From wriddick at usa.net Sat Feb 1 08:03:45 2003 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2003 07:03:45 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] 2003 MLA Annual Convention and Walker Percy In-Reply-To: <001501c2c7e4$162a7f70$0301000a@AFAC955012> References: Message-ID: >I am considering proposing a session on Percy for this year's convention. I >had thought of the theme of "time and place" in his work -- which has a vast >array of possibilities, > ... >What does Percy have to say to humankind in the 21st century -- anything? >Is his message still relevant? Why not look back on the 20th century now that it's closed - from Southern white flight into mall-festooned suburbs to the rise of religious fundamentalists taking advantage of all the benefits of modern science? Would Osama Bin Laden be a fan of heavy sodium? Does Trent Lott shop at The Gap? Instead of that section on Donahue in _Lost in the Cosmos_, what would happen if all those characters found themselves on an episode of _The Bachelorette_ instead? As we go from bourbon and uppers to steroids, celebrity, ecstasy and sex (apparently not to be confused with ecstasy) has much changed or are we just in a different rotation? You know, look back at the "century of death" Walker Percy-style. What about the future? Will Christ make it back in reruns or will He be replaced by ever more reality TV? I've got to go now. The Abswing(tm) is advertising. Where'd I leave my phone again...? From Craig.Abruzzo at morganstanley.com Wed Feb 5 14:48:52 2003 From: Craig.Abruzzo at morganstanley.com (Craig Abruzzo) Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 14:48:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [percy-l] Wedding Reading Message-ID: <200302051948.OAA26419@hqsas64.ms.com> I am looking for assistance in finding an appropriate reading for a wedding I am attending in London for a southern gentleman and an english bride. I have settled on Walker Percy, but would appreciate any suggestions from this expert group as to potential readings (passages, not just quotes). Any insights are helpful, and there is a cheeky bottle of merlot on offer for anyone who suggests that 'perfect piece'. Thanks in advance for your help. Craig From marcus at loyno.edu Wed Feb 5 18:26:22 2003 From: marcus at loyno.edu (marcus at loyno.edu) Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 17:26:22 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] Wedding Reading Message-ID: <3e419d9e.5a4010.0@loyno.edu> I can easily come up with a passle of passages from WP that should NOT be read at your ceremony! Marcus Smith >I am looking for assistance in finding an appropriate reading for a wedding >I am attending in London for a southern gentleman and an english bride. I >have settled on Walker Percy, but would appreciate any suggestions from >this expert group as to potential readings (passages, not just quotes). >Any insights are helpful, and there is a cheeky bottle of merlot on offer >for anyone who suggests that 'perfect piece'. Thanks in advance for your >help. Craig > > > >-- > >An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > >Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > From jdp at scn.org Wed Feb 5 20:00:43 2003 From: jdp at scn.org (Jonathan Potter) Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 17:00:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Wedding Reading In-Reply-To: <200302051948.OAA26419@hqsas64.ms.com> Message-ID: Craig, Maybe a passage from The Second Coming, with Will and Allie in the greenhouse: His hand was in the hollow of her back, pressing her against him. She came against him, willingly. It was a marvel to her this yielding and flowing against him, amazing that I was made so and is this *it* then (whatever *it* is) and what will happen to myself ... and will I for the first time in my life get away from my everlasting self sick of itself to be with another self and is that what *it* is and if not then what? He kissed her on the lips. Ah then *it* is that too after all, the dancing adream in the Carolina moonlight except that it was sleeting and it was firelight not moonlight on the glass. "Oh my," she said. "Imagine." "Imagine what?" "Imagine having you around at four o'clock in the afternoon." This is on p. 257 of the hardbound copy of the book, and there are a few other potential passages before and after, like about Will being prone to falling down and Allie being a good hoister. Best wishes, Jonathan Potter On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Craig Abruzzo wrote: > I am looking for assistance in finding an appropriate reading for a wedding > I am attending in London for a southern gentleman and an english bride. I > have settled on Walker Percy, but would appreciate any suggestions from > this expert group as to potential readings (passages, not just quotes). > Any insights are helpful, and there is a cheeky bottle of merlot on offer > for anyone who suggests that 'perfect piece'. Thanks in advance for your > help. Craig > > > > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > From sellick at bigpond.net.au Thu Feb 6 15:33:42 2003 From: sellick at bigpond.net.au (Peter Sellick) Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 04:33:42 +0800 Subject: [percy-l] WP and Fukyama Message-ID: <002c01c2ce1f$0a915580$caec8890@pc> This article is only obliquely about WP but I thought it might interest the list members. Revd. Dr. Peter Sellick, Personal Page: http://users.bigpond.net.au/sellick 37 Weld St. Nedlands WA 6009. 