I sometimes imagine a chair made by someone who sits all twisted. Sitting in that chair yourself, you couldn’t help but to sit in the same way.
When a designer designs an object, their stance will be encoded and transmitted to the user. Imposed.
Is culture really passed on like this, not just with chairs or superheroes, but in a general sense?
On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.
The perils of self-translation.
I’m often baffled by the number of people who seem to think that you can translate from one language to another simply by pulling the words of one language from a dictionary and plugging them into the syntax of the other. It just doesn’t work that way, friends.
Read to the end for a wonderfully delicious twist in the tale.
Amadán.
I’m currently reading The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, and it resonates nicely with this article on the numbing effect of the bureaucratic style exemplified in phrases like “officer-involved shooting.”
Watching the cell phone videos of the assault has, for most people, the immediate effect of provoking outrage and awakening a desire for justice. The purpose of bureaucratic speech is to dull these responses. It suggests your outrage is not worth it, that it’s fine to go back to what you were doing, that it’s best to move along and mind your own business.