens, Slam Dunk is not the only thing I've gone back to penitently after a period of sin, after having neglected it for so long, for no better reason than that I had other things to occupy me: I've gone back to putting Bach's great Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor on repeat for hours on end, as I used to in 2007 and 2008. I've listened to it a few times in the intervening years, but never like this. I would estimate that since my discovery of it, I've listened to this most perfect of compositions, this apotheosis of the musical arts, five or six thousand times at the very least. In the tenth grade, I remember there were days when I listened to the entire thing twenty or more times in one day. Alas, my childhood fantasies about owning a house with a giant pipe organ in it seem less practical now than they did at the time - the less, because I don't see myself acquiring the necessary skills to play this or any other organ composition within my lifetime. Those pictures I used to draw of pipe organs since I was seven years old should at any rate, I suppose, be good companions when I'm old and indisposed, or committed to some assisted living home for Alzheimer's patients. Taped to the wall, they might give my broken mind the impression that the instruments depicted therein had been part of my life. And I shall thereby have lived my childhood fantasies in hindsight. Well, I'd better set about constructing an idyllic fictional life for myself, then, in order that my final days be lived out in bliss.
That last paragraph was a little morbid, I guess. But it came out better than I'd expected it to. Let's not be stingy with words. Language isn't meant only for communicating. That kind of clinical view can only be taken by a professional linguist. There's so much more one can and should do with it.
English Language & Usage on the StackExchange network is a useful place to learn about the English language much of the time. But I hate it when some of the high-reputation members sententiously tell people what to say and what not to say. Saying that "X is what people say" is one thing, but saying that "you should say X, because that's what people say" is entirely another. That's just prescriptivism disguised as descriptivism. I could speak in Old English if I wanted to, but eventually I'd have to stop, because no one would understand me. But there are several other usages which are technically outmoded (by virtue of not being used by enough people), but can still be understood by the sufficiently well-educated. Otherwise we'd have as much difficulty with Dickens' works as, say, with Chaucer's. It shouldn't be for these descriptivist Nazis to decide whether or not archaisms are acceptable. (Imagine if Lovecraft wrote in the contemporary style!) They ought to have no say in the matter at all, even if people like John Lawler can drown you in linguistic jargon, and wave their PhDs and professorships at the University of Michigan in your face like the gestapo.
I suppose these omniscient knights of the intellect are laughing right now at us naïve whom-huggers, who continue using what they describe sneeringly as a "dead word". Why is it dead? Because no one uses it. But didn't I just use it? Or am I too dull and primitive, too stuck in the inertia of the past, to qualify as a person? These professional linguists, their forked tongues licking at bloodless lips, will tell you amidst the hideous laughter of their devotees that, if it is used, it is only idiomatic - not anymore a useful feature of the language. Says who? At most, you could say this of an alternative dialect, perhaps an informal one, but the number of people who understand and correctly use the word is too large for these grotesque swamp creatures to write them off with a flick of their pustular tentacles.
And then we have the even rarer use of the nominative form of nouns following copulae. I personally don't care one way or another, and follow this rule most of the time, if only for aesthetic reasons. But then we have the prophets on ELU claiming that following this rule is a sign that you have brain cancer, brain cancer used here as a synonym for mental retardation. These people are even upvoted by their sneering, hunchbacked supporters. It's really rather nauseating. If descriptivism says that people should be free to talk however they like, and that it will just sit back and observe what they say, like God in the Garden of Eden observing His creation with pen and notepaper instead of telling it what to do, then why doesn't it do that? I feel like reaching into my computer screen and slapping John Lawler and the others as hard as I can with a cold fish sometimes, withered and toothless old men though they be.
As it happens, Slam Dunk is not the only thing I've gone back to penitently after a period of sin, after having neglected it for so long, for no better reason than that I had other things to occupy me: I've gone back to putting Bach's great Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor on repeat for hours on end, as I used to in 2007 and 2008. I've listened to it a few times in the intervening years, but never like this. I would estimate that since my discovery of it, I've listened to this most perfect of compositions, this apotheosis of the musical arts, five or six thousand times at the very least. In the tenth grade, I remember there were days when I listened to the entire thing twenty or more times in one day. Alas, my childhood fantasies about owning a house with a giant pipe organ in it seem less practical now than they did at the time - the less, because I don't see myself acquiring the necessary skills to play this or any other organ composition within my lifetime. Those pictures I used to draw of pipe organs since I was seven years old should at any rate, I suppose, be good companions when I'm old and indisposed, or committed to some assisted living home for Alzheimer's patients. Taped to the wall, they might give my broken mind the impression that the instruments depicted therein had been part of my life. And I shall thereby have lived my childhood fantasies in hindsight. Well, I'd better set about constructing an idyllic fictional life for myself, then, in order that my final days be lived out in bliss.
That last paragraph was a little morbid, I guess. But it came out better than I'd expected it to. Let's not be stingy with words. Language isn't meant only for communicating. That kind of clinical view can only be taken by a professional linguist. There's so much more one can and should do with it.
English Language & Usage on the StackExchange network is a useful place to learn about the English language much of the time. But I hate it when some of the high-reputation members sententiously tell people what to say and what not to say. Saying that "X is what people say" is one thing, but saying that "you should say X, because that's what people say" is entirely another. That's just prescriptivism disguised as descriptivism. I could speak in Old English if I wanted to, but eventually I'd have to stop, because no one would understand me. But there are several other usages which are technically outmoded (by virtue of not being used by enough people), but can still be understood by the sufficiently well-educated. Otherwise we'd have as much difficulty with Dickens' works as, say, with Chaucer's. It shouldn't be for these descriptivist Nazis to decide whether or not archaisms are acceptable. (Imagine if Lovecraft wrote in the contemporary style!) They ought to have no say in the matter at all, even if people like John Lawler can drown you in linguistic jargon, and wave their PhDs and professorships at the University of Michigan in your face like the gestapo.
I suppose these omniscient knights of the intellect are laughing right now at us naïve whom-huggers, who continue using what they describe sneeringly as a "dead word". Why is it dead? Because no one uses it. But didn't I just use it? Or am I too dull and primitive, too stuck in the inertia of the past, to qualify as a person? These professional linguists, their forked tongues licking at bloodless lips, will tell you amidst the hideous laughter of their devotees that, if it is used, it is only idiomatic - not anymore a useful feature of the language. Says who? At most, you could say this of an alternative dialect, perhaps an informal one, but the number of people who understand and correctly use the word is too large for these grotesque swamp creatures to write them off with a flick of their pustular tentacles.
And then we have the even rarer use of the nominative form of nouns following copulae. I personally don't care one way or another, and follow this rule most of the time, if only for aesthetic reasons. But then we have the prophets on ELU claiming that following this rule is a sign that you have brain cancer, brain cancer used here as a synonym for mental retardation. These people are even upvoted by their sneering, hunchbacked supporters. It's really rather nauseating. If descriptivism says that people should be free to talk however they like, and that it will just sit back and observe what they say, like God in the Garden of Eden observing His creation with pen and notepaper instead of telling it what to do, then why doesn't it do that? I feel like reaching into my computer screen and slapping John Lawler and the others as hard as I can with a cold fish sometimes, withered and toothless old men though they be.
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