08 93868907 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From chad at wonkworld.com Mon Feb 10 22:30:50 2003 From: chad at wonkworld.com (Chad DePue) Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 19:30:50 -0800 Subject: [percy-l] Re: WP and MacIntyre References: <002c01c2ce1f$0a915580$caec8890@pc> Message-ID: <000e01c2d17d$f9fd4f00$0a00000a@wonkworld.com> Peter, reading your "Theological Reflections on MacIntyre's After Virtue" essay on the site below gave rise to a few questions as to how Percy and Alasdair MacIntyre intersect. I'd like to ask both you and the list if there is a connection between the philosophies of the two writers and if so, how? My initial thoughts (and i have not finished After Virtue but have read enough to know where he's headed) are that MacIntyre sees our ethical crisis as precipitated by predominately external events - ie the 'cataclysm' of the last 300 years that has fractured our language and vocabularly such that we are like kids dressed up as doctors attempting to perform 'surgery', throwing around 'adult' words and concepts that have lost their meaning and that we have no chance of understanding. Here he's talking about scientists in a hypothetical culture after some sort of world-war-inducing-cataclysm: "In such a culture men would use expressions such as "neutrino", and "mass", specific gravity", "atomic mass" in systematic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear surprising to us." Yet Percy sees this ethical dilemma as more internal - a loss of existential identity. We are not so much using tools we don't understand as focusing on our great successes in science and technology, which gives us the vague yet hauntingly empty feeling of 'progress' while our souls and our humanity atrophe. I quoted MacIntye from After Virtue here (taken from your article). I'd love the list to comment on how this fits into Percy's views on language and our ethical and theological crisis. Also, to those who haven't read the first chapter of After Virtue, i'm not doing it justice. -chad ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Sellick To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 12:33 PM Subject: [percy-l] WP and Fukyama This article is only obliquely about WP but I thought it might interest the list members. Revd. Dr. Peter Sellick, Personal Page: http://users.bigpond.net.au/sellick 37 Weld St. Nedlands WA 6009. 08 93868907 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From piat1 at bellsouth.net Tue Feb 11 08:09:13 2003 From: piat1 at bellsouth.net (James Piat) Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 08:09:13 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Re: WP and MacIntyre References: <002c01c2ce1f$0a915580$caec8890@pc> <000e01c2d17d$f9fd4f00$0a00000a@wonkworld.com> Message-ID: <003001c2d1ce$c5ecbdd0$0101a8c0@D68RS511> Dear Chad, Folks-- I found many fascinating essays on Peter's home page! Briefly I thought one of the points of agreement between both MacIntyre (as presented by Peter) and Percy might be in the failure of so called scientific objectivity to capture the teleological center of the narrative that is man. Thanks for bring Peter's fine essay to our attention. Best wishes, Jim Piat Peter, reading your "Theological Reflections on MacIntyre's After Virtue" essay on the site below gave rise to a few questions as to how Percy and Alasdair MacIntyre intersect. I'd like to ask both you and the list if there is a connection between the philosophies of the two writers and if so, how? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karey at charter.net Mon Feb 17 12:06:38 2003 From: karey at charter.net (Karey L. Perkins) Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 12:06:38 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] here we go again Message-ID: <007001c2d6a6$ef0a4ca0$0301000a@AFAC955012> >From the current London Independent: Birds that sing complex songs give clue to origins of human syntax By Steve Connor, Science Editor, in Denver 17 February 2003 Parrots, hummingbirds and songbirds - which are able to learn complex, repetitive songs - have provided scientists with a unique insight into the origins of syntax, the rules that govern human speech. A team of researchers led by Erich Jarvis of Duke University in North Carolina has found the key regions of a bird's brain which enable it to construct and remember the complicated sequences of sounds which make up birdsong. The learning of songs or calls in the animal kingdom is rare. Only three distantly related types of bird and three types of mammal - humans, bats and cetaceans - are capable of vocal learning, which is regarded as the essential first step in the evolution of human language. Dr Jarvis told the association's conference that his work on parrots, hummingbirds and songbirds had led to the identification of circuits in the brain's cerebrum called glutamate receptors, which are involved in the transmission of nerve impulses as well as the growth of new nerve connections when the brain is learning a song. Even though hummingbirds have some of the smallest brains of vertebrates, they are still capable of learning and remembering extraordinarily complex songs. "The main thing they do with their vocal specialisations is to defend territories and attract mates and the more complex the syntax, the sexier the song," Dr Jarvis said. "These little songbirds - which are some of the smallest birds around - can do more complex things with their vocalisations than say, a horse, which has a much larger brain. So this tells us what really matters is the presence or absence of a circuit in the brain, regardless of the size of the animal," he said. "Although it might seem far- fetched, I would not be surprised if these ancient receptors could some day help us to identify the entire system of brain regions for vocal learning and language in humans in a way that hasn't been done before," Dr Jarvis said. "If it is true that these receptors can be used to identify the human language areas it will help surgeons to localise these brain areas during surgery so that they can learn not to touch them." