Well, the first thing to be learned is that having too much fun in real life causes me to fall behind again on e-mail and blog reading...but what fun it is to make the backlog of e-mail disappear. It's the opposite of chopping or burning through a log of wood. With wood, when the first three-quarters are gone, the rest of the log is likely to snap and will certainly go faster. With e-mail, when the first three-quarters are deleted or stuffed into the Book Funnel Folder, the rest of the e-mails need to be read by ones. The good news is that I've already found a few book manuscripts that seemed to have been lost forever--the writers e-mailed them under a different name or some such thing.
Censorship
This is a blatantly self-serving web site with a lot of garbage to clear off the screen before you can see anything worth looking at, so it's just as well that the event they're agitating about is over and was over when I saw the link, but the core of the primary content is a list of twelve bills pending in Congress that could enable unconstitutional censorship.
Election 2024
You can stop now, Ds. You've already succeeded in casting a halo around the Orange One.
Etiquette
This grew into a long rant. More links below...
A blogger at PJ Media says that "it's all right to call your political opponents insane if they're, like, you know, insane." I didn't read the post; he may have been gloating about a political opponent's diagnosis, but like, you know, calling your political opponents insane tells me you're not thinking of good enough words to write an interesting rant, nothing to see here, move on.
But it is all right to call out errors of facts and logic in your political opponents' published speeches. Maybe not the image of former Presidents Bush and Reagan having "sex, or setbacks," because that's too icky, but certainly...
"Apparently the claim is that park ducks are house pets, so any abuse of a park duck is logically likely to be committed against dogs, cats, and boyfriends who never go home."
"It's true that it was this speaker's turn to speak, so the lie that speaker has in mind may be that that speaker is feeling pleased or amused, as shown by her unconvincing grin, rather than furious, as shown by her eyes and the rest of her body language."
"If one party got 80 ballots and 75 people were registered to vote, that party must be claiming support from some source other than registered voters."
And so on. Much fun can be had by fact-checking these things instead of verbalizing delusions about one's being licensed as a psychiatrist.
We need to talk seriously about this, actually. I say "That's idiotic" or "That's stupid" or "That's crazy" in casual conversation. Very likely you do. We all do. Most of the time it means nothing. Since "crazy" was actually an artisans' technical term before it was a term of verbal abuse (it's never been a legitimate psychological term), the case can be made that "crazy" more often means "excited" or "enthusiastic" or "in love with love" than it means anything like either "insane" or "having a random design," so maybe it shouldn't even be on the list of Forbidden Words. But the fact remains that, historically, calling people who disagreed with other people insane has been used as a form of oppression, torture, and murder. And it's happened recently, in totalitarian countries. And if the young people really want to try experimenting with full-bore, totalitarian Socialism, although that's a mistake rather than a mental disorder, we can be sure that what's happened to the dissidents declared insane in the Soviet Union will happen to some of the young, here.
I'd like to talk about a passage in the New Testament, here, although it's not Sunday, because I think it may be instructive for all people. You don't have to be a Christian to follow the thread. There's a reason why Jesus said that
"
whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.
"
(Matthew 5:22.)
How should we interpret the foreign words Jesus used? Matthew quotes Jesus as using two words, raca (also spelled raka, reka, raqa) and moros, which seem to be translations of the same concept into different languages. Is it worse to call out stupidity in some languages than in others? Probably not. We don't know exactly how the words were used in the local dialect, what made one language's word sound worse than the other. We know that both words were used as insults, and both basically meant :stupid, useless, foolish." Neither word resembles the word for "fool" in the Old Testament.
We know that the Pharisees were trying to please God by creating an ever stricter pherez, separation, between everyday life and what the Bible identifies as sin. They had lots of little rules about which prayers to recite on every occasion (there was a solemn prayer to be recited while using the toilet) and how far you could carry various objects on the Sabbath. The Bible warns against "evil speaking" and the Pharisees frowned on verbal abuse. They said truly evil things to, about, and against Jesus, but they thought they were protecting their religion from His potentially sinful interpretations. They are the likely suspects for having preached to the local audience that one word that means nothing to us today was bad enough to be rebuked by the religious council, while the other was bad enough to be punished by God.
The Old Testament's classical Hebrew word we translate as "fool" is transliterated as evilim. It was not the same word used for "evil." It referred to the specific type of fool who said to himself, "There is no God," especially meaning "There will be no punishment. What I want to do is bad, but I can get away with it."
