English as She Is Spoke

Posted on May 4th, 2007 in History, Literature, Anglo-Saxon, Words, Middle Ages by Craig

Yesterday I received a copy of Michael Drout’s Beowulf Aloud, a 3-CD set of his dramatic reading of the epic poem in its original language. I added the whole thing to my iTunes/iPod collection this morning, and hope to have some time to listen to it this weekend.

This morning I sampled the lecture and a few tracks of the poem. Although I can’t speak or read Anglo-Saxon, I’ve dabbled in it from time to time and have tried to pick up some sense of it by reading the poem itself. After listening to Beowulf in Old English for even just a few minutes, I’ve gotten some feeling for the original rhyme and rhythm, which even the best translations can’t recreate completely. Maybe I’ll post a few more comments on Beowulf Aloud after I’ve heard the whole thing.

Something New Every Day

Posted on May 1st, 2007 in Words by Craig

Thanks to David at Cronaca for putting into my vocabulary crores, a word for ten million and equivalent to the Marathi and Bengali word koti. I’m not sure how often I’ll use the word, or whether I’ll remember it for long, but it’s in my brain somewhere now.

Mencken Redux

Posted on May 1st, 2007 in Words, Politics by Craig

Sometimes I wish we had writers with the skills to excoriate the dunces and low-lifes of the political class the way Mark Twain did. Then I read something like Christopher Hitchens’s commentary on George Tenet’s recent public display of self-beatification, and I think, “This is Mencken,” more scathing and more efficient than Twain.

In his latest effusion, he [Tenet] writes: “I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting.” Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then [in 2001], and not just in his “gut” but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to “HUMINT” under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle.

Whether your politics fall on the left or the right, you’ve got to admit that this kind public humiliation of failed government officials is often necessary and therapeutic.