David Beaver on Gricean maxims of blogging: “Occasionally say what you are certain is true. It adds credibility.” Funniest blog post I’ve read in months.
Geoff Pullum on corpus fetishism in reviews of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language: “A couple of the reviews published in Britain have been so stupid that the only thing a fair-minded man like me can wish upon the reviewers is that they should die in obscurity.” I love the smell of blog wars in the morning.
Geoff Nunberg on Bush in Britain: “But it’s certainly convenient that Bush fits the negative stereotype of Americans so neatly — he’s a self-made straw man.” If I’m a good blogger one day I’ll be able to write phrases like that.
John Holbo on The Issue Regarding TCS and Confessions of a Former Protein Sheath. As they say in the classics, read the whole things.
{ 1 comment }
Ophelia Benson 11.21.03 at 7:15 pm
“But nowadays Americans seem to be making less fun of Bush’s linguistic derelictions, whichever side they’re on…Bush’s language has become a less important issue for his American critics, too. Not that they don’t still regard him an ignorant bumpkin (or worse, a pseudo-bumpkin) who embarrasses the country, but now they’re concerned that he’s making America look bad in much more dangerous ways.”
Well, not me. I still think his ignorance and stupidity and incuriosity matter. I think how embarrassing he looks next to either Blair or Clinton does matter, quite a lot. If nothing else, I think a less ignorant, provincial, determinedly parochial man would have done a far, far better job of bringing the UN and European countries along with the US and UK and the rest of the coalition – thus making the whole endeavor a global one instead of a largely-unilateral one, thus making the level of opposition there is now vastly less likely.
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