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From piat1 at bellsouth.net Mon Feb 17 12:38:59 2003 From: piat1 at bellsouth.net (James Piat) Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 12:38:59 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] here we go again References: <007001c2d6a6$ef0a4ca0$0301000a@AFAC955012> Message-ID: <002801c2d6ab$768dc770$0101a8c0@D68RS511> Thanks Karey, Hmmm, syntax and melody --- sequence and meaning. I've never thought much about that although my violin teacher is doing his damnednest to get me to understand music as something more than just mere emoting -- mostly frustration in my case. I've long held the suspicion that syntax was mostly an efficient scaffold for encoding our more or less universally shared conceptions of time and space as the lattice in which events occured -- so this universal spatial-temporal scaffold of what we say is mostly encoded syntactically and the rest (the events themselves) semantically. We could do it all semantically but given the universality of our spatial-temporal conceptions encoding the subject-predicate template gramatically seems the most efficient way to go. Of course I know next to nothing about what the scholars say. The notion that an ability to easily learn, store, retrive and (prehaps most importantly) express sequential information is I suppose critical to communication. But I also wonder to what extent representation can occur independent of communication. I think the two are more closely connected that generally supposed. Perhaps inextricably so. Best wishes, Jim Piat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wriddick at usa.net Tue Feb 18 00:06:48 2003 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 23:06:48 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] euthanasia, handicap and Nazis (Nazis?! I *hate* Nazis!) Message-ID: There's an interesting article written by an atheist disabled advocate who went to a Princeton debate to oppose the "humane" killing of "hopelessly" disabled infants. It's a rather interesting melange of things which might be of interest to the list. I'd merely add that whenever you get into a debate with a utilitarian, you're dead the moment you allow them to assume that people should get what they want. That means suffering doesn't necessarily make you a "worse person." Sometimes, as hard as it is to understand, it makes you better. Oh, yeah. There's no such a thing as rational decision-making in human beings. Doesn't exist empirically. Desires always conflict. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/16disabled.html "If talk didn't matter, would you make it your life's work?" From PARLINS at culver.org Sat Feb 22 15:43:47 2003 From: PARLINS at culver.org (Parlin, Steven) Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 15:43:47 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Re: WP and MacIntyre Message-ID: <580A6654EC74D511B41600034779BEDE07058DA5@exchangeserver.culver.org> Fantastic Wonderful Terrific Fabulous Great At one time, these words --and others could be included here as well-- were separate in meaning. Now they are all but indistinguishable (I suspect in part due to the relatively recent rampage of "Nicespeak"). Not sure what Percy would have to say about it, but I'm sure he'd have attributed it to the word being evacuated of its meaning. Just thought, I'd share this. It came up in clas today. SP -----Original Message----- From: Chad DePue [mailto:chad at wonkworld.com] Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 10:31 PM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Re: WP and MacIntyre Peter, reading your "Theological Reflections on MacIntyre's After Virtue" essay on the site below gave rise to a few questions as to how Percy and Alasdair MacIntyre intersect. I'd like to ask both you and the list if there is a connection between the philosophies of the two writers and if so, how? My initial thoughts (and i have not finished After Virtue but have read enough to know where he's headed) are that MacIntyre sees our ethical crisis as precipitated by predominately external events - ie the 'cataclysm' of the last 300 years that has fractured our language and vocabularly such that we are like kids dressed up as doctors attempting to perform 'surgery', throwing around 'adult' words and concepts that have lost their meaning and that we have no chance of understanding. Here he's talking about scientists in a hypothetical culture after some sort of world-war-inducing-cataclysm: "In such a culture men would use expressions such as "neutrino", and "mass", specific gravity", "atomic mass" in systematic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear surprising to us." Yet Percy sees this ethical dilemma as more internal - a loss of existential identity. We are not so much using tools we don't understand as focusing on our great successes in science and technology, which gives us the vague yet hauntingly empty feeling of 'progress' while our souls and our humanity atrophe. I quoted MacIntye from After Virtue here (taken from your article). I'd love the list to comment on how this fits into Percy's views on language and our ethical and theological crisis. Also, to those who haven't read the first chapter of After Virtue, i'm not doing it justice. -chad ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Sellick To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 12:33 PM Subject: [percy-l] WP and Fukyama This article is only obliquely about WP but I thought it might interest the list members. Revd. Dr. Peter Sellick, Personal Page: http://users.bigpond.net.au/sellick 37 Weld St. Nedlands WA 6009. 