[Artemisia] Smalls and language (moving OOP)

[Stephanae Baker]

Gentle Maestro Niccolo wrote:

> Oh...please do not read me to urge standardization in
> vocabulary.  I generally favor simplification, but
> only with regard to my persona as I understand him.
> Which is also subject to change!  I used to say (as
> Niccolo) that I didn't do math, I had people to do
> that for me.   Very soon into my little Italian
> adventure, I learned how very un-Genoese that position
> was.

I will confess that I used you most cruelly. I knew all along that  
you were not arguing for standardization, but I used your statement  
to launch my own topic anyway. My feeble defense for mistreating you  
this way was that I'd hoped you wouldn't mind too much. My other  
feeble defense is that your erudition often launches me into the most  
delightful reveries. Can you forgive me? In fact, the distinction in  
our arguments is quite subtle. I believe you were arguing mostly  
against the prescription of certain terms, while I was arguing  
against the proscription of certain terms. In the end, the result of  
either is a dearth of creativity in language, which is, I think,  
ultimately what we both are arguing against.

<snip>

>
>> Why do we want to eliminate so many words from the
>> English language?
>
> I do not know if you respond to me particularly or no.
>  If to me, we are in greater agreement than it may
> appear.

Again, please forgive my thoughtlessness. I addressed my post to you  
but stopped talking to you in particular after the first sentence or  
two. I am completely unsurprised that we agree on this point.

>
> My particular grievance has been what I call the
> "flattening" of adjectives.  While we (speaking of
> moderns generally) use a wealth of adjectives, we have
> somewhere decided they all resolve to "good" or "bad."
>    As I court herald, I raised a few eyebrows
> referring to my Kings  as "awful" and "terrible."
> (Both were compliments, and meant as such.) More
> recently, I recall a retired English colonel who was
> vilified by some NPR listeners because he called the
> 9/11 attacks "imaginative."  ("How dare he praise
> criminals like that!)

I can only agree and add that it is not only adjectives. I spend a  
horrifyingly large portion of my life editing jargon terms out of  
documents. One such word is "utilize," which I must change to "use"  
at least five times a day. The part that saddens me is that "utilize"  
really does have a specific denotation that is not the same as "use,"  
but so many people have employed it as a supposedly smarter-sounding  
version of the word "use" that it is no longer possible to employ it  
in its specific sense and hope that anyone will understand you. Even  
people (like me) who may know what it means will not credit you with  
knowing and consciously choosing it.

<snip>

> I have enough difficulty defending my positions, I
> will not undertake to defend the Society's heraldic
> processes.  :D  I went better than a decade between
> the arms I first submitted and the arms that recently
> passed Kingdom in Caid, largely because of
> disagreeements with those processes.  (It was
> interesting.  Master Bruce Draconarius didn't argue at
> all.  He just gave me a look that made it quite clear
> that he'd be hurt if I didn't let him help me design
> arms.  Devastating!)

I was aware of your story about your arms. I was reading about a  
decision by the College of Heraldry last night that I'd like to share  
my reactions to and see what other people think, but it's really a  
new topic, so I'll put it in a new thread.

>
> I believe it was Mistress Tanglwystl who made the
> argument that our difficulty with spelling is that
> moderns think of a name or word as a series of
> letters, and period folk were more likely to think of
> them as series of sounds.   For people living in the
> transition between the two ways of thinking, there
> would be many fun possibilities.  Not unrelated, I'm a
> qualified fan of l33t-speak and txt-speak, the
> qualification being whether one uses them out of
> creativity or ignorance.

Now, see, it's because of fascinating thought processes like these  
that I so enjoy talking to you. I see immediately how these ideas  
relate. We begin with period folk who viewed words as a series of  
sounds, move through literate ages where words are still some  
combination of sounds and letters, with decreasing importance on  
sound, and end up with languages like l33t and txt-speak that are new  
forms of communication--completely soundless and born of disparate  
keyboarding methods--but as artful or artless as any dialect,  
depending wholly on the creativity of the speaker.

However, where you qualify your fandom based on the fact that some  
speakers are artless, I'm an unqualified fan (l33t pwnz), because I  
know some people are simply artless in any language and always will  
be, which doesn't prevent them from being artful in areas that are  
more important to them. We can't expect that everyone will always  
share the same passions. If I become a language Nazi, I will have to  
walk on my lips if an artful costumer criticizes what I made myself  
in an hour to wear at an event and hoped would be at least almost  
adequate.

Affectionately,
Belladonna