The interesting thing about word rage is that it almost never really is. Those folks who talk about yelling at their radio when they hear someone use less instead of fewer, or who, like Dick Cavett, threaten to "pop" the senator who spoke of his "incredulous" experiences -- they're not really angry at all. It's all a exercise in counterfeit camp. And by the by, it demonstrates just what an irrelevant business language criticism has become.
If you take it literally, the striking thing about the indignation of modern language snobs is how ostentatiously disproportionate it always is.
"According to a 2004 Statistics Canada survey on charitable giving and volunteering, low-income households donate a higher percentage of each dollar they earn to charity than do high-income earners. Households with an average income of less than $20,000 gave an average of 1.7% of their pretax earnings to charity, compared with just 0.5% for households with an average income of $100,000 or more."
OK, this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for those of you who are interested in research, I'd love to hear some thoughts on this. My gut reaction is, 'Hell yeah, there should be public access to scientific research.' But then I started to wonder if that would affect peer-reviewed work. Would research become sloppier as it's made more readily available to the public? Would it matter, being that most people don't even care about this research?
Right now PubMed is one of the few and PubMed tends to not interest me so much since it's not focused on language learning, my primary interest. What happens when I leave the university, but I want to continue my research? Aren't teacher-researchers, such as myself, put at a distinct disadvantage in relation to the Ivory Tower-ensconced academics? On a different note, could we rely on the publicly accessible information as much as we do the pay databases?
Those who enjoy winning at the geography category in trivia games might like to file away for future use what I'm pretty sure is the world's longest official country name, beating "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea", and even "The Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" and "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". The Economist happened to mention recently (1/20/07) that in order to get into the World Trade Organization without making the People's Republic of China hopping mad, Taiwan (oops! I said it!) had to be extremely careful about how it was officially known (forget all about that "Republic of China" stuff). It was admitted as "the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu (Chinese Taipei)". That's the name. Don't get it wrong.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at January 28, 2007 05:08 PM
awwww, he's got naturally occurring mittens! This is an especially weird kind of cute, therefore I had to pass it along to my LJ friends who haven't yet discovered the wonders of the CO universe (it's good crack)
You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.
Interesting how very well the test results fit. I'd have to say that the test writer did her/his homework and after reading the writer's website... sure did. I rather like the concept of the Cultural Creative.
"As we are looking at the world, we have this impression that what we see is the real world. What this tells us is the way we see the world is more strongly dominated by how we perceive it to be rather than what it actually is."
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xeriah's journal
