Friday 20 April 2018

Quotations

SHARE
To the man-in-the-street who,
I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word intellectual suggests right away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

W H Auden



The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.


Henry Hazlitt



". I have spoken to several people now, who expressed fear of using Serbo-Croatian, on account of some people’s aggressive behaviour [if] the wrong term is used. Please understand that this is not a reflection of our Serbian or Croatian brethren on the whole, but nationalist extremists do exist, and in this case language is a thing (recognising Serbian and Croatian as two separate languages was in my opinion a political decision, and certainly not a scientific/linguistic one), which at one point went as far as some Croats trying to invent new words for anything they didn’t use a different word as Serbs. The result of that was something often known as Hrvatski Novorijek [Croatian Newspeak], and is every bit as horrible and silly as it sounds. As the languages share a word for sheep, [they] invented a new word for sheep in Newspeak “vuneni travojed” [woolly grass-eater]. Or for a pig: “četveronogo blatobrckalo” [four-legged mud-kicker]. Yes, it’s that stupid.""

Comment on Quorum


We got people eating paleo b/c "that's how we evolved man" and then thinking they can completely rewrite the laws of how humans communicate, travel, think, read, and build community. Sure. Sure.




2 comments:

  1. David in Belgrade20 April 2018 at 13:33

    The quotation above about Serbian and Croatian languages interested me and I found the original here:

    https://www.quora.com/Is-Slovenian-language-similar-to-Serbian

    A couple of years ago I was told off at Zagreb airport by the lady checking me in. I had explained to her that I understood (a little) Croatian because I already knew some Serbian. She got in a huff and emphasised that they are two completely different languages. It was only because I knew so little Croatian that I didn't appreciate this. Or words to that effect.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've heard a Croat say their language is based on German. Danke Deutschland indeed...

      Delete