I piddle around (some would suggest I piddle on) several languages. These languages differ considerably from one another, they go about the business of Clarifying their thoughts and intentions. They use widely different ways to explain the very object ot their communication.
English went through a massive shift to make the spoken word more clearly resemble the written word, curiously this took place at precisely the time that Gutenberg’s invention was increasing the volume of texts available to the readers of the day. The change to written vs. spoken English is something called the great vowel shift. You may have seen a T-shirt that proclaimed the event:
I survived the great vowel shift!
Arranging the letters on a printing press set contemporary spelling into concrete. The timing of this event could not have been more ill timed. The printed word had to be taught using a misfitting reckoning system. Of course, English went on to become the international language despite all this. Although it did receive some help from the absence of accurate weather forecasts, that event led to the sinking of nearly every ship on its way to defeating the British Empire. The geopolitical significance was enormous.
The great digital information shift occurred during my lifetime, around the 1960s. Learning my second language of German relied on intense time spent in a language-instruction classroom, and reinforced in a language lab — all based on an instructor-led distribution of sounds saved on magnetic tape. Vocabulary building required using an English-German dictionary unti nearly all the leaves fell out. Now I have free access to the findings of Google and can access new languages at a significantly more comfortable state. The change is unfathomable to generations that grew up with these tools widely available and frequently updated.
I also survived the shift from slide rule to pocket calculator
In 1975, when foreign language lessons appeared in textbooks and on vinyl, I decided to learn Russian as a complement to the German that I had just learned with some fluency. The Cyrillic alphabet provided interesting and confusing sets of letters — enough to keep a learner engaged in sounds and texts that looked familiar to the under-aided eye. It appeared to resemble Gellarese in many ways, cobbled together in a manner that seemed intuitive to the 1970s Cold War setting, an interesting series of words that deliberately resembled a code and a language history that included the drama of Tolstoy and a presence that made it seem like background music in a Soviet department store.
Intrigue comes across between German and Russian as it is cast against a background that the geography of post-war Europe provided. However, German and Slavic speakers would not yield to translation with any degree of ease. Russian uses neither the definite nor the indefinite article, whereas German conveys the meaning and usage of every noun and pronoun. The German language spoken by a five-year-old in Berlin provide all the parts of speech, every inflection, and every nuance of meaning. Stack Russian next to German and you arrive at that enigma wrapped within a mystery that Russia represented to Churchill. The Slavic and German ways seem to play out like a spy thriller, where the similarities may lie somewhere between the butler and the wrestler. God help the translator maintain any measure of surety and sanity in such a world.
A Passionate Love Story
My German and Russian proceeded along these avenues of restriction. Of course, the tools available on the internet were yet decades away. It is difficult to imagine how any new language can be approached without Google and YouTube: an assuring set of mouse clicks away. Hence the heightened curiosity that is aroused upon employing YouTube and Google to assist the learner who arrives to answer the question posed for this post — what gives?
Somehow, languages once learned to any extent seem to stick onto various brain cells and cortexes. I still remember much of the Russian that I heard on those 1975 records, language segments that blended together like a fermenting beverage. Somewhere between beer and vodka, I believe.
Yesterday, Representative Jim Jordan and progressive epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci met to meet on the absence of civics in the marketplace. Jordan represented the wealthy sectors who depend upon the Republican Party to keep the markets pumping gilded wealth to the capitalists who count on cheap labor and fossil fuels to remind their purchased politicians in D.C. that the chains must continue to keep the marginalized on the margins and to keep libertine liberty to pass the laws that keep the 99% to the whims of the marketplace. Jordan called on Fauci to give a date for opening the economy to full-throttle openness. Unlock the American economy that he had unfairly held hostage for so long. Just give us a date Dr. Fauci, just name the date. That was all he required of a country that had simply had too many chains imposed upon economic miracles, in the view of Mr. Jordan. Need I mention that Jim Jordan was standing for his Ohio constituents, that among those participants were those who called on the execution of Anthony at the earliest possible moment.
Dr. Fauci, don’t tread on me!
Freedom and Liberty, as understood by the comfortably wealthy beneficiaries of unfettered capitalism, keep cash flowing from the most productive participants of our economy to the least productive members of that economy. Jim Jordan wants to know when the most decimated groups would be permitted to simply return to the mills, when the most protected can see the invisible finger pry the economy fully open. These are the billionaires who multiplied their gains the most at the expense of individual working for a minimum wage that has not increased since the 1970s.
