It seems that no matter how many times I re-read a draft entry I frequently end up posting with errors. Most frequently the errors relate to the revision process, an extra word or space here or there. The impromptu nature of weblogs doesn’t help any.
Technorati Tags: Language and Writing, Web
This week I will stray into literature with an excerpt from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. From Wikipedia: “born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island [McCarthy] is an American novelist, author of eight Southern Gothic and Western novels. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and, less often, Herman Melville.”
It was gray and raining, leaves were blowing down. A ragged stripling stepped from a doorway by a wooden rainspout and tugged at the judge’s elbow. He had two pups in his shirtfront and these he offered for sale, dragging one forth by the neck.
The judge was looking off up the street. When he looked down at the boy the boy hauled forth the other dog. They hung limply. Perros a vende, he said.
Cuánto quieres? said the judge.
The boy looked at one then the other of the animals. As if he’d pick one to suit the judge’s character, such dogs existing somewhere perhaps. He thrust forth the lefthand animal. Cincuenta centavos, he said.
The pup squirmed and drew back in his fist link an animal backing down a hole, its pale blue eyes impartial, befrighted alike of the cold and the rain and the judge.
Ambos, said the judge. He sought in this pockets for coins.
The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.
Andale, he said.
The boy started at the coin.
The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy’s ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.
At the farther end of the bridge gave onto a small street that ran along the river. Here the Vandiemenlander stood urinating from a stone wall into the water. When he saw the judge commit the dogs from the bridge he drew his pistol and called out.
The dogs disappeared in the foam. They swept one and the next down a broad green race over sheets of polished rock into the pool below. The Vandiemenlander raised and cocked the pistol. In the clear waters of the pool willow leaves turned like jade dace. The pistol bucked in his hand and one of the dogs leaped in the water and he cocked it again and fired again and a pink stain diffused. He cock and fired the pistol a third time and the other dog also blossomed and sank.
The judge continued on across the bridge. When the boy ran up and looked into the water he was still holding the coin. The Vandiemenlander stood in the street opposite with his pizzle in one hand and the revolver in the other. The smoke had drifted off downstream and there was nothing in the pool at all.
Technorati Tags: Language and Writing, Books
The Volokh Conspiracy mentions in this post that several top law reviews publish issues online. However, Volokh laments that he cannot find a comprehensive directory of journals that have open content online. One, perhaps partial, solution to his dilemma is the Directory of Open Access Journals. Their mission is to "increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact."
They define open access journals as "journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access" we take the right of "users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory."
Their law and political science category, which contains 33 journals, can be found here.
Technorati Tags: Language and Writing, Law
What follows is an excerpt from A Short History of Western Legal Theory by J.M. Kelly. Kelly was a Professor of Jurisprudence and Roman Law at University College, Dublin and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was a Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister in Ireland, and he has authored several books on Roman Law and Irish constitutional law.
Notice how our present day theories underpinning modes of acquisition and ownership (a.k.a. capitalism and property rights) depend on the movements delineated in this excerpt.
Chapter 6 The Seventeenth Century
Natural Rights
The most significant seventeenth-century contribution to jurisprudence, alongside the placing of the law of nations on a scientific footing, and the definitive expression of the social contract as one binding the ruler as well as the ruled in a conditional structure of trust, was the concept–to some extent correlative to the doctrine of limited government–of individuals’ natural rights. Whereas the medieval Catholic world new a theory of natural law in which the main emphasis was on man’s duties to his sovereign or to his fellows (and even the secular natural law of Pufendorf, as has just been seen, still comes though in terms of social duty) the individualist atmosphere of Europe after the Protestant Reformation, an atmosphere which had been gathering since Ockham, gave a new turn to natural-law doctrine by extending it to comprehend also man’s rights against his sovereign and every one else. R.H. Tawney in his celebrated Religion and the Rise of Capitalism pointed to the ‘rejection by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of economic equity’ in favor of the assertion of subjective rights especially in the area of property. ‘The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers’, he wrote, ‘as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. but [by the seventeenth century] . . . “nature” had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play.’ [n.52 Rise of Capitalism (See Ch. 5 n. 22), 183.] It is true that already in the sixteenth century the jurists of Catholic Spain had asserted the natural right of even heathen peoples not to be maltreated and plundered, but that was rather different: a protest against cruel exploitation, and thus in the medieval tradition (to use Tawney’s words) of invoking the law of nature as a moral restraint. The newer trend was one by which the combined influence of nominalism and the Reformation, which both stressed the unique importance of the individual, led to a change of emphasis from natural law to natural rights.
