Rant
I now see, and this surprised me, that Geoff Pullum, though he may frequently break new ground
on
the incivility front, has yet to take his rantmanship to the highest level. Indeed, the
linguist who can master the rant genre is a rare beast, for as a group we
have an unfortunate tendency to attempt reasoned argument when wild
stacking of unrelated quotations and psuedo-factoids would have done
the job so much more admirably.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is courtesy of Frankie Roberto and his
excellent weblog
which first introduced the wider world to a latin lover without whom
our lives were ordinary that I am able to bring you today's
distinguished perorator, a denizen of the far off blighty ol' shores
for which Geoff and I weep
through every wretchedly sun-drenched California day, and a man for
whom, as you will see, no position on the value of
descriptivism
as against prescriptivism is too
simplistic, for whom any distinction between linguistics and
deconstructivist social studies is unnecessary, a man for whom no
sequitur is too
non, and so on and so forth, until
finally this sentence, nay paragraph, comes to a close.
I must ask you to select
appropriate
audio
background, be upsitting, and give it up, absolutely every last
frothy globule of it, for my personal ranter of the year Ian Bruton
Simmonds, and his wild christmas rant originally bombasticulated before
the preposterously named
The Queen's
English Society, a festival
of trouser stuffing entitled
A
Criticism of Modern Linguistics with Suggestion for Improvement of
English through the BBC.
Posted by David Beaver at February 4, 2005 01:40 AM