Collectivized nonsense.

Hey, I stopped posting all of a sudden. What happened there? I do have several things in mind that I'm going to post about, such as:

- V for Vendetta and some other comics.

- Fantastic Beasts and Quidditch Through the Ages, which I hadn't read until yesterday.

- The remaining chapters of GoF.

- Various smart things that I said and that other people said to me, in journals that are not this one.

And I'll make those posts, but at the moment I'm facing LJ with increasing feelings of dismay. languagelog recently had a thing about the phrase crazy talk, and mentioned a more specific usage of it, in a book called Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk by Neil Postman, in which he uses Crazy Talk to mean a "form of collectivized nonsense" that "requires that we be mystified, suspend critical judgment, accept premises without question, and (frequently) abandon entirely the idea that language ought to be connected with reality", even though it "usually puts forward a point of view that is considered virtuous and progressive". I have not read that book, but I have been reading a lot of Crazy Talk lately, let me tell you.

One thing I will say is that I probably should have read FB before coming up with this challenge (for starters, I managed to give the challenge a name that indicates precisely the opposite of what I meant), but hopefully it won't make too much of a difference. I'm working on a Neville/Firenze right now, though I have a bunch of other ideas too and it's a bit distracting.

American Idol and the finale of Project Runway tonight, eh?

Collectivized nonsense.

Hey, I stopped posting all of a sudden. What happened there? I do have several things in mind that I'm going to post about, such as:

- V for Vendetta and some other comics.

- Fantastic Beasts and Quidditch Through the Ages, which I hadn't read until yesterday.

- The remaining chapters of GoF.

- Various smart things that I said and that other people said to me, in journals that are not this one.

And I'll make those posts, but at the moment I'm facing LJ with increasing feelings of dismay. languagelog recently had a thing about the phrase crazy talk, and mentioned a more specific usage of it, in a book called Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk by Neil Postman, in which he uses Crazy Talk to mean a "form of collectivized nonsense" that "requires that we be mystified, suspend critical judgment, accept premises without question, and (frequently) abandon entirely the idea that language ought to be connected with reality", even though it "usually puts forward a point of view that is considered virtuous and progressive". I have not read that book, but I have been reading a lot of Crazy Talk lately, let me tell you.

One thing I will say is that I probably should have read FB before coming up with this challenge (for starters, I managed to give the challenge a name that indicates precisely the opposite of what I meant), but hopefully it won't make too much of a difference. I'm working on a Neville/Firenze right now, though I have a bunch of other ideas too and it's a bit distracting.

American Idol and the finale of Project Runway tonight, eh?