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| The (sic) BayThis is the
first of something I hope to make a regular thing. I get annoyed quite often
when I see any language being abused, and so being the pedantic bastard that I
am, I have decided to begin taking some back. It positively wounds me when I
see the repeat offences against language that occur in internet land, and there
are two major reasons for this-
- If not already, then soon young
Anglophones will receive most of their reading material from internet
sources
- It appears that the internet is
already an extremely important teaching aid for non-native speakers of
English
Because of
this, is it not vitally important that people learn to use written English
correctly, not just well enough to be more-or-less understood, but to gain
actual grammatical and syntactical fluency, to be able to sort correct usage
from the incorrect and in general, to be able to use the richness of the
English language to it’s fullest?
Why am I
focusing on the English language you ask? Why not Spanish, French, German, why
not just language in general? I have two reasons for this-
- Ability- I do not presume to
have the necessary ability in any other language to begin preaching to
others as to how they should use their own mother tongues.
- Urgency- other languages, have
central bodies which set standards for usage and thus give both the academic and the language student something to
aim for, they attempt to preserve
what they can of the vitality of their languages and signal words which
have been borrowed from other languages, or which are corruptions of
accepted words or usages. To the best of my knowledge, there are no such
institutions in English-speaking countries, dictionaries set standards eg.
OED but they are not as recognised and as international as for example the
Real Academia Española which aims to preserve Spanish- mostly from the
invasion of English words.
In the
interest of clarity and the propagation of understanding in the mass-diffusion
of written documents, should there not be editors for the internet, as there
are in newspapers, and I mean editors whose only function is to make the
intentions of the writer clear, not to place their own words before those of
the person whose name will be signed on the page. Small changes may become big
changes over time- so small inaccuracies may become glaring with time. If I am
not simply a crank and a pedant, then perhaps I may help some people to improve
their language-usage.
This
project is the result of my having trawled through countless websites and
forums as such my aim is to flag the repeat offenders rather than simple
misspellings and grammatical errors due to carelessness, everyone makes
mistakes, I cannot and would not attempt to cure that, however ignorance is eminently
curable- that is the reason why I am bothering to write this, and so without
further ado, onto the first installment of the (sic) Bay.
Amatuer-
Every time
I read this orthography, it causes my gall to rise, the word is not pronounced
‘ama-chewer’, it is spelt and pronounced AMATEUR. It is so amateurish, when
someone gets this wrong, it looks incorrect, it feels incorrect, it just is
incorrect- why do people get it wrong? They pronounce it incorrectly- here’s my
tip, learn a bit of French and pay attention to pronunciation, you’ll never get
this word wrong again.
Grammer-
No we’re
not talking about Kelsey Grammer the famous over-actor, we’re talking about the
word which should be spelt GRAMMAR, and comes from the ancient Greek
‘grammatikos’ meaning ‘concerning letters’ via the Latin ‘grammatica’ and the
Old French ‘gramaire’. When in lower case ‘grammer’ is not a word, it’s that
simple, it is not a second accepted rendering, it is simply incorrect. So
please watch your grammar and not your grammer. | | |
| Disappointed That I'm not Very White and NerdyI tried out this test and apparently I'm white enough to be laughed at but nowhere near enough to become a computer programmer, I kind of feel empty, I got 14% nerdy- Damn
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| Career/Lifestyle ChangeI should become a serial killer or a terrorist, maybe that way I'll get more traffic to my xanga, I know you're supposed to visit other xangas and post comments and shit, but the vast majority of them are so fucking vacuous- people who think that the world needs to hear about all the minutiae of their pathetic lives, or about how much they love Jesus, you know what I say, fuck Jesus and the people who follow him- this is bound to make me popular with everyone- and to fuck with the people who think that the world needs to know that they slipped on a tile this morning, I hope that the next time this happens you hit the wall full on, suffer a brain haemorrhage and stop writing pointless shit in your xanga. And for fuck's sake, if you are going to attempt to write poetry at least read something- anything, before you decide that you are the next Wordsworth, do the world a favour and educate yourself
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| The Christmas We Know?We are now
in the season of Yule, the time of year when we remember how the ancient Pagan
festival of Jul was hijacked by the catholic church and turned into christmas in
order to subdue and subvert the great Northern European tradition of earth
worship, by integrating superfluous christian propaganda into a festival of
light in winter which celebrates the rebirth of the sun and the turning of the
wheel as it completes another cycle and begins a new one.
The idea of
a child being born in the dead of winter is of course the original message, the
child is the new sun, symbolised by the red-breasted robin the King of the Oak,
who kills the wren, King of the Holly- his father and takes over from him. The
feasting and the sacrifice of a pig to the Norse God Freyr are the main
features of this festival which is based around the winter solstice 21st
December (being 25th December before the reform of the calendar),
and extends for the well-known 12 days.