08 93868907 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From PARLINS at culver.org Sat Feb 22 16:12:12 2003 From: PARLINS at culver.org (Parlin, Steven) Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 16:12:12 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Here's the full article --- Message-ID: <580A6654EC74D511B41600034779BEDE07058DA7@exchangeserver.culver.org> The New Statesman Essay - The tyranny of Nicespeak Deborah Cameron Monday 5th November 2001 Today, even academics are told how to answer the phone, and every hospital has a "mission statement". Deborah Cameron on the murder of public English In 1990 I returned to Britain after two years abroad, and found that I no longer spoke the language. My difficulty was not with ordinary conversation, but with public discourse. The rules had changed, and I could not get the hang of them. I was baffled when a worker at a fast-food outlet handed me a solitary carton of milk with a cheery: "Enjoy your meal!" I was unsure how to respond when bank tellers or supermarket checkout staff addressed me by name, as though I were an intimate friend. I pored uncomprehendingly over the "charters" that came through my letterbox, pledging the council, the Inland Revenue and the local GP surgery to the highest standards of "customer care". It was the same at work. My academic colleagues had adopted new ways of using English, and while I understood the words themselves, I had no idea what real-world entities they referred to. What, for instance, was the mysterious "quality" that we discussed at every meeting? What did people mean when they spoke earnestly about "aims and objectives" and "learning outcomes"? I was equally puzzled when I read the "mission statement" a committee had put together the previous year. This struck me as a long and convoluted statement of the obvious: we educated undergraduates, and we strove to do this well. Why was that a "mission", and who needed to have it spelt out? Then there were the instructions on how to answer the phone: "X Institute of Higher Education, Deborah Cameron speaking." At least we were not required to append chirpily: "How may I help you?'' But it seemed strange that instructions had been issued at all, and stranger still that they were generally obeyed. Only a few years before, administrators who took it upon themselves to prescribe a standard phone salutation to academics would have been derided as ignorant petty tyrants. The changes I was so conscious of had actually begun some time before I went away. I had dismissed them as passing fads. I returned, however, to what had become a revolution in public language. The likes of my colleagues no longer thought of this new tongue as an alien one, into which they translated thoughts originally composed in a more familiar idiom. They had become native speakers. Today, this language pervades both the public and private sectors, and much of the working population is fluent in it. We may joke (as Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, does) about the cliched absurdity of mission statements and standardised phone greetings, but we find it hard to remember a time when these were not cliches - when we reacted to them with genuine incomprehension, and sometimes with genuine outrage. Cultural critics had little to say about the revolution. Many were caught up in a far noisier debate, as advocates or opponents of "political correctness". Arguments raged about the linguistic practices of a radical fringe; Orwell's Newspeak was invoked to portray feminist councillors and anti-racist teachers as the new thought police. Meanwhile, with far less fanfare (and almost no sustained critical analysis), mainstream public English suffered a corporate takeover. I use the phrase "corporate takeover" because the new public language was shaped by ideas and practices that originated in the business world. The "mission statement" - and its shorter, pithier relative the "vision statement" - was popularised by management gurus such as Tom Peters, who noted that successful or "excellent" companies had a clear definition of their core goals and values, which they communicated explicitly to every employee. Most such statements do not refer explicitly to the real core goal of any capitalist enterprise: "Our mission is to make the largest possible profit for our shareholders." Nor, on the whole, do they allude directly to whatever it is that the company actually does. The journalist Dorothy Grace-Elder once reported on a visit to a Glasgow sanitary-ware factory, during which the workers were asked if they knew the company's mission; after a moment of puzzled silence, one finally replied: "Wur mission's tae make lavvies." Old-style manufacturing industries did not need mission statements. The mission statement belongs to an era in which the main purpose of many companies is not making but branding things; the language in which a company represents itself to the world is part of its brand-image. As part of the marketising process that began during the Thatcher era and has continued to the present day, British public sector institutions were also encouraged to