Just heard on PBS – Rick Steves on the history of San Gimignano: “A plague decimated the town, reducing its population by two thirds.”
Tag Archives | Lapsus Linguae
Lost In Translation
In “The God Complex” (Doctor Who, new series 6) the dying Minotaur is speaking its last words. Amy Pond asks: “What’s it saying?”
The Doctor answers:
An ancient creature, drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting in space through an endless, shifting maze – for such a creature, death would be a gift.
Then accept it, and sleep well.
I wasn’t talking about myself.
Today I came across a post that interprets these lines very differently from the way I do. Rebecca Kulik writes:
This line comes at the end of the Doctor explaining to his companions why a creature once worshipped as a god would see death as a gift. The sacrifices the creature took to keep itself alive had “soaked it in the blood of innocents.”
Sound a bit familiar? The Doctor thought so, because he felt the need to clarify to his companions that it wasn’t about him.
The look of shock and a bit of sorrow on his face as he delivers the line says it all. The Doctor realizes that the words could apply to himself too.
So Kulik and I apparently disagree about which lines are the Doctor’s translation of the Minotaur and which are the Doctor speaking in propria voce. As I read it, “An ancient creature, drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting in space through an endless, shifting maze – for such a creature, death would be a gift” is the Doctor translating the Minotaur, while “Then accept it, and sleep well” is the Doctor’s own response. But then the final line “I wasn’t talking about myself” is on my interpretation not the Doctor’s own remark, but rather his translation of the Minotaur’s counter-response. Indeed, no other interpretation initially occurred to me.
And I think my interpretation makes more sense: why would he need to tell Amy and Rory that he’s not talking about himself, when they’ve just heard him tell the Minotaur to accept death, and so have no reason to interpret the first speech as anything but the Doctor’s translation of the Minotaur? And the Doctor’s shock makes more sense too. Or so it seems to me. Comments?
A Little Unbalanced
In the wake of the recent NSA revelations, there’s increased talk about the need to “balance” freedom against security. I even see people recycling Larry Niven’s law that freedom + security = a constant.
Nonsense. What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with – by anyone, be they our own government, other nations’ governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?
You can’t trade off freedom against security because they’re exactly the same thing.
How to Translate the Gospel of John
It all began with an argument; and the argument had to do with God, and God was the whole argument.
The argument had to do with God right from the start.
Every topic came up in the course of the argument; and if it hadn’t been for the argument, none of these topics would have been raised.
It was a very lively argument, and its liveliness made it very illuminating for everybody involved.
Robots Are Stupid
A spam message I received this morning begins this way:
Hope you are well, I was surfing through your website “www.auburn.edu” and realized that despite having a good design; it was not ranking on any of the search engines for most of the keywords pertaining to your domain.
Cordial and Sanguine, Part 56: The Mind Cannot Foresee Its Own Eternal Recurrence, Recurrence the Second
Re this, it’s a good thing Corey Robin didn’t know that Hayek used to tell people to pronounce his name “hi-yek, as in high-explosive.” Only a short step from there to “I am not a man, I am dynamite.”