The
festival was also celebrated by the Romans as the Saturnalia which begins on
December 17th, in praise of the God Saturn. In this tradition the
birth of the Gods Sol Invictus or Mithras on 25th December were the
centre-pieces and feasting continued into the first week of the modern January
the Kalends festival celebrating the new year. With the conversion of the
fickle Roman Emperor Constantine to christianity, it was found convenient to
patch together a christian corruption of the festival and to pretend that that
had been the point all the time.
Virtually
everything about the modern festival is really Pagan although most christians accept
them even though they represent what they tend to view as evil. The christmas crib
points to pagan idolatry of worldly objects which symbolise their gods with the
child Sol Invictus replaced by the infant Jesus, I seem to remember the 2nd
commandment having something to say about that but then christians have always
had problems practising what they preach, I could mention the missions of love
that were the Crusades.
The
decoration of trees with fruits, symbols, images etc. is of course
pre-christian, it greatly resembles the decoration of trees practised by the
devotees of Baal. Evergreen trees were sacred to the ancients in many places
being symbolic of eternal life and rebirth in death, the represented the hope
of the spring and summer to come, especially plants that flowered or bore fruit
at this time such as holly.
The grandiose
feasting and drunkenness which characterise this time are of course the
remnants of the true celebrations which haven’t been altered by christianity in
any form, except perhaps in the hypocritical grace given to god before the
gorging. And of course the Madonna and child images have many ancient sources,
among them being the Babylonian goddess Semiramis and her child Thammuz, the
Egyptian Isis and Horus, and the Greek Semele and Dionysus
Christmas
tree lights themselves suggest the pagan tradition of the rebirth of light in
winter, also the worship of fire and of the stars, which incidentally accounts
for the bright star which was supposedly followed by the three heathen ‘kings’,
who were astrologers, Zoroastrian priest-magi who were typically renowned for
their great wisdom; thus the fable of their worship of the child suggests the
old religions bowing down to this new one. It is clearly a ploy by the gospel
writers Matthew and Luke to suggest the divine origin of Jesus if these wise emissaries
of an ancient and venerable sect should journey so far to adore a child, (citing
their astrological tradition even though the bible condemns astrology and other
forms of ‘magic’, such as divination) giving him gifts which were fit for a
king or even a god, then surely he must have been such- with similar motive
Joseph Smith concocted his amusing tale of an angel revealing the supposed
narrative of Jesus’ holiday in America on golden plates which was to become the
Book of Mormon.
The point
is that you can believe these silly tales or see them as they are- allegories,
parables and outright propagandist fabulae designed to suggest fulfilment of
prophecy and the cultural importance of those involved, as everyone knows,
history is written by the victors and not by truly detached observers (they
deal in anthropology and archaeology, and strictly speaking probably very few
are even relatively detached) it is important to note that the concept of the
stars announcing an important event or birth is ancient, far more so than christianity,
Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Mithridates and Abraham for example
supposedly had their births blessed by propitious stars.
To end this
piece I would like to wish everyone contentment in this time and urge people to
inform themselves about things they take for granted, you may surprise yourself
and bring your faith into question which is what being human is about
Sources:
Wikipedia
(for many articles and for the spread of knowledge in general)
Dr. E.
Cobham Brewer, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Millennium Edition,
revised by Adrian Room, Cassell Publishers LTD, London:1999
Rev William MacLean,
The Pagan Origin of Christmas A Reminder (Edited extract from
Westminster Standard Publication No. 24, Easter, Lent, Christmas and the
Cross, available from Palmerston Villa, 4 Millburn Road, Inverness, IV2
3PS, or the F.P. Bookroom, Glasgow) http://www.fpchurch.org.uk/EbBI/fpm/1999/December/article5.htm | | |
| The List of Banned Books 1948I've just been reading through the list of books that were forbidden by the RCC up until 1948 and apparently Opus Dei still uses the list, not to mention adding new books to it from time to time. The list includes great writers such as Flaubert, Voltaire, Racine, de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Samuel Richardson and Emile Zola as well as great philosophers like Bentham, Berkley, Descartes, Rousseau, Locke, Heidegger, Hobbes, Hume, Kant and some unexpected ones (at least by myself) such as Robert Boyle, Oliver Goldsmith, Heinrich Heine, Larousse (of the dictionary), Maurice Maeterlinck, Blaise Pascal amongst many others. The list itself runs to about 250 pages in length and is a veritable who's who of atheist, protestant and and heretical catholic thinkers although I cannot account for the omission of Charles Darwin (his father Erasmus Darwin is included) unless I missed it or it was considered self-evident that his work was a danger to the impressionable, Karl Marx is also missing although apparently Opus Dei produce an expurgated version of his works, I wonder if they do that with The Origin of the Species, that would be interesting and very short as well.
All in all it makes me glad I'm not in Opus Dei even though some think ignorance is bliss, those people are fucking idiots who deserve nothing but contempt. In any case, the list has expanded greatly my list of must-read-when-I-get-the-time books. I wonder was it ever considered a point of honour amongst some writers to get onto the list and especially to get the coveted Opera Omnia (all work) tag, like Michel Proudhon among others. Happy reading anyway
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