Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Sancification by age
Dennis Skinner used to be known as the beast of Bolsover, but became, or at least became seen as, a loveable rogue in old age. Tony Benn has followed a similar path. Now it is the turn of Bill Deedes, the subject of acres of fawning prose in the DT. One Richard Davenport-Hines writes about him in the TLS, a propos of a biography, and makes him out to be a very rum cove, but one who had what used to be called a good war, despite trauma near the end. A wow at office politics (although not a wow at more personal relationships) and greasy pole climbing, a feeble Cabinet minister in 1962 and a not much better editor of the DT in 1974. Got on by being nice to those with the power to advance him. But became a very successful columnist in 1987 towards the end of his very long career. And now resides in glory on his cloud on high. What, one wonders, has R D-H got against him? But the lesson is clear. If you last long enough, you will make it to secular saint. Not the other sort as the church still has some standards.
This despite the rather tortuous derivation of secular, being something to do with gaming in ancient Rome.
A new kind of lorry on the way back from Cheam the day before yesterday. A Travis Perkins lorry, with the usual grab between cab and the back (surely there is a proper word for the back half of a non-articulated lorry? Not trailer that is. It will perhaps come to me post-blog), but with two short flights of steel steps, one on each side at the rear-end, topped off with a railing across said end to stop one falling off again. Rather like a stumpy version of the companionways on ferries. And not reaching anywhere near the ground - although the idea is presumably to make it easier for people to get up onto and down from the back when unloading the thing. Maybe I will get to see the stairs at work one day.
Drawn to pompous thoughts by a peice in yesterday's DT about the seriously unpleasant way that negociations between supermarkets and their suppliers are conducted. One can see that there is a lot at stake and that such negociations can hardly be cosy - but do they have to be so nasty? Is it really worth having such cheap food in shops, if this is the way that the shops behave to make it so? What is the point of being rich if we sell - if not poison - our souls along the way? As, I think, Huxley pointed out, the ends do not justify the means, the ends are the means.
And then I was reminded by a discussion of aspect in Slavonic verbs, of the complexity of describing the time occupied by an action - an action (for these purposes) being what it is that a sentence with a verb describes. We suppose that an action occupies a closed interval of time, that is to say that it starts at X and ends at Y, with Y bigger than X. The degenerate case of an instant where X=Y is an unnatural, human artefact. Natural actions occupy positive time. Suppose further we have an interval A, about which we wish to say something. We might want to say where it is in relation to the present (an instant), in which case we have three options. A is before the present, in the past; A straddles the present; or A is after the present, in the future. Alternatively, we might want to say where the interval A stands in relation to the interval B, in which case there are rather more options. A can come entirely before B (A before B), can contain B (B while A), can be contained in B (A while B), can come entirely after B (A after B), or can otherwise overlap with B (A starting before B or A ending after B. I don't think think there is a neat way of saying these ones in English). Then, there is the question of the length of the interval. The intervals appropriate to some verbs - like hit - are presumed to short, while those of others - like is - are presumed to be long. And if one is well oiled, one might start to think about what one might say about discontinuous actions, perhaps better described as successive actions of the same kind. For example, the successive spittings of the decent widow being touched up by Richard III. How do we capture some sense of the number of spittings? Their duration in time?
Generally speaking, tense, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions like while & after enable us to talk about this sort of thing, in English anyway, in a very economical way. But, returning to the Slavs, it seems that they have lighted on a rather differant way of doing tense than us Germanic-Romantic types. As if they have come up with a differant set of axioms to ours, but which amount, in some sense, to the same thing. I dare say there were scholars in the last two centuries who wrote very fat books about tense systems across the world. And district commissioners who had to learn strange languages in the Papuan Highlands, who wrote thin books about their tense systems. These last were probably helped by having learnt Latin and Greek (grammer) at their public schools.
This despite the rather tortuous derivation of secular, being something to do with gaming in ancient Rome.
A new kind of lorry on the way back from Cheam the day before yesterday. A Travis Perkins lorry, with the usual grab between cab and the back (surely there is a proper word for the back half of a non-articulated lorry? Not trailer that is. It will perhaps come to me post-blog), but with two short flights of steel steps, one on each side at the rear-end, topped off with a railing across said end to stop one falling off again. Rather like a stumpy version of the companionways on ferries. And not reaching anywhere near the ground - although the idea is presumably to make it easier for people to get up onto and down from the back when unloading the thing. Maybe I will get to see the stairs at work one day.
Drawn to pompous thoughts by a peice in yesterday's DT about the seriously unpleasant way that negociations between supermarkets and their suppliers are conducted. One can see that there is a lot at stake and that such negociations can hardly be cosy - but do they have to be so nasty? Is it really worth having such cheap food in shops, if this is the way that the shops behave to make it so? What is the point of being rich if we sell - if not poison - our souls along the way? As, I think, Huxley pointed out, the ends do not justify the means, the ends are the means.
And then I was reminded by a discussion of aspect in Slavonic verbs, of the complexity of describing the time occupied by an action - an action (for these purposes) being what it is that a sentence with a verb describes. We suppose that an action occupies a closed interval of time, that is to say that it starts at X and ends at Y, with Y bigger than X. The degenerate case of an instant where X=Y is an unnatural, human artefact. Natural actions occupy positive time. Suppose further we have an interval A, about which we wish to say something. We might want to say where it is in relation to the present (an instant), in which case we have three options. A is before the present, in the past; A straddles the present; or A is after the present, in the future. Alternatively, we might want to say where the interval A stands in relation to the interval B, in which case there are rather more options. A can come entirely before B (A before B), can contain B (B while A), can be contained in B (A while B), can come entirely after B (A after B), or can otherwise overlap with B (A starting before B or A ending after B. I don't think think there is a neat way of saying these ones in English). Then, there is the question of the length of the interval. The intervals appropriate to some verbs - like hit - are presumed to short, while those of others - like is - are presumed to be long. And if one is well oiled, one might start to think about what one might say about discontinuous actions, perhaps better described as successive actions of the same kind. For example, the successive spittings of the decent widow being touched up by Richard III. How do we capture some sense of the number of spittings? Their duration in time?
Generally speaking, tense, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions like while & after enable us to talk about this sort of thing, in English anyway, in a very economical way. But, returning to the Slavs, it seems that they have lighted on a rather differant way of doing tense than us Germanic-Romantic types. As if they have come up with a differant set of axioms to ours, but which amount, in some sense, to the same thing. I dare say there were scholars in the last two centuries who wrote very fat books about tense systems across the world. And district commissioners who had to learn strange languages in the Papuan Highlands, who wrote thin books about their tense systems. These last were probably helped by having learnt Latin and Greek (grammer) at their public schools.
# posted by Jim @ 3:48 AM 
