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Lies Told in English
I should preface this post by noting I’m an (now domestic) engineer — hard “g.” English is not my proficiency, unlike my Hillsdale English major daughter, the Elder. You want help with your Math homework or figuring out how to fix the ice maker? I’m your gal.
Elder recently signed up for a 300-level 17th and 18th Century British Literature class at the local branch of CU in preparation to return to Hillsdale this fall, after identifying and dealing with some health challenges. She dropped the course after attending the first session, saying, “Mom, it’s not Hillsdale.” To which I responded, “Now you know why we insisted, if you’re going to be an English major, Hillsdale should be your top choice out of a scant handful of options.”
The first sign of trouble was the class introductions. Students were asked to give their name, year in school, and preferred pronoun. (You saw that coming, didn’t you?) Let’s keep in mind that “preferred pronoun” is an insistence that you talk about zir in the third person to someone else when xe’s not even in the room! If you were talking to they, you’d use “you, you, your” like any decent person. It’s coercive, totalitarian rubbish. I say we call the narcissistic little prigs “bastards.” Fixes everything.
Then Elder got a look at the syllabus. Nearly a third of the authors selected for study were women and none of them were named Austen. Too bourgeois, it would seem, except one of the women wrote about Islam after her experiences in Turkey where her husband was stationed as a diplomat. Oof — insert feminist scowl. And, yes, Islam was another major theme of the class about 17th and 18th Century British Literature! You can’t make this stuff up.
Finally, the class discussed an excerpt from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, a philosophical work first published in 1620. The professor focused on Bacon’s use of the phrase “empire over creation” (translated from the original Latin), suggesting the negative leftese connotation of “empire” (rather than the more likely Biblical allusion Bacon was making to dominion over creation). Oddly, he also asked the class the significance of the era in which Bacon was writing (early 1600s was the Age of Discovery), misleading the students to believe that Bacon could have been criticizing “empire” before the British Empire had even been established (Britain’s Imperial Century was from 1815 to 1914 according to historians), let alone before lefties had decided empire was a bad thing. Pull chute!
This incident started a family conversation about why university English departments are so corrupted and readily corruptible. Mr. C. (also an engineer — hard “g”) argued that the interpretation of literature is a subjective exercise. There aren’t hard truths built in like in Math and Science. I dissented.
Great literature reveals (absolute, universal) truths about the human condition. It isn’t subjective — it’s susceptible to misinterpretation by lefties with an agenda. Literature has staying-power when it is recognized for its truths by individuals over generations. As C.S. Lewis intimates in The Abolition of Man, it is against our human nature to continue to believe that which isn’t objectively true.
And speaking of the annihilation of our humanity, Drew Klavan makes the point that majorities don’t win — culture wins. If we don’t start fighting for the true meaning of words, I don’t see how the West survives. When the Elder was making her case for dropping the class, she said, “it lacks integrity.”
in·teg·ri·ty
/inˈteɡrədē/
noun
- the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
- “he is known to be a man of integrity”
- the state of being whole and undivided.
Just so.
Published in Literature
Where’s 10 Cents when you need him?
Good question.
Liberal arts is dead. It was killed by liberalism. Absolutely tragic. We won’t appreciate the full impact of the loss of liberal arts for decades. If we’re lucky.
Here’s an opportunity to practice what I preach. Thanks Doc.
The Liberal Arts were killed by leftism, not liberalism. Leftism is the most illiberal ideology. It is an empire of lies and it all starts with corrupting the meaning of words. Let’s take back the meaning of “liberal.”
I think the effects of the corruption of language are well upon us.
Dear Editor. I know you were trying to be helpful, but the joke is “I are an engineer” because, well, if you have to explain…
Don’t “fix” it. I just wanted to let you in on it.
SSM came first.
not catching on
You do need to explain. I’ve explained myself, more than once, as with:
That one even engendered some puzzled and amusing back channel to-and-fro with folks who didn’t realize I are a moderator, and that I could actually seen it.
Examination within different cultural environments can answer the questions about which behaviors are biologically normal and which are cultural constructs.
Haha! You made a funny, She!
I completely agree.
The fact that leftists are called liberals is a never-ending source of amazement for me.
For example, the German language uses, der, die, and das for the definite article “the.” Der is masculine, die is feminine, and das is neuter. Which is used is based upon the noun it precedes. So, we have der Mann (the man), die Frau (the woman), and das Auto (the car).
These are rather obvious as to their gender. However, others are not so. Der Tisch (masculine, the table), die Tasche (feminine, the bag), and das Madchen (neuter, the girl).
Thus, if Wilhelm starts saying, “Don’t call me der Mann, I’m die Frau!”, or call me “der Frau”, why it would add to to the confusion of one who is obviously a man preferring to be called a woman.
It might help if there were an understanding of the difference between gender and sex and sexual preference. A factor in English that probably affects this is the lack of any attention to gender in the language after unique pronouns for male and female as well as sexless objects.
That is because their words only come in two genders.
And our words, in English, come without gender, except when one of the two sexes is featured, otherwise neuter.
Yes. English speaking people, who, in large numbers it must be supposed, have never understood the meaning of gender, have themselves created this confusion with the use of the word gender to mean who knows what.
