i love christianity...

I object to the word "calculate", which you so carelessly tossed in there Tiassa. If you've watched Independence Day, you may have noticed the short fat General said the word properly: "caticlate".

PS: I'm bigoted against people who can't or won't say "caticlate".

 

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Well enough

After all, I am quite hard in my condemnations of people who say "disorientated", or put an extra "r" in the word "Washington".

thanx,
Tiassa

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How could you possibly put an extra "r" in Washington?

 

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Accent, I think

I think it's accent. My grandmother used to be the only person I heard say it, but it seems it's quite common, though I can't figure out just where all these people are coming from. My grandfather was from Missouri, and he never stuck that "r" in there. I can't even remember what part of the country my grandmother was from. But the phenomenon does seem to come from either the midwestern US, the southern US, or else is pure hick.

At any rate, the word becomes "Warshington". Of course, Grandma also told us to, "Warsh your hands before you eat."

It was only mildly annoying while she was alive. But now that there's nobody close to me who speaks like that, I find myself holding people in contempt for sticking additional letters or syllables into words.

Watch the cheapest of American television shows. Stuff like "Cops" or "Most Idiotic Police Videos" and so forth. You'll see a lot of people on those shows who attempt to elevate the image of their intellect by randomly sticking additional symbols, such as "disorientated". I got all over a friend the other day for using the word "obligated" instead of "obliged", but that's a matter of preference since "obligated" is appropriate.

But people who stick extra syllables into their speech because they think it makes them sound more intelligent ... really, if they want to sound intelligent they ought to speak more dynamically. Besides, it's getting easier and easier to f--k with people like that. I use the word "remarkable" quite a bit these days because people put way too much value on it. To the other, people in my immediate circle have finally figured out how I use the word. But given that most high school graduates can't read well in this country, and given the impressively low retention rate of our college graduates, I find myself surrounded by people who think of communication as just another tool for comparison. It's kind of like reading a novel where the guy writes well enough but throws down the bare-bones story, develops it, and lastly raids his Roget's in search of colorful language. There are a couple of bestsellers from the fantasy aisle who use big or obscure words with no sense of rhythm, and who seem to rely on the public not knowing the more specific distinctions of words. It's kind of like an American 30-days-to-a-marketable-vocabulary course stretched out over six-hundred pages of recycled crap. To the other, of course, the author has been referred to as of the Tolkein heritage, which seems to be either a bad attempt to boost sales or else a conspiracy to drag Tolkein's name through the mud.

charging rhinoceri have arrived,
Tiassa

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Re: Accent, I think

Warshington is pretty rural/hick... of course we have the urban deviations from proper speech as well. Axe instead of ask and 'ieet for alright. We have the Canadian "Eh", "Ya", dare (there) that filters down into northern Michigan and Minnesota. In Central Illinois we had a hell of a time with a local man's directions to turn at the tar (tire) shop.

I had the… interesting experience of living in rural Texas for a while where the language really gets butchered: Akern for acorn, rock-welder for rottweiler, brahma or brahmin bulls are known as brimmers, and a burger joint named What'a'burger was always pronounced waterburger. My favorite was grammatical though; "What do all ya'alls want?", spoken by a waitress to me and my wife. Since there were only the two of us I thought a quadruple pluralization was a bit much.

Language mutates, pronunciation varies, dialects evolve, and most geographical regions have their own parlance that differs from formal usage. Unfortunately, some people know only their local dialect or deliberately carry it into their literary and formal usage where it simply winds up sounding ignorant.

~Raithere

P.S. I'm still digesting and working on a reply to your previous post.

 

Ahh, the colorful diversity of dialect. I became quite aware of this as a teen when moving from New York (nuw yauwk) to Atlanta (alana). My first reaction to being in the midst of all these people speaking their crazy local-yocal jargon was to think "how ignorant are they?". I mean, I'm a writer and have always tried to clearly communicate ideas both on paper as well as verbally. To hear terms like "I'm fixin to go do that" and "It's just down the road a piece', or "I ain't never gonna" and "I'll be talkin at ya", well it started to get on my nerves. I'm in the land of double negatives! What am I going to do? I thought I didn't have this problem, I spoke proper English, they were wrong damn it! Then you know what happened? I found an old tape I had of my friends and I talking and joking around. This was about a year or so after I moved. I played it because I missed them and wanted to remember the good times we had. It was sort of a shock hearing it. The voice that was coming through that little recorder couldn't have been mine! I mean it was crazy. I had such a strong northern accent. "wot are yous douuwin", "give me a cup of kauwfe", "ya got any butts?" (cigarettes), and it goes on and on. I started thinking about language and accents. I realized that no matter where we live, there is some kind of twist on it. Some claim that people living in the mid-west don't have an accent. Hogwash!, or should I say Hogwarsh! And you know, all of us in the US don't really speak "proper English" now do we? We speak our version of it (however varied). If your average American speaks proper English, what is it that the English speak? The experience of moving from one region to another was a good lesson in self awareness, which brings me to my next point:

