Death sport (or: Me and my OED)

Mean tounge insinuated earlier that the angelically fancy words I use in your treatises do not reside inside my head, but rather on the pages of a dictionary.

In this post I will first make a statement about that accusation and then present my views on the nature of language and its relation to other aspects of living, and then a couple of words on foreign language learning.

The fact that one uses a dictionary to corroborate one's intuitive sense of words and language in the composing of a text doesn't necessarily mean that the chunk of text isn't one's own. Or does it? After all, you don't blame a surgeon for using highly sophisticated surgical tools in order to save lives, do you?

The craft of compassion and tender care necessary for these treatises to be handed down to you by the ancients is similar to that of a surgeon's scalpel. What we do here is by no means different from what takes place on an operating table:
The devotion, minute preparation, highly dextrous execution, an untainted harmony between thought and action. All is present.
So if any readers are lost on the operation blog that was however regrettable – still inevitable. Consider this a complete rebuttal.

What's so damn interesting about language then? Has it some intrinsic value to me? I think that viewing language as an end in itself is a mistake. To continually widen your lingual horizons is about a joy of discovery and association rather than that of verbal masturbation and domination.
This is not only about mere vocabulary. All the same from time to time we come to realise that, even though it wasn't our intention, we've been fucking ourselves. This treatise's "Gentlemen's agreement" is one example of using verbality as a battering ram and a tool of domination.

Language has power. Truth however, must not be subordinated language. It is the application of language to get closer to the truth that I praise, not the mistaken notion of using aforementioned to argue for the relativity of truth.
Having that said, I will no longer try to wage war on straw men. Just for clarity's sake.

A childish fascination for the many aspects of language has made me appreciate the way in which it so closely ties in with concepts, differences in, and changes of, culture and personal identity.
One of the inescapable beauties of communcation is the restraining and inhibiting factors that the very core of language establishes, and won't relinquish the speaker. What I cannot put into words, I cannot understand for myself nor make others understand. That is a perfect segway into the next topic.

Foreign languages can be utterly interesting if one invests time and effort into them. I say invest because there's a huge payoff. The only risk involved is that if given that no application is found, it will fade, and so will your interest in maintaining it.

The chin mustn't be tucked in. A peculiarity about language learning is that to improve, one must continually make mistakes, a lot of them. A peculiarity about humans is that we dislike making mistakes and to appear foolish and ignorant in the eyes of others. As I have shown, these do not fit very well together.

The process of learning a new language demands distance and fearlessness on the learner's behalf and patience and tolerance on the reservoir's. Trying to match this can be extremely difficult, but should, according to me, always be the goal when building up a solid foundation for learning a foreign language.

Revised for clarity on May 26th 2006