Neuroquirks
I absolutely can't stand the sound of cloth tearing. It makes my skin crawl and my head hurt. There's a name for this kind of thing, but right now I can't think of it. Other people most often experience it when hearing chalk scraping on blackboards.
Almost as jarring to my peculiar sensibility are the titles of certain books.
One is Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." (In my view eyes are instruments, and it is actually the possessor of them and not the orbs that are doing the watching.) Another is Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." (In the ordinary context of things, that statement sounds too obvious to be said, though in his "Cosmos" Carl Sagan reminds us that the Sun actually doesn't rise or set at all and that instead once a day our little point on Earth, wherever it may be, turns once more toward and later away from Sol.)
Another painful title is Maya Angelou's "Gather Together in My Name." (Arrogant) And another is "The Way Things Should Be." (Even more arrogant. In his addled mental condition Russ Limbaugh strikes me as one of the last persons who should even whisper his notions about the way things should be.)
But the worst is a book that came out a decade or so ago and was and still is taken seriously, though I think its title shows a great disrespect for the language, or a cynical attempt to attract notice, or a seriously arrested point of view -- or any combination of those. In it a Francis Fukuyama announced that "The End of History" had arrived. But I would think that instead history is set to keep rolling for eons more, with and without human governments of any kind.
You shouldn't have to read a book just to discover that with his title an author was just being ...precious, unless, while I wasn't looking, certain meanings of words and expressions have changed drastically in recent years. That's possible. Lots of things have slipped under my radar recently or fallen victim to my tendency to shift more and more things, even those that are still thought to be gospel, over into the status of being bullflop.
Almost as jarring to my peculiar sensibility are the titles of certain books.
One is Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." (In my view eyes are instruments, and it is actually the possessor of them and not the orbs that are doing the watching.) Another is Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." (In the ordinary context of things, that statement sounds too obvious to be said, though in his "Cosmos" Carl Sagan reminds us that the Sun actually doesn't rise or set at all and that instead once a day our little point on Earth, wherever it may be, turns once more toward and later away from Sol.)
Another painful title is Maya Angelou's "Gather Together in My Name." (Arrogant) And another is "The Way Things Should Be." (Even more arrogant. In his addled mental condition Russ Limbaugh strikes me as one of the last persons who should even whisper his notions about the way things should be.)
But the worst is a book that came out a decade or so ago and was and still is taken seriously, though I think its title shows a great disrespect for the language, or a cynical attempt to attract notice, or a seriously arrested point of view -- or any combination of those. In it a Francis Fukuyama announced that "The End of History" had arrived. But I would think that instead history is set to keep rolling for eons more, with and without human governments of any kind.
You shouldn't have to read a book just to discover that with his title an author was just being ...precious, unless, while I wasn't looking, certain meanings of words and expressions have changed drastically in recent years. That's possible. Lots of things have slipped under my radar recently or fallen victim to my tendency to shift more and more things, even those that are still thought to be gospel, over into the status of being bullflop.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 7:23 PM
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