EDIT: Of course, word meanings can change over time, but then the different meanings must be recognized when language translations are involved, and that is part of what prompted my initial question.
Anyone know how SSM partners each spell their last names in Polish?
Yes, this has me confused too. They keep telling us that there are 37 genders or whatever, and then they list what seem to be sexual preferences, not genders.
You are either a boy or a girl. I suppose you can feel like you are a girl born into a boy’s body . But is it possible to feel like you are a gender-queer pan sexual trapped in a boy’s body? What would be the correct body for a well centered and content gender-queer pan sexual to be born into – how many are there to choose from, other than boy or girl?
(And, as a side note, I’ve always wondered how you can be confident that what you are feeling, this girl feeling, is what an actual girl feels like? Girls are mysterious creatures. You don’t suddenly become that wholly unknowable thing, that eternal mystery, that frustrating, impossible to understand, irritating enigma, that wonderful concatenation of Yum! without whom life for men would not be worth living, all with high heels, lipstick, and a padded bra.
How do you know that you are not feeling a third thing: what a confused man thinks a woman feels like? How could you tell?)
And why is it that suddenly one’s sexual preference is so important to the rest of us? Why that, and not, say, taste in cuisine, or music? If a general population is going to interact with each other out in the world, isn’t it much more likely that we might have to decide together where we are going to eat, or what we are going to listen to today, rather than what kind of sex we are going to get up to?
Precision in the use of language I have thought of as an elemental component in building critical thinking skill. These words from @johnh in another post ‘when you think, you think in words, words not literally spoken but which you hear in your head’. We don’t have this precision in sufficient numbers to guide our thinking process now in English-speaking western nations, especially America. You highlight a good example.
The newly elected governor of Florida is trying to help by bouncing the common core approach out of state public education.
Guidance taken under advisement, Sñr. Caballero… :-)
I can guarantee you trans women aren’t experiencing real womanhood. How do I know? I was born with all the requisite female parts and I have spent far less of my life in pantyhose and high heels than the average trans woman. It’s amazing how the trans movement is based entirely on superficialities and we’re not supposed to notice.
Great comment @thescarecrow.
Either Hillsdale must expand very far, very fast, or parents need to seriously consider educating the next generation in undergraduate business schools. Worked for our POTUS!
Hillsdale has this little thing (subversive to the public indoctrination system) called the The Barney Charter School Initiative. The goal is to open at least one Hillsdale curriculum charter school in all fifty states over the next many years (here’s the current list).
It’s very moving to hear Larry Arnn talk about his daughter’s experience as Head of School at one of the charters in Texas. Three times as many families entered the lottery as there were openings available the first year. They held the lottery in a gymnasium, and when people learned their children hadn’t made it in, they wept. Larry Arnn tears up when he talks about the education American children deserve versus the
educationindoctrination they’re getting. It’s truly tragic.Edit: The Barney Initiative is a worthy cause accepting donations at the link above.
Yes, I have always wondered about this. My ex-girlfriend was definitely all woman, yet in 8 years I never saw her in make-up, high heels (though I tried), sexy lingerie (though I tried), or any kind of nylons. She was (is) a rock climber, fly fisherman, hiker, camper, official Boy Scout (still not sure how she managed that one), very good snowboarder – you get the idea. But she was female. Proudly. Feministy. And powerfully attractive to this man, for all the REAL reasons women are attractive.
If a guy thinks he’s a chick, why is he never the baseball-cap-wearing fly fisherman my girl was?
And speaking of feministy. Why isn’t it that women – and feminists – are not flat out insulted by trans dudes? Men, pretending to be women. I see that Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece about some lesbians who are pretty shook up about this idea that there is no such thing as gender (how can I be a lesbian – a girl who loves girls – if there’s no such thing as a girl, as distinguished from a guy?). But other than that, I’ve heard nothing. Do the women on the View, or whatever, really sit and talk with Caitlin Jenner off camera as though he’s one of the girls? Do feminists embrace him as a sister, down for the struggle?
If there are lesbians out there who fully support a man’s dressing as woman and wanting from now on to be addressed as Loretta, would they hit on him? Would they find sapphic sexual pleasure, in spite of all that chest hair? Not to mention that . . . oh, never mind.
We live in strange times.
See, that’s where you made your mistake. You’re supposed to want to see her out of the sexy lingerie. I think it was Heinlein who said a woman has her sexiest clothes with her all the time.
Some (the German language for example [as mentioned]) languages have a third – neuter – but to your point, I believe that this is more American feminist insanity that the rest of the world simply does not have the resources and time to ‘entertain.’
Besides that my research has concluded decisively that there are still a lot of women living outside of North America that actually enjoy being female and don’t want to try to pretend that they are not simply delicious as is.
Tom boys are an endangered species in this insane era.
I never said I didn’t want to help her out of it.
I asked her once if she liked sexy lingerie, and she said no one had ever bought her any. So I did. She loved it, but it remained in her drawer next to the stuff she wore every day. High heels too. I assume they are still in the box.
Good thing I found her very fetching in baseball cap and little red sneakers.
(It’s possible we are straying from the main topic here . . . . ) :-)
…and/ or Russian?
True. But it’s inherently interesting.