sisu

Pardon my French

What bothers James Lileks about gutter language in the public square seems to be the fact that "there's a small child present":

If naughty words crossed my lips, they would not necessarily require a road map. And, of course, that makes me an utter hypocrite, I suppose. So, you can say it at home, but Bono can't say it on network TV? Yes! You've grasped the nub of the gist, you have.

What bothers some of us, though, isn't the doggy doodoo connotations of gutter language per se so much as the poverty of language resources its excessive use betrays.

[via Lucianne]

Totium orbium lingua

The center of Classical Latin news broadcasting nowadays is Finland

Mel Gibson may have breathed a little life into a dead language when he announced last year that his new film “The Passion" would be made entirely in Latin and Aramaic. But according to an article in London's Economist, there are some out there who have never given up the ghost. We weren't surprised to learn that the Vatican has a five-man team that meets every Thursday to translate modern words into Latin, but this one caught us off guard:

Latin has a surprising number of advocates in the modern world. And these are not merely classicists or arty types entranced by the glories of Virgil, the cockiness of Catullus or the breathtaking fall of the rhythms and words of Horace. They are people who believe Latin has a future, as well as a past.

Small wonder then, that some people still prefer their news in Latin, and that the centre of Latin news broadcasting nowadays should be Finland, a country of translucent birches, lakes and blondes, and with a language the opposite of universal. The Finnish Broadcasting Company (aka Radiophonia Finnica Generalis, or YLE) puts out a five-minute bulletin, "Nuntii Latini," every week and has done so for 14 years. The bulletins are broadcast worldwide, and are also collected and published as books.

[via Arts & Letters Daily]

Sound it out

The good news is that the Department of Education's latest literacy results "provide a glimmer of hope," writes Malcolm A. Kline of Accuracy in Academia:

Most children in early grades can recognize letter sounds at the beginning and the end of words, [representing] at least a partial movement back towards phonics -- learning language phonetically -- and away from studying words using the whole language or "look say" approach of learning individual words by, essentially, guessing at what they are.

The whole language method of instruction never worked, and test scores proved it.

The bad news is that "we are a long way from the true phonics that once sent literacy levels and test scores in the U.S. up rather than down":

When schools taught reading using the pure phonics method of learning every letter sound before attempting to decode words, the educational establishment did not need tricks merely to keep test scores at the same level.

One score-boosting, self-esteem-inducing gimmick: Dropping the Standard Written English test that the Board now plans to reintroduce. Giving students points for writing their names on tests proved another popular ruse that test takers have used for years.

We agree with Michael Knox Beran in the Winter issue of City Journal that "The soundest foundation of self-esteem is genuine achievement, and numerous studies have shown no measurable benefit from the self-esteem movement in the schools.

[via Milt's File]

Mojo and all that jazz

"Crikey, I've lost my mojo!"

It's the name of a band, a kind of MP3 player and an abbreviation for Mother Jones, among other things. But only recently has this thing called mojo emerged as the pundits' word of choice to denote a politician or other public figure's hotness. For example:

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield was asked last October by a CNN reporter "Have you lost your mojo?" he didn't seem to know whether he had or not.

And they asked me that, and I said, "I don't know what it means." And they said, "In 1926 or something, it had to do with jazz music."

The Webster's New World Dictionary defines mojo as "a charm or amulet thought to have magic powers," or "power, luck, etc., as of magical or supernatural origin." The word is thought to be of Creole origin:

Mojo has most recently come into popular culture in connection with the "Austin Powers" movies, starring Mike Myers, in which mojo was portrayed as the secret behind the title character's libido. At one point, Myers complains, "Crikey, I've lost my mojo!"

Like, do we HAVE to dumb down?

We normally agree with the Manhattan Institute's estimable Senior Fellow in Public Policy, John H. McWhorter, but, like, we beg to differ with his capitulation to foul language in the public square.

Noting that "the FCC's enforcement bureau ruled Oct. 3 that [the] adjectival usage of the F-word does not qualify as 'patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium,'" the good doctor throws in the towel:

. . . this has not gone down well with some, [including] Michael Powell himself, who played no part in the ruling and deemed it "reprehensible" that children might hear the F-word in any form on the air. But like it or not, we'd better get used to it. We are today a society that elevates giving the finger to "the man" to a sign of enlightenment. So there are bound to be more such rulings, and at the end of the day, we are best advised to fasten our seat belts and accept them.

Forget about Powell's reference to that last bastion of scoundrels, "the children"... What bothers some of us isn't the sexual connotation of the F-word but the poverty of language resources its excessive use betrays. In that light, Bono's "This is really, really f -- -- ing brilliant!" doesn't sound so f -- -- ing brilliant!