Monday, November 3, 2008

Danger! Latin!

Oh God help us.
The thought police have now banned Latin. No more quid pro quo; no more ending your lists with etc.; no more using e.g. for for example for example. The rationale is that thick people feel intimidated by Latin in sentences and, since we are all required to be thick these days, Latin has to go.
Let's take the linguafacists to a logical conclusion here and carry out the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing on our dictionaries. Good old Germanic words in our language; that's what we want. Let's get rid of all the horrible loan words that are polluting our dictionary and just use modern Anglo-Saxon. Let's get rid of kangaroos, aardvarks, bananas, algebra, ginseng, semtex, yacht, bungalow, autumn, sauna, beef, pork, amen, goulash, banshee, all operas in Italian, bamboo, kiwi, checkmate, sputnik and the thousands from Greek and Latin (virtually the whole vocabulary of Science).
Oh dear. We are starting to look a bit threadbare round the nouns.
Well, obviously. As ever, the idiots in charge have missed the point entirely. We don't need to know that e.g. stands for exempli gratia. We use it because it stands for for example. I'd bet that 99% of the population are happy with using e.g., i.e. and etc. without ever knowing what they are in Latin.
Presumably we will have to bin all our Status Quo and Ultravox CDs too.
Perhaps we should have done that already.

3 comments:

Fiona said...

It's enough to make one weep, isn't it. My favourite quote from BBC News is "A Campaign spokesman said the ban might stop people confusing the Latin abbreviation e.g. with the word 'egg'." Classic.

JAT55 said...

I loved the comment from the Campaign for Utter Darkness:
"It is far better to use words people understand. Often people in power are using the words because they want to feel self important. It is not right that voters should suffer because of some official's ego."
Where does the word EGO come from for Heaven's sake?!

GC said...

Ego could be mistaken for 'Egg'. Ban it I say.

Anyway, I love the way that you state your love of the Germanic language and then complain about Facists!