“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)
Christie Heffner “told the [Chicago] Sun-Times, ‘pornography is a word used by critics to demonize sexual images they don’t approve of.’ Failing to follow up properly, the reporters neglected to ask Ms. Hefner why she thinks ‘to demonize’ is a bad thing.”
Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000
“[They use] statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”
“Andrew Lang, Scottish humourist” quoted in Scott Reid Lament for a Notion
In my latest National Post column I express gratitude for all the things that make me happy normally and are now helping me through the quarantine including (my life is so interesting words may fail you here) a brilliantly designed new power bar protecting my vital computer lifeline to the world.
“I refer to those who have fallen under the devilish spell of what is vaguely called ‘postmodernism,’ and in particular a subdivision of it sometimes called ‘deconstructionism.’… in this way of understanding things, language is under deep suspicion and is even thought to be delusional. Jean Baudrillard, a Frenchman, of all things, tells us that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. (Perhaps this explains, at long last, the indifferent French resistance to the German invasion of their country in World War II: They didn’t believe it was real.) In an earlier time, the idea that language is incapable of mapping reality would have been considered nonsense, if not a form of mental illness. In fact, it is a form of mental illness. Nonetheless, in our own time the ideas has become an organizing principle of prestigious academic departments. You can get a Ph.D. in this sort of thing.”
Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
In the National Post I ask how even bureaucrats could possibly write a doggerel health warning that, whatever one thinks of its content, is miserably inept as doggerel and not notice that it didn’t rhyme, scan, inspire or amuse except, in the last case, accidentally.
“What I have applied to language, is still more justly applicable to sentiments and manners. The passions, the sources from which these must spring in all their modifications, are generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages; and it follows, as a matter of course, that the opinions, habits of thinking, and actions, however influenced by the peculiar state of society, must still, upon the whole, bear a strong resemblance to each other.”
Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe
“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”
W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories