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[tarigwaemir]

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Got this quiz from durberville who got the same result, actually:


Youarechosentospeak INUKTITUT, thelanguageoftheesikimoswhoarelivinginGreenland.

What language are you supposed to speak?
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(By the way, that caption is supposed to be funny because Inuit or "Inukitut" actually does look like long strings of words put together without any spaces in between, at least in most standard romanization. I can't really explain why it's transliterated that way, because I know nothing about the language itself, but Inuit is the language they're referring to when they say Eskimos have seventy words for snow. It's supposed to be quite poetic, I hear. I get all my information secondhand, and in this case, it's from reading The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt, which has made me a polyglot wannabe.)

Oh, and according to this quiz (from tryogeru), I'm a centrist. That's not particularly a good description. I'm Confucian about most social issues which makes me conservative I suppose but not in a Western sense, Machiavellian about political issues which makes me a pragmatist, and Hobbesian about foreign policy which makes me an internationalist to the extreme. (Hey, at least Einstein agreed with me!) Alex thinks I'm authoritarian, which is sort of true, I suppose, but hardly precise.

Actually, many people are imprecise in their diction, which aggravates me to no end. I mean, I had this argument with the aforementioned Alex last Friday, in which I was trying to get across the point that America didn't have too many intellectuals of worldwide stature until after it attained superpower status largely because there is something about American culture that panders to mediocrity. (Alex was asserting that the pandering to mediocrity part is all FDR's fault because he initiated the welfare state.) I was trying to say that America may be a meritocracy in an economic sense but that culturally, intellectually it doesn't really encourage talents to be developed to their fullest (which is completely true because no one likes admitting in America, especially in the sphere of public education which was the original topic of debate, that not everyone starts off on an equal footing and that some people are simply more advantaged than others). Anyway, before I start recounting the entire discussion, he said that my point was that America wasn't decadent, which really startled me because that's not really the definition of decadent. I floundered and compromised for a bit then tried to figure out what he meant by decadence afterwards, and I realized he was using it in connotation with excessive aestheticism, the value of art for its own sake, which is a part of decadence of course. But that has nothing to do with what I was thinking about, which incorporated intellectual progress on all spheres, not simply art. I mean, my whole point was that America had no great scientists or mathematicians until after it reached its global power status. And to a certain limited extent, very few great artists, but that's nothing to do with America's position on decadence.

Honestly, I consider decadence to involve the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, and in that respect, American society has always involved some element of decadence (or at least potential for decadence).

By the way, my original point was that people can be terribly imprecise, because words are like dandelion puffs, with a precise center and a whole lot of fluff around it. And that fluff is precisely what causes misunderstandings and makes my head ache. Connotations are horribly subjective, which you all probably knew already, but I'd like to complain about it just one more time.

...Tari