Once again with the flummoxation by tabulating machine…

I don’t seem to be able to catch a break—yesterday Blogger was spiked all day, then I get back from lunch and find someone in DP has yanked the string out of my tin can. Not just no Blogger, but no Internet AT ALL. ::sigh::

Oh, well. What better way to pass the time than working on my carpal tunnel syndrome some more by providing you yet another excerpt from my little Christmas gift from sweet Reba, Everyone’s Writing-Desk Book, (the 1903 edition) written by Charles Nisbet and Don Lemon.

Today, the boys were talking about Words and Their Mutual Congruity, in which they paid special attention to the organic nature of language; using native speech in lieu of foreign; and gave a unique exegesis on the growth of Romance languages out of their pure and sturdy Latin roots (except, strangely, German, which in their eyes seems to have sprung fully formed from the dank, mossy forests of Prussia—thus explaining words like “Schönheitsgefühl.”)

All fine and dandy, until they come to a beastly mongrel—

English a Mixed Tongue.—Unhappily, in some wise, the English tongue is a manifold blend. The grit and staple of it, however, is Anglo-Saxon, and no speaker or writer need hope that his words will find their way straightly and tellingly to the great body of English-speaking folk, if his speech do not ring, most of all, of Anglo-Saxon. It is Anglo-Saxon that names all the homely things, whether in cotter’s house, in workshop, or afield, in Britain, and all the homely bearings that British folk hold to one another. Anglo-Saxon are sun, moon, and stars; winds, waters, and seas; hill, dale, stream, brook, and burn; wood, bush, tree, timber, hurst, holt, weald, field, meadow, grass, turf, and hay; father and mother, husband and wife, children, son and daughter, sister and brother; farm, house, town, home, hearth, roof, fireside, and hall; birth, wedding, and death; cradle and bed; sleep and slumber; garden, horse and cow, geese, cocks and hens, laverock and linnet; daisies and buttercups; head, face, eye, nose, ear, tongue, chin, neck, breast, limbs, arms, fingers, etc., etc. It is Anglo-Saxon that sees, hears, smells, smacks, feels, handles, walks, strolls, talks, sings, whistles, plays, dances, works, ploughs, harrows, reaps, spins, weaves, builds, rigs ships, sways land and sea, and, doing most of the rough and hard toil of the world, speaks the words of truth and pith.

Sounds about right to me. Now it's off to my secrete remote bunker to post this.

UPDATE: Well, trying to post this has been problematic. I tried e-mailing it to myself at my Yahoo account from work, but since apparently everything is down here, it didn't go through. Luckily, I had the foresight to save it on a disc and took it with me to the Bunker. Unluckily, the silly computers that were available at the Undisclosed Location don't have any sort of word processor program. (All the ones with Word were taken up by homeless guys and students.) Thinking very slowly, I decided to save it to my Yahoo Briefcase thingy. Tried to open it and got a huge amount of Wordpad goobledygook, but figuring I could edit in Blogger, I cut it anyway. Then went to Blogger and hit Paste. Got this--ø#[]. Crap. Turned it off and came back over here and met up with our MIS guy in the lobby, who says that there's a building up the street with a big DS3 line we route through, and it's their line that's down, and until BellSouth could fix it, nobody was doing anything for several blocks around. ::sigh::

Got a Coke from the snack bar, and came up here and HEY! IT WORKS!!
posted by Terry at 2:41:00 PM