June 2011
4 posts
SCOTUS Rejects Ban on Violent Video Games for... →
I think that seems right. I don’t think it can ever be good when the government censors a material able to express ideas (ie. be construed as having a largely artistic or communicative basis). Leave that up the parents.
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes...”
– My favorite speech was produced for a fitting cause: as one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio helped organize a series of demonstrations against the administration rules against political speech and constraining the academic freedom of faculty. While the Marxist tones...
Apophthegm →
gdcm (Paidika) writes about the greek word phthengomai,
I find this word at once ugly and fascinating. Phthengomai: it’s hardly a comely sound. And yet from what I can gather it’s nearly unique among Greek verbs of vocalization—and there are a number; the Greeks were chatty—for terms that can apply both to animal and to human sound. LSJ records that in context of a horse, it means to ...
"The", the definite article
The word “the” is a part of speech called a “determiner”, specifically an article. This class in english includes: “a(n)”, “the”, “no”, “some”. These words combine with a noun to create a noun phrase: “the man”, “a man”, “some men”, “no man” is an island.
Originally, in Old...
April 2011
1 post
February 2011
1 post
"No hanging prepositions!": how descriptive is...
Basically the question came up with some friends of mine as to what degree people actually write “correctly” in Standard English. Do people use hanging prepositions in American writing? Specifically, we know from a descriptive standpoint that all Standard American English (SAE) speakers use hanging prepositions—it is simply a fact about the way people speak, it has nothing to do...