Tiassa said:

"However, I think it is quite obvious that self-aware entities are less rational. Self-awareness requires something to compare itself against; one can no more distinguish the self from a homogenized singular without creating disparate states. That is, the self does not exist without an "other" to be "not-self"."

Although I agree with you that one can not distinguish the self without comparing it to an "other", where I disagree is that this necessarily implies self-aware people are less rational, if we are taking the word "rational" to mean what the dictionary defines it as:

"Having or exercising the ability to reason, of sound mind; sane, consistent with or based on reason; logical: rational behavior."

What is so irrational about recognizing that you are not the only being in the entire universe? Like my little story above, based on my own experiences with other people and their accents, I used reason to distingish the fact that people speak differently and that this is often based on where they live. I grew in self awareness, seeing more clearly how I used language and how it is not a perment feature of my personality, but can change or be influenced through enviornmental factors. (yes, after 16 years in Atlanta, I now say "you all", but will fight to the death before saying "ya'll").

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But it's ADDING letters ....

I cannot speak for Raithere, but I'm under the impression that the rational/irrational notion that we're undertaking has largely to do with the observable versus the assumed, such as addressed in the attack on irrationality.

An instinctive animal operates according to specific criteria. A self-aware animal such as a human operates according to comparative criteria. The priority awarded those criteria is entirely subjective. It is objective in the sense that it is empirical, but that array is no more expressible than the notion of God; it is, in short, one's entire life, and the more subtle and therefore hard to identify the influence, the more influential.

To consider the dictionary definition only begs a question: Upon what principle do we weigh what factors?

Why, for instance, women and children first? Well, technically, it's in the interest of the species. Why no tattoos in the Old Testament? Because you're in the desert. Infection really isn't what you need to bring to the camp. But what, by the dictionary definition, is rational about, say, the American military operation in Afghanistan? What is rational about child labor? What is rational about the humanitarian argument against child labor? What is rational about the pacifist argument against the Afghani-Bush War?

To generalize in order to be specific: Why is any one factor any more important than any other?

I hardly think anyone in the modern day proposes utilitarianism, but it is what, in the end, we expect of ourselves. Unless, of course, we choose an irrational stopping point. That is, an arbitrary or satisfactory--a subjective--stopping point.

Humankind responds to so many irrational factors in its rational, living process, that it is an operative observation that self-awareness leads to irrationality.

I can't imagine.

To the other, I find it absurd to imagine one the only real thing in the Universe.

By and large I have no real problem with accents in general. You'll notice that most of them compress words. A friend and I were actually talking today about the accent in the western US, specifically in Seattle. It seems the predominating characteristic is a lack of dimension. Where it starts sounding unique is not in letters stressed but in words melted together. Imagine a bunch of stuffy Lutherans and Episcopalians whose kids all got high. But the most defining aspect about common speech in Seattle seems to be that we all sound a little like we've been drinking.

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But most accents blend letters together and eliminate certain phoenetics from words. There is no "r" anywhere in the word Washington, so it seems odd to me to add a letter. Let's put it this way: we put up with "Puyallup" and "Calapoola" on a regular basis, so I well appreciate the elimination of of letters (P'yall'p and Calap'la--seriously; it just hit me that for Juan de Fuca we prefer foo-ka to fyew-ka because it's actually less work to say). Communication is data, and there's no reason to be sticking extraneous data into communication.

Thing is, I can't figure out where "Warshington" comes from. Where warshing the car, warshing the laundry, warshing your hands ... I can't figure out where this peculiarity of speech comes from. I'm the same way with extraneous syllables. I swear people try to augment their lexical power by using nonexistent words like disorientated. Don't get me started on the annexing of words. Transition is not a verb. The word is transfer. If it was a necessary evolution of the language, I wouldn't care. But when it's arbitrary and unnecessary to boot, it bugs me.

thanx,
Tiassa

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