view themselves as brands, and to use language similarly, for purposes of self-promotion rather than public information. Nobody needs to be told what universities, schools and hospitals do, but they all have mission and vision statements now, most of them comprising platitudes such as "serving the community" and "pursuing excellence". These slogans are as meaningless as the old mottos on schoolchildren's blazers: "Pietas" or "Manners Makyth Man". That they are written in modern English only emphasises their vacuity: as a friend of mine observed when asked to speak at a conference on "pursuing excellence in facilities management": "Who the hell would pursue second-rateness?" The branding of language does not stop with the mission statement. One of the things I found most disconcerting on my return home was the proliferation of formulaic and scripted exchanges in the service industries - the standard phone salutations delivered with standard perky intonation; the replacement of traditional British courtesies by Americanisms such as "How may I help you?"; the exhortations to "Enjoy your meal" (uttered whether or not they made sense in a given context). This way of speaking did not evolve naturally; it reflected the corporation's growing desire to regulate and control the language that its representatives used. The idea was to subordinate the personality of the individual speaker to a centrally designed corporate voice. Only if everyone in an organisation said the same thing in the same way could customers receive what one company's how-to-answer-the-phone manual called "a consistent experience of the brand". An extreme instance made news earlier this year: a call-centre in Bangalore, serving US customers, required its employees to conceal their "offshore" location by impersonating Americans. Operators not only perfected their Midwestern accents; they invented American names, and personal histories to go with them, and watched episodes of Friends to keep their colloquialisms current. But you don't have to go to India to find workers adopting prescribed forms of language at odds both with their ordinary ways of speaking and with what they think of as their "real" identities or personalities. All over Britain, in call-centres and supermarkets, airlines and insurance companies, workers are being instructed in every nuance of verbal performance: what words to say, where to pause, what emotions to project using pitch, stress and tone. In call-centres, hi-tech surveillance makes it possible to enforce these demands consistently. In supermarkets, employees know that the customer they fail to greet with the prescribed open gaze and ready smile could be a "mystery shopper" employed by the company to make spot checks on their customer service skills. The commonest instruction given to service workers is: "Smile when you say that." Let customers know what a great company you work for, and how happy you are to be serving them on its behalf. For public sector professionals, the pressure takes a different form. Despite the telephone answering instructions I quoted, professionals do not usually have to perform someone else's script. Instead, they have to produce their own propaganda, using a language imposed from above by the government agencies that allocate their funds. This was what was going on in the discussions of "quality" that mystified me in 1990. The government, trying to improve the accountability of publicly funded bodies, had set up agencies to measure the quality of university teaching. What was evaluated, however, was not what happened in lecture halls, labs and seminar rooms. Primarily, it was (and still is) a linguistic artefact: the "self-assessment document" in which departments define their mission and evaluate the quality of the education they provide. In theory, this is an exercise in critical self-reflection; in practice, departments are playing a zero-sum game, competing with others for finite and inadequate resources. If they do not claim to be "excellent", they will inevitably come out losers. That is why British academics, just like managers in corporations, have become fluent in promotional jargon, accentuating the positive even if that means being economical with the truth. Self-assessment documents do not say, for instance, that large classes and overdependence on casualised teaching staff are compromising standards. Instead, they say things like: "The challenge of teaching larger classes has been addressed through rolling programmes of staff development; standards are monitored through robust quality assurance procedures, in the context of an institution-wide commitment to continuous improvement." This is an invented example, but I assure you that it is not (quite) a parody. Like the political discourse criticised by Orwell in "Politics and the English Language", it takes a series of buzz-phrases ("the challenge of X". "rolling programme", "staff development", "quality assurance", "continuous improvement") and uses the verbal glue of vagueness and abstraction ("has been addressed", "in the context of") to stick them together in the manner of a prefabricated hen house. The resulting sentence contains hardly any information, but that is not its point. The point is to demonstrate to the Quality Assurance Agency that the university speaks the approved managerialist language, which in turn signifies its commitment to the values embodied in that language. The English literature scholar Peter Womack has likened academics writing this sort of prose to Winston Smith in 1984, composing his features into the required "expression of quiet optimism" as