John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

The dash is more than just a piece of punctuation: it is the line between barbarism and civilization.

I don’t want this life. There’s too much gold and not enough bad guys.¹

What a strange state one must be in to understand those words. How one enters it and how one leaves are mysteries of the highest order.

1. One Line Drawing : The Volunteers : A Ghost↩

El alma no florece sino en el período biológico que corresponde a la edad con que nace.

Quienes nacen para ser jóvenes se vuelven grotescos al envejecer. Quienes nacen para viejos son grotescos durante su agria juventud.¹

La crucifixión, según el cristiano de hoy, fue un lamentable error judicial.

La facultad de percibir la misteriosa necesidad de lo atroz pereció con la escena griega y los altares cristianos.²

1. Nicolás Gómez Dávila : Escolios a un texto implícito : Tomo II↩
2. Nicolás Gómez Dávila : Escolios a un texto implícito : Tomo II↩

Though I rarely mention technical issues on this site, I think the following is such a strong cause for concern that I would like to focus anyone who reads this site’s attention on what may prove to be an inexcusable invasion of privacy perpetrated by the designers of Skype, the world’s most popular free VOIP software.

Skype 1.4.0.99 reads /etc/ passwd and firefox profile!

In every generation, unjust men have used legality rather than morality as the guide for their actions.

Conan: I remember days like this, when my father took me to the forest. We ate wild blueberries… more than twenty years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind…

Almost twenty years of pitiless combat! No rest — no sleep like other men! And yet, the spring wind blows, Subotai. Have you ever felt such a wind?

Subotai: They blow where I live too — in the north of every man’s heart.

Conan: It’s never too late, Subotai.

Subotai: No… It would only lead me back here another day — in even worse company.

Conan: For us, there is no spring. Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.¹

After a workweek of almost eighty hours, I can smile at the irony that a quotation from Conan the Barbarian seems to best sum up my life lately.

1. Conan The Barbarian : Conan’s Monologue↩

One of the great ironies of philosophical debates is that almost every line of writing that begins with the words “empty rhetoric” is itself an example of “empty rhetoric”: Jefferson called Plato a sophist; I think Jefferson a sophist; someone will one day think me a sophist. And so on it goes, ad infinitum.

Outside of mathematics, everything written by human beings is empty rhetoric so long as you do not see the details that have been implicitly assumed by the author, but this does not preclude the fact that some writers have respect for the laws of logic and others do not.

I finally saw you for the first time in two fucking years, and I told you I was fine. You told me you had made it through the roughest patch, and you tried to make some jokes, and you asked me about my life, and you shook and drank a beer, and I held back the tears. I felt no love, just pity for what you had become.

What a tragic life we’ve built.

“Bad things happen,” you said as I walked you to the porch and faced you through the frigid Boston night. You hugged me as I stood and told me I was a good boy.

“Bad things happen,” I whispered back, and I said I was doing fine, and I walked away, and it was so cold that the tears froze to my face.¹

Only recently has this song begun to strike me as deeply as it does now, though no specific event in my life lately could be fairly said to be responsible for the change. Perhaps only the tenor of my days lately and the thoughts that come with it could be the cause — the reason for this recurrent thought and its accompaniment and even harmonization at a minor third by the unfaltering certainty that the tragedy of our lives is almost always of our own construction.

What a tragic life we’ve built.

1. The Suicide File : Some Mistakes You Never Stop Paying For : Cold Snap↩

Today, while listening to the radio, I heard a strange pronunciation of the word “used”, which, upon consideration, seems to have struck me as odd because, in my own use of English, there are two separate pronunciations for this one word (or at least this ostensibly one word) that are alternatingly used based on the grammatical context of the sentence. The other speaker, not making such a distinction, sounded unnatural to me.

To be precise, in my dialect of English, the past participle of the word “use” in its traditional semantic sense is pronounced as if it were “yoozd” with two voiced consonants, while the word “used” as a part of the periphrastic imperfect tense built around “used to” is pronounced as “yoost” with two voiceless consonants.

This leaves me with three questions:

1. Is this pattern consistent for other speakers? Or is it purely a product of my own upbringing?
2. If the pattern is widespread, is this an example of a pure effect of sandhi (conditioned by the “t” of “to” that follows “used” in the periphrastic) or of something more — a change in pronunciation occuring only in certain grammatical contexts and not in others?
3. Was the speaker on the radio’s pronunciation characteristic of another dialect of English, or simply an example of hypercorrection?