Because raca was Aramaic and the crowd listening to this speech were familiar with both Aramaic, a language spoken on the street, and Hebrew, the classical language of the Bible, it's possible that raca was understood to mean merely what we mean by "stupid" without this overtone of rebellion against God, especially in the sense of mistreatment of other people.
Moros was Greek. It is the source of our words "moron" and "sophomore." A sophomore is a second-year student in a four-year program, and a thing described as sophomoric is spoken, or written, or done on the basis of just enough education to allow people to make egregious mistakes. (This web site has furnished a few examples but, for the benefit of people who might be led into greater error, of course, with no concern for our reputation, oh right, this web site has corrected them when we were informed of them. Last week, in a burst of dyslexia, I referred to current television commercials and tossed in the name of a prescription medication that's used to treat different symptoms than the one I had in mind, showing that my mind files all brand names for patent medicines as "nasty garbage advertised on television.") In classical Greek moros was not always used with a sense that the person's foolishness was morally wrong, but in early Christian writings it was used that way.
For a man to call his brother raca or moros did not imply, for the original audience, that he was showing off, "I know all these languages." Apparently most people did. They were more fluent in one language than in others, they wrote a language they'd learned at school with an "accent" from the language they spoke at home, but first-century Judeans were familiar with Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and sometimes other languages as well.
But the choice of words obviously did imply that the man was taking different attitudes, even policies, toward this brother. Raca would have been what he said to express his own feelings toward his brother, which would be brought up in discussion with religious teachers. Moros would have been what he said in declarations of policy--forbidding the brother to speak, forbidding him to visit the man's house, refusing to share material goods with him if he became destitute. Mental hospitals did not really exist, though people with mental disorders were brought to some places and people in hopes that they could be helped (apparently most of them weren't). A man sayin to his brother "Thou moros" might be throwing him out of their family's house, which was one way to determine whether or not the brother was insane. If he was sane, but did not agree with his brother, he could probably get some sort of job somewhere. If insane, he might be left to perish on the street, or exploited by someone who might use drugs or beatings to induce babbling that could be sold to the credulous as wisdom from an oracle. The consensus of the community might be that the brother who'd been thrown out was saner than the one who'd thrown him out. Then again, the brother who'd been called moros might become the sort of public nuisance some homeless people are today.
So in a very real sense raca might have been properly translated by our words of casual contempt: dweeb, idjit, moron, dimwit, dingbat, airhead, dummy, turkey, jackass, twit, drip, peabrain. Moros might have been properly translated by our words for formal, institutional judgments: insane, delusional, senile, demented, retarded, incompetent, psychotic, autistic, certifiable,
that horrible sugar-coated "person with" some disastrous condition. This is controversial because our words of serious judgment are meant to have no moral or religious implications, but their implications for the way we treat the person are, I think, still closer to first century Judean use of moros.
In today's English most of the words used to justify dismissing or suppressing what people say, restricting their freedom, not accepting them as adult members of society, are adjectives rather than nouns. They can be used to describe conditions or things other than persons, in which case they have less potential for abuse. "Retarded" was originally meant to be an acceptable word because it was meant to describe a child's growth rather than the child; someone whose physical growth was "retarded," or stunted, by a disease might still be six feet tall when he grew up, and someone whose learning process was "retarded" might still graduate from a good university when she grew up. "Incompetent" can refer to a level of learning; a person with no experience around moto vehicles might be incompetent to drive a car this year but competent to drive a car next year. Insane Admirers, who babble nonsense about a woman being more radiant than the sun, etc., in the belief that this kind of thing will persuade her to do what makes babies when she doesn't want the babies, are clearly suffering from temporary insanity; most of them can be snapped out of it by redirecting their attention to work.
Word usage changes constantly. Diagnoses made with compassion, intended only ever to help people who really are incompetent, turn into playground taunts. People neutralize playground taunts by latching onto the key words and using them as brands, or band names, or screen names. "Doctor Demento" made some money with "wild and crazy" shows. Maybe next year's hit record will be performed by Pathological Patrick and the Four Psychotics, after which "pathological" will become a new word for a new style of music. It can be hard to predict these things.
Still, I think it's best to recognize words like "fool" and "crazy" and "ree-tard" as terms of abuse and words like "insane" or "senile" as legal or medical terms for conditions that have to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist. When we mean that our political opponents are spouting bad ideas that make no sense, it's just better style to attack the ideas and show why they don't make sense.
Meme
The search for balance in introverts' social life...
Google lists 24 possible origins for this meme, not favoring one. I don't know who made it. I'm just glad to see Lens working again. Well, running normally, anyway.
Poetry
For introverts only:
No comments:
Post a Comment