New Rule: If you don’t actually know the language, don’t speak about it as if you do.
New Rule
August 6th, 2007 by bracooRadio Interview This Evening @ 6.30 CST
July 31st, 2007 by bracooI’ll be on the radio this evening discussing my article ‘Athletes and Lawlessness’. You can listen here.
Upstaging in the Youtube Debate
July 26th, 2007 by bracooUnlike the last few posts, this one will be brief. While watching the Youtube.com debates on Tuesday night, I noticed for the first time how mainstream candidates were given priority staging against fringe candidates who were pushed… well… to the fringes. Here’s a full frontal picture from the night. Note that Mike Gravel is not even pictured.
This Is My Beloved Son in Whom I Was Well Pleased
July 26th, 2007 by bracooI was recently asked about a particularly vexing passage from the New Testament by a former student. The student came across a difficult passage in her Greek Bible and brought the question to me to try to get a satisfactory explanation. She noticed while reading in the gospel of Matthew that God’s proclamation upon Jesus’ baptism did not read in Greek how she had come to expect while reading it in English.
The text reads Ουτος εστιν ο υιος μου ο αγαπητος εν ω ευδοκησα. This is most frequently translated as "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased"; but my bilingual student objected on the grounds that the second verbal inside the relative clause is, in her words, "in the past tense". If this were indeed so, this would present a serious problem for Christians committed to the perfection of Jesus as it would suggest that there was a point in history in which God was pleased with Jesus but no longer is so. In this case, the passage would read "This is my beloved Son in whom I was well pleased", and translators would be guilty of a heinous misdeed.
So, where does the problem lie, with the translators or with my student? Read the rest of this entry »
I’m Such a Good Friend Because I Hate All the Same People You Do.
July 26th, 2007 by bracooA close reading of the story of the magi will undoubtedly render unsettling results. When naturally moving through the channel of authority, the magi came to Herod the Great, the puppet king of Israel, and inquired of him, “Where is the infant King of the Jews?” (Matthew 2.2). Herod becomes infuriated by the suggestion that another, and not he, is the rightful sovereign of Israel; but Herod is not alone in his frustration.
The text reads, “When King Herod heard this he was perturbed, and so was the whole of Jerusalem” (2.3; italics added). This often overlooked addition is somewhat troubling when one considers the pervasive messianic hopes of the vast majority of Jews in the early first century. This leads the reader to two questions: (1) What does it mean that “the whole of Jerusalem” was “perturbed” along with Herod? (2) Why would they be “perturbed” if they had messianic hopes? Close textual analysis will show that “the whole of Jerusalem” should not be expected to mean every individual in Jerusalem but rather the reigning officials and that these were “perturbed” by the threat that a new king posed to their various power positions.
It is not uncommon for individuals to make use of hyperbole in order to emphasize or show the gravity of a situation. Consider the very common tendency for a friend, while relating the popularity of a recent gathering, to say, “Everyone was there!” By no means does s/he mean, nor does her/his hearer expect her/him to mean, that everyone was there. Instead, s/he are understood to mean by the use of this vernacular that there was indeed a good attendance. Misinterpreting common hyperboles such as this to be a literal description is the stuff of Calvin and Hobbes and not the stuff of real conversation.
Athletes and Lawlessness
July 26th, 2007 by bracooWith charges filed against Michael Vick for his role in illegal dogfighting at his home, I’m led to revisit the high degree of lawlessness among athletes.
One case doesn’t convince you of a trend? You’re a discerning citizen, and I can’t blame you. Try this on for size. 40% of NBA players surveyed in 2001-02 by Jeff Benedict, author of "Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA’s Culture of Rape, Violence & Crime", had criminal records. When compared to the 21% of Americans that have a criminal record right now, the difference is staggering.
A survey of the history of competitive spectator athletics ultimately takes us back to ritualized competitive violence as showcased in the Coliseum of ancient Rome or the Mesoamerican ball game both of which conclude with human sacrifice. The present day athletic competition is little more than a frame within the frame of another kind of activity, ritualized violence.
Election Tactics pt. 1
July 26th, 2007 by bracooThus far it seems that the Republican Party is set for a serious ass-kicking next autumn, but I wouldn’t count them out just yet. After all, this is the party that didn’t let the loss of an election detour their candidate from taking office; and, when the Democrats had the opportunity to correct this misstep four years later, the "IVote Values" blitzkrieg stunned the left and mobilized the right, propagating an air of disenfranchisement among middle-class, white Americans (clearly the most stratified group today in America).
As the "IVote Values" campaign motored its way across the South, the President was simultaneously pushing Congress to act on an amendment recognizing marriage as solely between "one man and one woman". The amendment failed just as expected in July 2004 but had already done enough to ignite the accelerant of alienation lain across the heartland by the "IVote Values" campaign.
Why I Love Language and Languages pt. 1
July 26th, 2007 by bracooIn his book, "Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis", Michael Hoey describes a trip taken to Australia in which he and his wife were touring a national preserve with their guide and a younger, bilingual man, both aborigines of the Anangu people. Encountering their intended destination, an escarpment with climbers at varying levels of progress from base to summit, the Hoey’s guide began to relate the significance of this place to the Anangu. Hoey describes how their guide continued for some time in his own tongue without any pause for the younger man to translate. He accompanies this description with these words, "As he drew [upon the ground with a stick] he talked, clearly and loudly but in his own tongue- either Pitjantjara or Yankunytjatjara, I had no way of knowing which. That was also right. His tongue was here long before English, and we needed to know that we had no right to instant access to his thoughts."
Hoey draws many conclusions from this personal moment and the story their Anangu guide shared with them in the shadow of Uluru, a sacred place for the Anangu people, but the statement that most encapsulates my love for languages lies in the last clause of the quote above, "we had no right to instant access to …".
My interest in language and languages lies atop a greater interest in people and their thoughts. Like Hoey, I can sense that the climbers upon the rock are an exercise in insensitivity, and I want to know why. Unlike him, I’m not sure that a fully adequate translation could ever exist. Part of avoiding the false and arrogant assumption that an individual has the right to or even could achieve instant access to a person or her/ his thoughts is encountering them on their own terms, and the first step in doing so is an attempt to encounter it just as it was meant to sound.
The Precision of “Little Eichmanns”
July 26th, 2007 by bracoo
The firing of Ward Churchill by Colorado University at Boulder on Wednesday should be frightening to anyone interested or invested in the future of the academy. Churchill has a history of criticizing the United States for its policies, both foreign and domestic, and quickly (Sept. 12, 2001) produced a short paper entitled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" that serves as a brief but good introduction to his ideas about Sept. 11 and the War on Terror.
As noted by Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, American Studies Professor at Temple University who debated Bill O’Reilly on Wednesday night, Ward Churchill did not call the victims of 9/11 "Nazis" in his book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality; he called certain victims "little Eichmanns". To the dense masses the two might appear to be synonyms. That is of course after they’ve googled Eichmann to find out who he is. But synonyms they are not.