Merganser mentioned the first link last night in the "Only the unimaginative find things unimaginable" thread.
Haven't read the second link yet, but as for the diaeresis, I think the rule used by the Government Printing Office's Style Manual is adequate:
6.32.
Use a hyphen or hyphens to prevent mispronounciation, to ensure a definite accent on each element of the compound, or to avoid ambiguity.
...
co-op
...
re-cover (cover again)
re-creation (create again)
Anything that reduces ambiguity is wicked.
How adequate can a guide that misspells "mispronunciation" be?!
FWIW, the Coop calls itself the Co-operative.
As for OP.1, it basically boils down to "just because". Which to be honest, is the case for most style guide rulings. But if it generates a lot of complaints and doesn't actually have any benefit, it might be an idea to change things. But frankly, I think they keep it precisely because it looks "fussy". This is the New Yorker after all.
1: I feared as much.
I was also delighted to know that it is pronounced "die heiresses" instead of like "die-a-rhesus."
"Re-creation" deeply offends me. It is not just my almost physical need for the possibility of multiple readings, interpretations and puns, but also a moral position about the importance of context for signs.
I once wrote a long screed in which I tried to match form and function, a mimicry, about the meanings of words in Finnegans Wake. I said the method and message of FW was that no part or word within the work could be apprehended without apprehending the whole of the work (although partial understandings were available, and significantly, only partial understandings were conceivably available.)
This was, I think, the moral even religious point, a radical humanism, an anti-reductionism, for Joyce:that no word in FW, and by metonymy, no sign, thing, concept, or person in the world had meaning or value in themselves, but only in relation to all other words, signs, etc both in close immediate relation, more distant relation, and as part of the totality.
Ambiguity and symbolism move us outward, expand our consciousness. Reductionism, any attempt to remove meaning or value from context is profoundly pernicious.
Oh, and I hate science.
And having glanced at the Adorno, this, saved from this morning's readings, might be on topic, from the Lamarre Uncovering Heian Japan
In his study of Kūkai's brushwork, Hirayama situates him in the larger framework of calligraphy and outlines two notions fundamental to calligraphic practice and theory. First, he tells us, writing shows the organization or composition of things.This is what I have called mimicry: characters echo and mime the patterns of things. Hirayama describes this as a mode of manifestation: calligraphy makes manifest the way in which entities are put together and interact. Such a notion of inscription does not allow for the ascendancy of the subject over objects. The writer, as subject, does not control objects and introduce order but, rather, follows the traces of phenomena. This is Hirayama's second point. He reminds us that calligraphy presents forms of movement. It shows the movements of the heart-mind that make manifest the nature or character of the writer; and, at the same time, it shows the movements of the natural world. Calligraphy thus makes manifest the workings of things.It is difficult to discourse on this link between the movements of heart-mind and the movements of things. Borrowing the terminology of traditional commentaries, one might think of the heart-mind as an aperture. In calligraphy, the heart is an aperture that is sensitive to natural movements; it dilates and contracts with them, adjusting the flows and responses of the writer's body. The brush, then, is not so much a tool of conscious expression as a kind of seismograph. It feels the vibrations and oscillations of the world that affect the heart. It twitches in response. Writing is a medium in the occult sense. It delivers signs from other realms through the human
body, that is, via the heart-mind. The mark of the sage is that his expressions are attuned to natural movements and cosmological configurations.The heart-mind is truly that which moves through the middle.
Bye
Check out pictures of the Space Shuttle from a rooftop of my acquaintance.
4: Blame me. I didn't copy-paste from something online, I opened the book on my desk and typed it in by hand.
9: Cool. The DC crowd got our own look at it a few weeks ago.
I also thought the rating system on the Register's Web site was cool. You people should add something like that here.
9: With bonus cross-species bonking imagery.
Ah, so this is the place to complain about how much Chrome sucks at rendering Unicode (rather than the random thread I used for that last night). A lot, is how much.
Adorno describes exactly why I use ellipsis. Except I'm not a hack journalist, I just always feel that my thoughts are outrunning my language capacity. My sentences are always trailing off into the ineffable. It's also useful as an attempt to signal coworkers that you have thought more about the issue than you are able to contain in this particular email.
9. Impressive. Were you a guest of your acquaintance while he was taking those pictures or did you just get told about them? (Btw, he doesn't need to be shy about his camera craft.)
He made me coffee this morning, about ten feet below the spot on the roof where he was standing. (And I'm honestly surprised by how well the pictures turned out -- he doesn't take a lot of them.)
7: Could you put that less clearly, please?
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This is annoying:
I get an email from the pres's office to supply a list of all graduating seniors w/ honors, so that they can double-check their official roster.