he turns to face the telescreen. Managing language is a booming business, supporting legions of consultants whose expertise may consist of having once read a book about transactional analysis or neurolinguistic programming. One big corporation advertises that its employees are trained in "expanded listening": they have learnt that listening is a "four-stage process" and that most people listen at a "25 per cent level of efficiency". (So far as I know, no reputable psycholinguistic research supports either claim.) The New York Times recently reported that computer help-desk workers are being trained to diagnose not the technical problem a caller wants help with, but the caller's personality type. If the worker uses a language (pseudo-) scientifically designed for the caller's personality, the interaction will be judged successful, whether or not the computer problem is solved. In politics, too, there is a growing faith in the power of managed language to transform less tractable realities. In the spring of 1999, New York police officers shot and killed an unarmed Gambian named Amadou Diallo; they claimed to have mistaken him for a dangerous armed criminal. More than 1,000 people were arrested in the protests that ensued. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police chief, Howard Safir, responded by handing out pocket-sized cards that reminded police officers to speak politely to members of the public: to address them as "sir" and "ma'am", and say "good morning", "please" and "thank you". Faced with a serious political problem, Giuliani - not, as we have seen in recent weeks, a stupid or insensitive man - resorted to the premise of corporate customer care: say the right words, speak nicely and all will be forgiven. Such examples suggest that we need to move beyond George Orwell's mid-20th-century analysis of what ails our public language. Orwell's main concern was the ideologically motivated use of words to conceal the truth; the remedy he proposed was plain English, a prose style as clear and transparent as glass. The problem with today's public language, however, is not so much that it represents reality inaccurately or dishonestly, but that it does not set out to be a representation of anything at all. When organisations proclaim they are "pursuing excellence", or when they write scripts for their employees to parrot, they want us not to believe the words, but to applaud the sentiments behind them. Their claims are not primarily "veracity claims" ("what I am telling you is a fact"), but "sincerity claims" ("what I am telling you comes from the heart"). Orwell's antidote to Newspeak - plain English - was intended to expose statements of dubious veracity: he reasoned that if we stripped away the obfuscation and understood what was being asserted, we would expose the lies. But dubious claims of sincerity cannot be exposed in the same way. "Nicespeak" is dishonest in a different way from Newspeak, and plain English is less effective as a critical response to it. Indeed, Orwell's prescription has been co-opted by the other side: no one knows better than a corporate PR-person or political spin-doctor the value of plain language for creating ersatz intimacy and simulating sincere concern. If fake sincerity does not respond to the bracing tonic of Orwellian plainness, perhaps we should try the homeopathic approach: irony. This is the technique of anti-corporate "culture jammers": take our adversaries' language and turn it against them by inflecting it with a different or opposite meaning. ("Just Do It," the anti-sweatshop campaigners tell Nike - meaning: "Pay your workers a living wage.") Admittedly, the ironist has a challenging task in a world where a notice can announce in all seriousness: "In order to better serve you, we are closed this afternoon." But if our mission is to expose the emptiness behind the painted smile of Nicespeak, irony and satire may be our most effective weapons: suitably postmodern remedies for a postmodern linguistic disease. Deborah Cameron is professor of languages at the Institute of Education, University of London, and the author of Good to Talk: living and working in a communication culture (Sage, ?16.99) ? The Author ? New Statesman Ltd. 2001. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher. The New Statesman is registered as a newspaper in the UK and the USA >From cstuartchapman at yahoo.com Wed Mar 5 00:50:13 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Received: from web40505.mail.yahoo.com (web40505.mail.yahoo.com [66.218.78.122]) by happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu (Postfix) with SMTP id DB2852005C for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 00:50:09 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <20030305055135.87246.qmail at web40505.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [137.18.255.41] by web40505.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 04 Mar 2003 21:51:35 PST Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 21:51:35 -0800 (PST) From: Stuart Chapman To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-1718242458-1046843495=:85423" Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote biography X-BeenThere: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" List-Id: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 05:50:13 -0000 --0-1718242458-1046843495=:85423 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily. C. Stuart Chapman, Ph.D. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more --0-1718242458-1046843495=:85423 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily.

