Magazine calls for abandonment of the culture on which its existence depends
Ben W. writes:
TIME makes the case for misspelling. No need any longer to correct posts at VFR. The spell checker is obsolete.
The evolution towards a new conscious principle of misspelling could be labeled (borrowing from Stephen Jay Gould) as “punctuational equilibrium.” When do you suggest that VFR could be liberated from the strait-jacket of grammatical totalitarianism?
LA replies:
I haven’t read the article yet, but can imagine what it says. Time and Newsweek have for the last generation been at the forefront of societal decadence and nihilism. Each new sick and destructive trend that comes along, they seize on it, package it, normalize it. I don’t think I’ve purchased either of those magazines more than five times in the last 20 years.
Adela G. writes:
Not surprisingly, Time is following in the footsteps of The Grauniad.
Hannon writes:
Being an attentive speller, I found this article thought-provoking on a number of fronts. They mention the “punishment” suffered by those who commit spelling errors on job applications and I thought “Yes—that’s exactly it!” Not that people should be “punished” but where does society start with its rules? Wasn’t the NYC “broken windows” campaign against neighborhood crime highly successful? Contrary to the belief of the teacher in the story, caring and carefulness are overarching virtues that do not begin at some magical threshold of “bigger and better things”.
A number of prime indicators of modern liberalism’s perversity are to be found in this brief piece. Paraphrasing: “…those who find the current rules of [society] too hard to learn should have their [behavior] labeled variant, not wrong.” Overall, though, the article basically says language is a conservative medium that does, ever so slowly, evolve.
LA replies:
There will always be people who want to abolish the rules of spelling, just as there will always be people who believe in communism (and here for once I mean communism lower case).
Paul Nachman writes:
Regarding TIME, Newsweek, and your headline “Magazine calls for abandonment of the culture on which its existence depends,” this is one of my pet themes. So many Western institutions are busily destroying the basis for their own existence:
- The LA Times’ cheerleading for mass immigration has to be part of the reason its readership is sinking. And it’s sinking not just from reader alienation from their editorial policies but from English-reading readers fleeing Southern California. (Of course, there are additional important factors in major newspapers’ troubles these days; and The LA Times also owns a couple of Spanish-language newspapers distributed in its area, so there’s some hedging of bets, whether conscious or unconscious.)
- Once the ACLU has succeeded in atomizing our society (“pounding away at the common civic culture” was someone’s perfect description), do they think the authoritarian government that will arise to keep the lid on the resulting all-against-all civil strife will put up for even an instant with the ACLU?
- Does the Sierra Club actually think that the overpopulated, resource-scarce nation we’re heading for—in part because the big enviro organizations won’t risk any of their moral and political capital talking about overpopulation and immigration—will give a fig for environmental protection? (Nevertheless, I retain my continuous-since-1975 membership, in case there’s ever a chance to help pick up the pieces.)
- Don’t colleges and universities recognize that they are the fruits of Western civilization—in particular, of the surpluses-beyond-bare-subsistence that capitalism has engendered—and that it would be in their selfish interests to try to preserve the system, rather than vociferously condemning it at every turn?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2008 09:06 PM | Send