Obviously I have no fucking clue who is graduating. What if they dropped a class this semester? Why would they tell me?
So I email the registrar and get their list. I pretend to double-check name-spellings against my master list, which I got...from the registrar.
Then I send the registrar's list to the pres's office, so they can double check it against the registrar list.
Awesome.
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18. This is how full employment is maintained in better times; did you not realise?
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Not a dime's worth of difference.
My own interpretation of the 60s is that the CRA basically empowered the fucking Federal Marshalls. The "right to vote" in Mississippi didn't mean squat without a gun hanging around to make it happen. See also:1876. Dixie and the West understand this shit:words on paper are to wipe your ass with.
So Obama is slashing the bureaucracy to shreds, keeping the nastiest shit, and your SCOTUS can do whatever it wants and won't matter because there won't be anyone around to regulate and enforce your protected rights. This is, of course, a plan, a method:
No Phones No Staff But Obama/Holder created a Securitization Working Group| He loves us and will protect us.
Obama said, "This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans."Whether or not the President, attorney general and others intend to get around to this task someday, "speed" was a terrible word to choose. Because 85 days after that speech, there is no sign of any activity [...]
No way I vote for this guy.
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I was also delighted to know that it is pronounced "die heiresses" instead of like "die-a-rhesus."
You wouldn't believe what I recently learned about the pronunciation of "epigone".
17:Yes, but only after a weekend spend watching Pier Paolo Pasolini and reading about the Cambridge Capital Controversy. and Holbo scattering his pee in the direction of Zizek has also inspired me.
Actually it was a Sraffan, a distinct minority within the heterodox economics community, trying to engage the Neo-Kaleckians and other mainstream Post-Keynesians in a patient logical way, with empirics. He linked to and remarked on the recent Krugman-Keen dustup (he was on Keen's side).
Krugman basically just dismisses Steve Keen with the standard "stupid, incoherent, can't be bothered" line. The same way Holbo dismisses Zizek. But Krugman does spend a massive amount of time and energy carefully trying to understand and refute the Austerians, freshwaters, and other conservative economists and politicians.
Because the right-wing, or so Krugman thinks, has power and Steve Keen has none. Krugman is sucking up. Really.
Oh yeah. "Stupid, incoherent, can't be bothered" was a common response to PPP's Teorema. It is also a common reaction to the films of Doris Wishman.
I do it many times every day, to be fair.
"I didn't understand it, so it was badly written and/or badly thought" is narcissism, projection, and usually sucking up to an audience.
Ain't no such thing as bad writing or weak thinking. There are exclusionary discourses.
Another thing done these wee small hours is read these 483 Comments, and counting, several times.
The content is fun, but much more fun is watching all these people trying to grab turf, establish boundaries, limits, walls. Every single one of them is trying to create, define, limit this community to their own image.
Much of it is done positively. "Isn't it wonderful that Peggy and Megan aren't in workplace competition!"
(Subtext:Everyone who expected nasty conflict there just doesn't like women.)
Ain't no such thing as bad writing or weak thinking. There are exclusionary discourses.
I can't wait until I get this line from a student.
(Subtext:Everyone who expected nasty conflict there just doesn't like women.)
Worst Jello wrestling event ever.
Everyone who expected nasty conflict there just doesn't like women.
Given what a cipher Megan was before this season, that's an unfair assessment. She could very well have turned out to be someone trying to use a man to get ahead.
"I didn't understand it, so it was badly written and/or badly thought" is narcissism, projection, and usually sucking up to an audience.
Ain't no such thing as bad writing or weak thinking.
Add an 'often' to the first bit and delete the second, and we'd have comity! Not that I'm saying that's a good thing, necessarily.
Dammit. First two parts were supposed to be in italics....must've screwed up the HTML. And there is definitely such a thing as bad/weak HTML.
27 + 28 wrong together at once, proven by algebra
There is subthread over at Basket, riffing off of Don's reading of Ian Fleming, that posits Mysterious Megan as a deep-cover SPECTRE agent. This is not crazy enough for me, but let's just pretend that MM veers off into the Casino Royale for the next twenty episodes. Exploding suitcases, gold-lame corpses, kickboxing Peggy on the Orient Express.
Would we say:
1) Wow, I never understood Weiner, the show, or these characters at all. I was so stupid not to see Pete as Ernst Blofield. I feel like an idiot.
or
2) I know her like my sister,and Peggy would never ever do that. So out of character. WTF happened to Weiner, did he go crazy or drop acid? Weiner, thou art a bad artist!
Both these attitudes are expressed at Basket every single week. Megan was good, bad, or a cypher...and it was the writer's fault, when the interpretation was not a function of the individual's own bad character.
Of course, to each other in RL, we are all fictional characters in a personal play written in collaboration.