Finally, a religion for the rest of us: pastafarianism. And the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are not just satisfied worshipping their god, they have petitioned the Kansas State Board of Education to take their theory of Egghead Design more seriously and give it equal footing with the lesser varieties such as Evilution and Cretanism. They got back responses from three of the less humor-deprived members of the board.
.We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.
[via padawon dot info via boing boing]
I finally got around to finishing reading Ronald Wardhaugh’s Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings about Language. Blackwell, 1999, p.163. [Mentioned here earlier.]
Whatever a grammar of a language is, it is largely impervious to human intervention. That is, the really interesting rules and principles are so basic that we cannot do anything at all about them. What we can do is to try to influence some of the minor outcomes, for example, try to insist that people say I drank instead of I drunk or It’s I instead of It’s me. Essentially that is tinkering with matters of no linguistic importance. To elevate the study of grammar to the task of trying to bring about “correction” in such matters is to try to trivialize that study. These matters may be of social consequence and often are, but that is a social observation not a linguistic one, because I drunk and It’s me are linguistically on par with I drank and It’s I. Furthermore, it is an observation that tells us much about social organization and the function of trivia in such organization and nothing about the structure of language.
Whereas everyone who speaks a language draws on a grammar of that language, there are often local variations in some of its details. Many such differences are related to regional and social groupings of speakers of the language, giving us regional and social dialects. Linguistically, these differences are interesting because they enable us to see how different groups handle certain details of the grammar. No group can be said to handle such details “better” or “worse” than any other group. What we do observe, however, is that the solutions of one group may be more highly valued than those of other groups and deemed superior. Once again this is a social judgment not a linguistic one.
Seems that Max Baer, Jr., aka Jethro Bodine, has bought an out-of-business Wal-Mart in Carson City, NV, and is turning it into “Jethro’s Beverly Hillbillies Mansion & Casino”.
Professor Guy Deutscher, of the University of Leiden and the author of The Unfolding of Language (the book’s website), will be chatting online Saturday week, 08/20/05, at 11:00 AM Left Coast time (GMT - 7). Hosted by wordsmith dot org. Should be interesting.
Reader omega comments in the army-navy dialect-language thread (here and here) that some new information has been posted (message 6) to the Mendele Yiddish language list which raises doubts that Professor Fishman was the person who uttered the famous linguistic aphorism during a Weinreich lecture.
Although Weinreich is often cited as the author of this statement, his text clearly presents it as having been told to him by someone attending a lecture during a graduate course he had held a few years previously. This person was not one of the regular course participants, but was a high school teacher who had immigrated to America as a child. (tsvishn di tsuherers iz eyn mol oykh arayngefaln a lerer fun a bronkser hayskul. er iz gekumen keyn amerike vi a kind.) Nothing is said about where he, in turn, might have picked up the phrase and there have been various suggestions about it having first appeared in an earlier publication.
It is further pointed out that Professor Fishman was born in the USA and was too young to have been a high-school teacher in the mid-forties.