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Defending a logical approach to language (which is what I see it to be) is not adolescent. I assume that you find nothing wrong with the term "look up", because we know it to mean find? Doh, Homer Simpson's exclamation, is in dictionaries; but remember dictionaries are for reference. Because the majority uses "birthday" to mean one's yearly anniversary of birth does not mean it is smart to follow.


You assume right. Nor do I have a problem with using "gymnasium" to mean "a room or building equipped for gymnastics, games, and other physical exercise" despite the fact that, etymologically, it means: "exercise naked."

You, Cur, have two choices: Turn up naked for gym class on Monday, or demand that your school adopt your ideosyncratic, aphasic approach to language.

You actually remind me of the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo, in which characters who've taken a black market drug called Dylar suffer the curious side effect of being unable to understand the metaphorical meaning of language, and take everything that is said to them literally. If you say, "That went over my head", they will look to the ceiling and ask, "What did? Where is it?" If you tell them that you've got a bone to pick with them, they will politely tell you that they have eaten.

What you are actually set against is the metaphorical economy of language. You want everything spelt out for you, with all the holes filled in. But what you are actually advocating is more like a code language for computers; the very opposite of poetry, literature, prose, creative language use. When Shakespeare writes, "Out, out brief candle", he is not failing to be pedantic, he is demonstrating a very human, abstract, analytical ability to draw a comparison between disparate phenomena with important properties in common: a candle and a human life, for example: both are lament, brief, beautiful, both burn, both illume, both can be snuffed out. Making sense of language requires a meaning-sensitive being to fill in the lacunae, and this, in fact, is much of what the pleasure of reading consists of. A word like "Birthday" is a very minor case of the same essential phenomenon. Where are you gonna draw the line?




Last edited by Hydra; 07/01/2007 2:59 PM.