There appears to be no shame at wearing the tiniest fig leaves — call it a fig-leaved futures market. Freedom and Liberty are always fobbed off in this way. The Evangelical Right feel themselves the victims of a new brand of persecution. Churches seem the last bastion in their mode of thought, the progressive elements of our society are battering at the door. Mind you, it is a metaphoric door, not the kind of door bludgeoned open at the Capitol Building on January 6th. The legions who followed every word of their Emperor God flew in on private jets, in muscled pick up trucks with all the flags of MAGA “free” to flap in the breeze, to fuel their need to vandalize and to plunder. The leader was on his way up Pennsylvania Avenue, wasn’t he. No, he was bunkering in a room reserved for friends and family, the kind of nice people you could find on the town square, the kind who were debating the form of execution. A predilection for the mighty noose, a more “scary” beheading of a guillotine. Any form of execution that would provide the most theatrical moment, guillotines and noosing devices started to appear. The would be a reign of terror not seen on any scene, but long longed for. A gentle return to the lynchings that so very well conveyed the spirit of law and order that called for the bloodiest of theatrics, a return to the perfectly proper white-supremacist call to revenge by the most highly armed. Strange fruit would once again be found dangling from the branches of trees to affirm a new spirit of magical madness that would mean a return to the great white way by those who had been denied the true meaning of the Second Amendment and who wanted the removal of the Fourteenth.
A massive mob to redress the wrongs inflicted by the Marxists upon the spirit of American manliness, a return to family values, an America First point of view solidly anchored to the Holy Bible of the founding fathers and based on freedom and liberty.
I listen to rightwing evangelical programs in order to keep myself informed on their orthodox views and to check the bases of my own touchstones. There are no leftwing equivalent broadcasting giants, if you don’t like the smell of brimstone then I will suggest lend it an ear and see how well your own beliefs stack up to their public voices and challenges. EWTN is the old nun on the block, if you have fond memories of sisters twisting minds in their school systems expect a warm welcoming hearth fueled by sulphur in your radio. If you have purchased an automobile already equipped with SiriusXm radio, you can find the softest softballs in the evangelical white world on The Catholic Channel (129). The segments are organized by the patriarchs of church organization. As a result, women do not fare well on The Catholic Channel. Turnover is rapid and generally unannounced. Another reason I give for choosing the Culture of Death!
Barbara McGuigan: ProLife Warrior. She takes no prisoners
Mother Angelica, formerly of Canton OH, brought patriarchy-friendly broadcasters to a hundreds of airwave owners. The “good fight” to make abortion impossible is the single issue that each program feverishly shares, a litmus test that is as reliable as a home-pregnancy kit. Another thing that each broadcaster brings to his (the default personal pronoun) audience is a perpetual drone on the only issue that counts for their audience, the only issue that will forever count it seems: Roe v. Wade. They fail to mention that 5% of American women will seek an abortion at some point (or multiple points) in their fertile years. That number does not change. Another number that never changes is assigning responsibility to the women listening to their drum beat, though men can impregnate fertile women by the hundreds or thousands during their fertile years. A woman can only become pregnant around one year.
Speaking of statistics, racism is rampant and full-throated in the world of Catholic broadcasting. Blacks make up only a few percent of membership in Catholic parishes. Blacks have simply come to know that the welcome mat is flipped to the Jim Crow side when a black person darkens the church door. The events occurring at this very moment in Minneapolis make institutional racism as clear as white. Gun culture is active among their congregants, many of them like the smell of gunpowder in the morning.
The failed Capitol coup of 6 January 2021 brought the racist card to ever more games. Trump is a friend, a hero, a stalwart white force for a systemic white supremacism that many congregants share. Those who do not are accused of joining with the “Cancel Culture.” At any given point I demonstrate my membership in that cultural crime. During and after the 2020 election cycle, a vote for Trump meant a vote for religious freedom and religious liberty. Freedom and Liberty are watchwords that reveal the racist cards for each deck cut. BLM means Blue Lives Matter to the comfortably wealth-managed congregants who showed up to follow Trump on 6 January, not noticing that the racist they followed did not follow them to the Capitol grounds. No, he went to a personal family and freaks rally in the White House Bunker to celebrate carnage and opportunism for present and future political ambition. The faces in that bunker room crowd look eerily akin to the faces of crowds celebrating the carnage and opportunism at a traditional family-friendly town square lynching.
Sequanda Haugabook, left, and Rodney Miller put up paper saying “take it down now” onto the mural painted by artist Dave Powers in Elgin May 19, 2016. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
In a country where black property rights are marginalized by any means possible, where gentrification is the theft of value by means of gentrification, blacks lose entire neighborhoods to bidding wars that sell homes owned by families for generations. Property is purchased at a bargain-basement price and then sold to whites who accomplish something called “wealth management.” Another way to play the game: sew discord in potentially valuable neighborhoods and blame the marginalized for damage to property jobbed out to arsonists and similar “growth industries” in a modern economy.
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billziegler1947 