Month: May 2017

The Sentence Fragment Fully Fragmented

WalterI was taught to avoid sentence fragments. And that is what I taught my students.  But being as flexible and reasonable as you all know me to be, I would allow the occasional exception. Suppose you have just crafted a paragraph summarizing Kant's views on space and time. I would allow you a 'Thus Kant' as coda. There is no call to be as hidebound as a schoolmarm.

But recently we have been witnessing the fragmentation of the sentence fragment. Example:

 

 

Mr. Trump, meantime, is breaking all the china in Washington as he works to reinvent the wheel. Every. Single. Day.

'Every single day' is a sentence fragment. 'Every. Single. Day.' is a sentence fragment fully fragmented.

I am assuming, hopefully, that no one will take the further step of breaking words into their constituent syllables.

Full-on fragmentation cannot be fairly laid at the doorstep of Hemingway any more than conceptual relativism can be fairly laid at the doorstep of Kant. But these gentlemen unwittingly played a role. Or it might be better to say that they set the stage.

I may from now on use Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' puppet to signal language rants.  Don't get too excited over my rants. After all, a rant, by definition, involves a certain exaggeration of umbrage. 

Nullification Crisis

How long can we last?  Not long without some serious political cleansing of our institutions of the leftist scum that years of conservative inaction have allowed to accumulate.

Myron Magnet at City Journal:

Wait: let me get this straight. It’s legally binding for two underlings in the civil rights divisions of the Departments of Education and Justice to send out a “Dear Colleague” letter declaring that, as these bureaucrats interpret Title IX of Congress’s  Education Amendments of 1972, colleges and universities can’t get any federal funding if they don’t make special accommodations for transgendered students, however defined; but it is not legal for the president of the United States, pursuant to the Constitution’s injunction that he ensure that the laws “be faithfully executed,” to deny some federal funding to cities that declare themselves “sanctuaries” from federal immigration laws, and that accordingly forbid their officials from cooperating with federal authorities in implementing them, as Congress has demanded?

Old Mountaineers and Bold Mountaineers

I'm no climber, but I love walking in the mountains. On a solo backpacking adventure in the magnificent Sierra Nevada some years back I overheard a snatch of conversation:

There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers.

Ueli Steck, the great Swiss climber, is dead at 40, having fallen near Everest.

I have repeatedly asked myself, why I do this. The answer is pretty simple: because I want to do it and because I like it. I don’t like being restricted. When I climb, I feel free and unrestricted; away from any social commitments. This is what I am looking for.

I have a better answer. Steck climbed because he was very, very good at it, and we humans love doing what we are good at. Freedom from social commitments can be had in far less perilous ways.  

I am reminded of something the great marathoner Bill Rodgers once said when asked why he ran and won 26.2 mile races at a blistering sub-five-minute-per-mile pace. "I like to be be fit." (I quote from memory) But of course one can be very fit indeed without running such a punishing distance at such a punishing pace.