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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The trailers for a drama set in what appears to be one of the penal colonies in Australia are playing continuously on one of the international TV channels here. The voiceover starts "At a time when freedom was deprived ....".
Now, certainly one can be deprived of freedom, but what can freedom be deprived of? Or is this idiomatic in the Southern reaches of the English language?
Bingley
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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If the sentence continues somewhat like this, "At a time when freedom was deprived, inmates something-something...", I don't have a problem with it, though it would be better to say when their freedom was deprived.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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The problem is easily solved; simply bind the term in quotation marks: when "freedom" was deprived (of meaning).
edited for intelligibility
Last edited by inselpeter; 10/20/05 02:04 AM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The key kere is that it was Aussie. In regler English they'd a been saying, "At a time when freedom was depraved."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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It goes something like "At a time when freedom was deprived and following orders was the only thing to do, one woman blah-blah-blah"
Bingley
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Well, it's just plain stupid, isn't it?
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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It is wrong to attribute this solecism to Australian English.
As someone who has worked in television production (and, I might add, is of antipodean extraction on the spindle side) I can tell you a general truth -- proven by long and bitter experience -- about the kind of person who writes the commercial blurbs in that industry, Australian, American or English: a litterateur he is not.
Turn on your television, any television, and listen to your commercials, reality television programs, talk shows and infomercials with the same critical ear. That will suffice to silence all criticism.
But, let it be said in passing, this slight is typical of the cultural cringe accompanying colonial modernism. And supposing any of you guilty of it are American, you should remember that European intellectuals cringed the same cringe at your cultural heritage upon immigrating to the New World to escape the Nazi’s during World War Two.
The recently arrived French Surrealists, for example, contemned the Abstract Expressionists and action painting of the so-called "New York School" ; Continental writers were similarly hostile to the American literary developments of the 1950s, as is evident from letters, journals, and numerous documented encounters.
If the "vulgar yanks" had let that extinguish their muse, there'd be no Pollock, no Ginsberg, Burroughs or Kerouac.
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old hand
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old hand
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The fact that this, let's say, unusual construction has generated such interest from various corners suggests to me that we may be facing an instance of linguistic speciation, in the sense of the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis  . Transition to transitive use of verbs has been ongoing across the board (not ours, maybe).
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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wsieber, what the Janey Mack is a punctuated equilibrium hypothesis?
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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