lesslucid (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lesslucid) wrote,@ 2008-05-11 15:33:00 |
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senseless butchery of the English language for fun and profit
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/or
"Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
George, George, it's like you're not even trying! Come now:
Inscribed on the interior of a "propietal" apprehension of Hegelian dialectics, we discover the following paradox: for racing (or indeed, to traverse the metaphorical terrain of an undiscovered lexicon of "truth") or its macropolitical antecedents, there is no correct "form" and yet the correction of its formalisms taxes this "larger metonymy" in a Foucauldian sense. We find "swiftness" expressed in a further taxonomy of guilt but it is constantly being both under-written and re-written (in a double sense) through its re-evaluation of its particular epistemological foundations. "Swiftness" hence precedes the discovery of meaning in "race"; to extract from it a "pure" testament to the ahisoricality of our re-envisioning of that selfsame "purity" requires an intervention from the "exterior" of the system which is predicated on the same notion of "purity" being able to transcend the very systematicity on which it depends. The endeavour rejuvenates; by a re-inversion of the paradox of "accidental victory" we discover that there is an insight "maintained" through the expression of "swiftness" as it moulded in the form of the un-won race.
And that's just the first clause - I could probably wring a whole thesis from the sentence itself...
...and now, back to marking. :(
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/or
"Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
George, George, it's like you're not even trying! Come now:
Inscribed on the interior of a "propietal" apprehension of Hegelian dialectics, we discover the following paradox: for racing (or indeed, to traverse the metaphorical terrain of an undiscovered lexicon of "truth") or its macropolitical antecedents, there is no correct "form" and yet the correction of its formalisms taxes this "larger metonymy" in a Foucauldian sense. We find "swiftness" expressed in a further taxonomy of guilt but it is constantly being both under-written and re-written (in a double sense) through its re-evaluation of its particular epistemological foundations. "Swiftness" hence precedes the discovery of meaning in "race"; to extract from it a "pure" testament to the ahisoricality of our re-envisioning of that selfsame "purity" requires an intervention from the "exterior" of the system which is predicated on the same notion of "purity" being able to transcend the very systematicity on which it depends. The endeavour rejuvenates; by a re-inversion of the paradox of "accidental victory" we discover that there is an insight "maintained" through the expression of "swiftness" as it moulded in the form of the un-won race.
And that's just the first clause - I could probably wring a whole thesis from the sentence itself...
...and now, back to marking. :(
