Hellbent
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I am reading Moby Dick and enjoying it. 19th century novels often seem to romanticize "the other", which I quite like. EDIT: although sentences like these can be a bit bothersome:
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names - a singularly common fashion on the island - and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language - that man makes one in a whole nation's census - a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.
http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/moby/moby_016.html
Stumbled upon this news item just now and it tickled me because of how it ends:
"As it stands now, Floyd Mayweather, should he ever stop dancing away from a $40 million purse, would be favored against Manny Pacquiao, largely because of how they looked against common opponent Juan Manuel Marquez. Pacquiao-Marquez III, which many people believe was really won by Marquez, is still fresh in everyone’s memory. But what if Miguel Cotto gives Mayweather trouble on May 5? There would be an even fresher memory, and everything would change. After all, thoroughly dominated Cotto couldn’t even reach the final bell against hell-bent Pacquiao."
Read more: http://www.boxinginsider.com/columns/cotto-mayweather-may-unsettle-odds-for-floyd-versus-pacquiao/#ixzz1rn6CD9bD
I have poison ivy on my face (the 'systemic' variety) and half my face is swollen. The poison ivy started in my eye and I set to work over the last 4 days of keeping it clean and repeatedly applying Caladryl. The swelling finally went down, but now my cheek is swollen. Unless you actually remove the oils from your skin, poison ivy is one persistent beast hellbent on my suffering.- Show previous comments 7 more
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I read half of Moby Dick for a summer reading assignment in high school before finding out we were supposed to read something else. I was so glad because that book was extremely boring. If you're enjoying it Hellbent I'm glad for you but I can't read your posts about it as it pains me to do so.
Technician said:It's funny how our dialect and vocabulary has actually shrunk with our social progression.
If it's not another word for weewee it doesn't belong in the English language, got me?
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Technician said:It's funny how our dialect and vocabulary has actually shrunk with our social progression.
Hmm that seems a very common trope (or myth) across cultures.
In Greece, we often get told that the average everyday vocabulary in the Greek Revolution's times (1821) was larger than today's (with specific figures: 4000 words for today, 6000 during the time of the Revolution), not to speak of ancient Greece.
The problem is that such observations are often biased and fail to account for the fact that in ye olden days books and manuscripts were much more likely to be written by educated and somewhat pompous scholars, and thus the language used in them seldom reflects the actual everyday language, which would've been much simpler. I wonder what future linguists will think of the sewer of text written by "fuckin' 'tards" on "the internets".
For example, the texts cited in the example of Greece (the memories of General Makrygiannis and Kolokotronis from th 19th century), were most likely written under dictation by a scribe/scholar, than the Generals themselves, who were essentially mountain rebels, and couldn't have had the necessary education and fluency to write like that, and almost certainly didn't speak like that in everyday life.
Then again, language is ever-changing. A tendency for simplification over time, even in the basic rules of grammar, exists in virtually all languages (e.g. compare the classical and medieval versions of many languages vs their modern counterparts, including Arabic and Chinese). And to be fair, most languages have many new words for stuff that didn't exist back then....
