felis_ultharus

Some Dalits in the village of Bankagaon are building a temple to the English language, deified as a goddess.

The purpose of translating English to godhood is to encourage the study of English, which is seen as the best means to escape the poverty and desperation that the old (officially dead) caste system condemned them too.

Clearly, she'll have to be one of the Sacred Whore goddesses of the Aphrodite vein. She's had vocabulary with half the languages on earth - to say nothing of the promiscuous origins of her grammar.

So, yeah. The work week is over. So much to do, so little energy to do it with.

T.S. Eliot might have said "April is the cruelest month," but then he never had to try spelling août on an English keyboard.

It's the only word I ever need to put a circumflex over the "u." I always finally learn it by the end of the month, only to forget by following August, dammit.

At least on LJ, I can cheat and use HTML tags.

"Stories are equipment for living."

This is my new favourite quote, gleaned from CBC today. I looked up the quotee, and discovered it was a literary theorist I'd never heard of named Kenneth Burke -- and by coincidence, today would've been 110th birthday if he were still alive.

Listening to CBC for a full day on a Saturday -- as I did today at work -- is an experience in the ridiculous and the sublime. CBC is still this country's best news source, but in between the news are very strange things.

Brent Bambury's sense of humour, for instance, falls into the ridiculous category -- it makes one reflect on the banality of evil.

Politics

Among the sublime, there was a brilliant argument by a senator as to the stupidity of fixed election dates in Canada. Not just is it a numbed emulation of the American system for no reason, he argued, but it also means that we've made it illegal to call and early election.

The senate once forced Mulrouney to shelve free trade unless he got a new mandate from the people in the form of an election -- they felt that he'd sprung a major change on the public by surprise, without consulting us. We can no longer do that -- a policy either has to be shelves until the fixed date, or allowed through, and the senate may be reluctant to stonewall something that long.

It also means that that Harper can pretend he's doing something about election reform, when he isn't tackling the real problem -- the lack of proportional representation, which helps the right-wing party win elections even when most Canadians vote to the centre or to the left.

Language

On a very different note, I learned of a new punctuation mark thanks to CBC today -- the interrobang. It's meant to replace the "?!" you get at the end of loud questions -- as in "What the fuck?!". Unfortunately, I can't get it to display on my browser, even with the code.

Looking it up, I discovered the irony mark -- a backwards question mark (؟) -- for ironic statements. No doubt it'll be of great use to Alanis Morrisette؟