🚀 go-pugleaf

(Jonathan Swift, author of _Gulliver's Travels_, once wrote a satirical piece
called "A Modest Proposal".  At the time, the British Isles was experiencing
population explosion and famine concurrent with the social upheavals of the
industrial revolution.  The richer classes were especially concerned that
the state of affairs would threaten their own wellbeing.  He suggested the
rich might solve the problem by buying excess babies from the poor and eating
them.)



ZORBA THE GEEK quotes me and comments:

[[[
>seems to me that instead of eliminating "To Be" we might add new variations
>which give grades of exclusivity.
>
>
>"To Be" -- 'to have the attribute of'
>"To Ba" -- 'attributed to the set of'
>"To Bu" -- 'to exist in the state of'
>
>--
>Alan Barclay
>

Are you serious or is this some kind of joke? How long do you think it will
take before 'they' add these words to the spell checking dictionaries?
]]]

I guess I didn't grin hard enough; it was just A Modest Proposal.

The English language is a mess of pragmatic solutions to the demands of
communication.  Every decade brings some new habit or fad of speech which
slurs the old rules and leads to a need for new ones.  Every writer has
the challenge of learning the accepted rules of communication, then juggling
these with the current wave of change and using a collage of the two to
get his point across.  This is one of the reasons writing is an art.

I agree that English has gaps of imprecision and fuzziness.  But I
believe that the dynamics of language will provide patches when they become
necessary (q.v. the current androngynization of pronouns, etc).  I feel this
discussion of semantics of "To Be" is a little trivial, and perhaps silly
--though I admit it is an interesting intellectual excersize.

--
Alan Barclay


alan_barclay@mindlink.bc.ca