“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, August 9, 2010

The Fremdsprache Ambush

Graham Harman has an excellent post on a form of one-upsmanship that might be one for his Gallery of Grassholes or whatever it's called... It's apropos (in a humoresque way) the ongoing conversation about languages on various blogs today. He calls it The Fremdsprache Ambush, which is a fabulously recursive thing to call it, and sounds vaguely like a chess move or an event in the Franco-Prussian War.

My absolute favorite example of this? “
Entscheidungsproblem.”

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