Speaking of Pynchon... (SPLAD)

Fri Feb 17 00:03:19 UTC 2023

Sure. Maybe Mark Kohut was just playing the language harp in his hood mode. Or maybe he was playing it for laughs; something new that none of us ever noticed before. And here I am trying to impose on the entire flow of linguistic change  and cultural personality a stultifying colonialist barrier, a task that is going to be difficulter than i thought, not getting the properer understanding that you have now supplied. Or it could be that given the context of an affirmation of correcter and traditionaler diction, it is as lame as it seems. 

And truth be told, given what Kohut says about me every chance he gets  I feel well within my rights when he sticks his foot in his mouth to let him chew. 

> On Feb 16, 2023, at 3:41 PM, Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Might I remind you all that language is a verb, not a noun -- a flowing river, never the same twice. c.f. Steven Pinker, "The Language Instinct", for abundant examples, one of my favourites being the use of the double negative. In "English" this is supposedly not permitted, yet in several other languages it is almost necessary. But even in English, it is, depending on the context, not only permitted but encouraged... "I ain't got nobody."
> 
> Without doubt, two slices of the sword occur here: race and class. There are dozens of flavours of English, from Oxford to Brixton to Newfoundland to Harlem to Boston to N'Orleans to Texan to Birmingham (both cities)... I could go on, but you get the point. In China, there are thousands of dialects, of which English speakers can name only two, and possibly three. I'll start with Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese, but if you've any sense of history, you must also include Hakka -- if only to acknowledge how the British managed to addict the Chinese masses to opium (and if you can't follow that thought-train, read a little history about how the Chinese refused to trade tea with England for anything but gold, which Queen Victoria would not consent to, so instead the Royal She chose to smuggle opium across the mountains into China, and create millions of addicts, and hence leverage in the tea trade).

> But I digress. 
You sure fucking do.

> My original point was that there are a hundred flavours of English. Some snotty professors here and there might object -- and I too rail at the outright butchery of the language, but I also understand that "English" as understood as a language has long since departed from the shores of a windswept, damp, often frigid island -- thanks to the spirit and actualization of Colonialism -- to embed itself in places distantly removed from its origin. This was followed by, again, thanks to the "English Language" and its ladies in waiting, English Law, Property Rights, and a dozen other atrocities -- the embedded belief that the Euro way of conquest was the only path to Civilization for these backward nations. Originally it was the Spanish and Portuguese that pioneered this vision, but then came the much more powerful Netherlands and Belgium, and eventually France and England. 
> I am mixing histories here, and didn't mean to do so. Let me refrain from politico-linguistics and return to geo-languistics.
> One of my favourite examples is Jah-English. When I saw "The Harder They Come" I could only understand about a tenth of the English spoken there. I had the same experience when visiting a jazz club in NYC at 125th and Lex, at 4am, to hear Ornette. Two things happened that morning: a white boy in the middle of the summer is here at 125th and Lex, in the middle of the summer, obviously unarmed, and two: he is either crazy or here on a mission, but he's unarmed, so there's only one other reason: he is here to hear Ornette.
My guess is that the first thought of those in the club was nowhere near so convoluted, but just that you were there to hear Ornette Coleman. I mean, you are not and never were his only white fan. 
> No one threatened me; the opposite -- I was welcomed, because they understood I was there to hear Ornette play. Stupid white boy, willing to take such risks, to hear Ornette. Nobody touched me or threatened me that early morning, and some folks even asked my name. I went back to that club and that hood about 100 times that year, and got a Walk and guaranteed safety. Eventually they learned that I was a journalist writing about jazz and that won me another credit or two -- but nothing ever happened to me. I was somehow Protected. Safe to write about the jazz culture without threat. I appreciated that.
 Arthur
 I have no argument with what you are saying here, and I have said the same kind of thing when teaching high school English.   And particularly in poetry or humor I have taken many liberties with the lovely flexibility of my native tongue, but this interpretation of Kohut’s post does not ring true for me for reasons I make clear above. The "you sure fucking do” was said for a laugh since it is rather a long way of making a point and the drift was a bit extreme. 

I would suggest that a sincere question or 2 would have been a better approach to understanding  my thoughts on the changing nature of language. One thing that is not happening is that literate people are not adding 'er' to any word they like.

> 
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 1:34 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> A  “righter” way?  Is this classic Kohut or what? He is appproving of a belief about correct diction by calling it righter? Is this word in a special dictionary I can’t find? Really,  righter? 
> 
> 
> Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com <http://gmail.com/>  <mailto:pynchon-l%40waste.org <mailto:pynchon-l%2540waste.org>?Subject=Re%3A%20%3D%3FUTF-8%3FQ%3FRe%3D3A_Speaking_of_Pynchon%3DE2%3D80%3DA6_%3D28SLPAD%3D29%3F%3D&In-Reply-To=%3CCALAvXn34fxX4hePGYQrPbo-9PGmeSf67QaDYJ-hVhooGscHEWA%40mail.gmail.com <http://40mail.gmail.com/>%3E>
> Thu Feb 16 08:49:15 UTC 2023
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> On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 3:05 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com <http://gmail.com/> <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>>> wrote:
> 
> >
> > And the way TRP writes 'dwell upon", older righter way than 'dwell on'.
> >
> 
> 
> 
> Really? Before I look it up, may I ask how so, in your estimation?
> 
> I admit to using them interchangeably.
> “Upon” tends to make me start humming “up on a rooftop, way up high” so
> that’s fun.
> “Up” is nice and brief, also good.
> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>
> 
> 
> -- 
> Arthur
> 