The Crow's Eye: Cordial, As In With a Mallet

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Mar 26, 2010

Cordial, As In With a Mallet

"...Earlier in the week, Coulter had received a cordial letter from Francois Houle, the vice-president academic and provost of the University of Ottawa welcoming her to the nation's capital and suggesting that she review what constitutes hate speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Houle pointed out that, for instance, "promoting hared against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges" under the Charter..."

Some Guy With No Sense of Proportion

Yeppers. You read it right. Warning someone to watch her words or else the coppers might grab her and teach her an ("so sorry, lass, that we've got to save ya from yarself with a spell in the prison kitchens") important lesson about right speech and keeping the environment safe for dissent-fee profit and docile kneeling.

Yah yah, Ann Coulter sucks. She has spent more time spilling verbal puss across the airwaves than almost anyone except El Rushbo, Glennbeckistan, and Hopey Changey Hisself. Sure, all that rings true. This has got Lady Irony right out of her home digs and wandering the wide world collecting justly due tithings.

But.

Characterizing an intimidation racket's censorship warning as a "cordial letter" takes the prize.

Chutzpah.

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This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.