The first step in this direction had indeed been taken even before the Reformation, by one of its precursors, William of Ockham (if Villey is correct in tributing to him the earliest use of the word ius, ‘right’, in a subjective sense; Richard Tuck believes this new usage goes even further back, as has been seen, to the papal bull Quia vir improbus of 1329). But the real inaugurator of natural-rights thinking was Grotius. In his work on the law of his own country, written in his own language–Inleidinghe tot de Hollandsche Rechts-gheleerdtheydt (1619-20)–he offered, in Tuck’s words, ‘the first reconstruction of an actual legal system in terms of rights rather than laws’; consequently , it was ‘the true ancestor of all the modern codes which have rights of various kinds at the centre’. [n.53 R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), 66.] From this position Grotius could move, in his great work De iure belli et pacis (1625), to view the law of nature as essentially the injunction to preserve peace by way of showing respect for the rights of others; and so ‘rights [had] come to usurp the whole of natural law theory.’ [n.54 Ibid. 67.]
* * *
Locke, although the prophet of natural rights in England, does not draw up a formal catalogue in the manner of Grotius. But his language necessarily implied the elaboration of values to countervail the royal prerogative; the rights of Englishmen show through in his developing fluid (so to speak) as shaded fields enclosing and delimiting the rights of the crown. Locke . . . concentrated chiefly on the right of property; but the route to other rights, today more easily classified as personal or political, lay thorough his extended employment of the word ‘property’ to include mens’ ‘lives, liberties, and estates’.
Technorati Tags: History, Language and Writing
My friend ‘upsidedownblue‘ posts Wednesday Afternoon Art every week on his livejournal. His efforts inspired me to do something analogous with words. While “Wednesday words” has lovely alliteration, I do not want to step on upsidedownblue’s toes. Wednesday is for art. Thus, I have chosen Thursday. Every Thursday afternoon I will post an excerpt from something that I believe will provoke thought and comment. Given the current course of my studies the excerpts will most often come from philosophy, history, legal theory, or law. However, I will occasionally go farther afield into fiction, literature, and poetry. I hope you enjoy and find enlightening Thursday Afternoon Words.
Technorati Tags: History, Language and Writing
A class I am planning on taking in the Fall requires the venerable Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I purchased the latest addition and read it through. The last time I read it all the way through was in 1994–also for a class. On page 43 of this, the fourth, edition of Elements I read this:
Meaningful. A bankrupt adjective. Choose another, or rephrase.
I found this sentiment peculiar: meaningful is not used improperly, meaningful is not cliché (Can a word alone be cliché?) rather meaningful is destitute of the particular thing that would otherwise make it meaningful. Two examples are given:
| Wrong | Correct |
|---|---|
| His was a meaningful contribution. | His contribution counted heavily. |
| We are instituting many meaningful changes in the curriculum. | We are improving the curriculum in many ways. |
Can this idea be right, that a word can loose its essence so that even proper use of it should be avoided? To me the idea is silly. Meaningful has a meaning, significant, and I see no reason to avoid using it, properly.
The above examples imply that the problem being addressed is not the bankruptcy of meaningful, but its use when something more concrete would serve better. Thus, the vague “meaningful changes” becomes the more explicit “improving the curriculum in many ways.” This idea fits with the admonishment of Rule 16: “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” My conclusion is that meaningful is not bankrupt, but its use may occasionally be improper in light of Rule 16.