Tag Archives | Lapsus Linguae

My Name Is Legion

A few months ago I caught a clip of Bill O’Reilly claiming to be “proud of Killing Jesus.”

Tonight he read aloud an email from a viewer saying “I just finished Killing Jesus and it was magnificent.”

Murder cases tend to get complicated when you receive multiple incompatible confessions.


Brave New Words

At the time I wrote about the transubstantiation model of the state I had forgotten Orwell’s very similar description of doublethink:

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them …. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it … to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. … The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt ….

I probably did remember the following passage from Rand:

He was doling his sentences out with cautious slowness, balancing himself between word and intonation to hit the right degree of semi clarity. He wanted her to understand, but he did not want her to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root – since the essence of that modern language, which he had learned to speak expertly, was never to let oneself or others understand anything down to the root.

Whether Rand’s description of “that modern language” was influenced by Orwell’s account of Newspeak I don’t know, just as I don’t know whether Orwell’s Newspeak was influenced in turn by the similar device in Rand’s Anthem.


Samma-vacha

“My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained.” — Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

“Our own counsel we will keep on who is ready.” — Yoda, The Phantom Menace (1998)

What’s depressing about this is not so much that George Lucas doesn’t know what keeping one’s own counsel means,* as that in eighteen years no one had the courage to tell Lucas he’d made a mistake.

 

 

* Lucas evidently think keeping one’s own counsel means deciding for oneself, when it actually means keeping one’s thoughts and plans to oneself. And when you’re in the middle of explaining that you think someone is not ready to be trained, you are precisely not keeping your thoughts to yourself on the matter.


I Am Oz the Great and Terrible

So, Cranston reads it well, of course – except that that pause in the middle leads me to suspect he’s misunderstood the grammar and taken “survive” to be intransitive, rather than transitive with “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed” as its object.


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