 

C. Stuart Chapman, Ph.D.



Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more --0-1718242458-1046843495=:85423-- >From JHForest at cs.com Wed Mar 5 06:35:39 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Received: from imo-r08.mx.aol.com (imo-r08.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.104]) by happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3AB4F2002A for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 06:35:39 -0500 (EST) Received: from JHForest at cs.com by imo-r08.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v34.21.) id 3.132.1bb01f1b (4446); Wed, 5 Mar 2003 06:37:02 -0500 (EST) From: JHForest at cs.com Message-ID: <132.1bb01f1b.2b973b5e at cs.com> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 06:37:02 EST Subject: Re: [percy-l] Shelby Foote biography To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="part1_132.1bb01f1b.2b973b5e_boundary" X-Mailer: 6.0 for Windows XP sub 50 X-BeenThere: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" List-Id: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 11:35:39 -0000 --part1_132.1bb01f1b.2b973b5e_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In a message dated 3/5/2003 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time, cstuartchapman at yahoo.com writes: > I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby > Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it > uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily. Congratulations! Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? ISBN? Jim Forest * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's e-mail: Nancy's e-mail: tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180 Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm * * * --part1_132.1bb01f1b.2b973b5e_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable In a message dated 3/5/20= 03 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time, cstuartchapman at yahoo.com writes:

I thought that you Percyite= s would like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Fo= ote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspond= ence heavily.


Congratulations!

Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? IS= BN?

Jim Forest
* * *
Jim & Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
Jim's e-mail: <jhforest at cs.com>
Nancy's e-mail: <forestflier at cs.com>
tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm
* * *
--part1_132.1bb01f1b.2b973b5e_boundary-- >From cstuartchapman at yahoo.com Wed Mar 5 07:14:16 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Received: from web40507.mail.yahoo.com (web40507.mail.yahoo.com [66.218.78.124]) by happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu (Postfix) with SMTP id B450020044 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 07:14:15 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <20030305121542.3292.qmail at web40507.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [137.18.255.42] by web40507.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 05 Mar 2003 04:15:42 PST Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 04:15:42 -0800 (PST) From: Stuart Chapman Subject: Re: [percy-l] Shelby Foote biography To: JHForest at cs.com, percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org In-Reply-To: <132.1bb01f1b.2b973b5e at cs.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-1473203276-1046866542=:2727" X-BeenThere: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" List-Id: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 12:14:16 -0000 --0-1473203276-1046866542=:2727 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sorry about the lack of details. The book is being published by the University Press of Mississippi. ISBN: 1578063590. The book spells out some of the themes of Foote (and Percy) that I've mentioned in some earlier postings here. Am also trying to get Jay Tolson to review a copy. Even though I mainly lurk, I enjoy very much this board. All the best, Stuart JHForest at cs.com wrote:In a message dated 3/5/2003 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time, cstuartchapman at yahoo.com writes: I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily. Congratulations! Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? ISBN? Jim Forest * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's e-mail: Nancy's e-mail: tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180 Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm * * * --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more --0-1473203276-1046866542=:2727 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

Sorry about the lack of details. The book is being published by the University Press of Mississippi. ISBN: 1578063590.

The book spells out some of the themes of Foote (and Percy) that I've mentioned in some earlier postings here. Am also trying to get Jay Tolson to review a copy.

Even though I mainly lurk, I enjoy very much this board.

 

All the best,

Stuart

 JHForest at cs.com wrote:

In a message dated 3/5/2003 6:52:08 AM W. Europe Standard Time, cstuartchapman at yahoo.com writes:

I thought that you Percyites would like to know that my biography of Shelby Foote is now out: Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. As you can imagine, it uses the Percy-Foote correspondence heavily.


Congratulations!

Just a few details to make it easier to get a copy: Title? Publisher? ISBN?

Jim Forest
* * *
Jim & Nancy Forest
Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
Jim's e-mail: <jhforest at cs.com>
Nancy's e-mail: <forestflier at cs.com>
tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm
* * *



Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more --0-1473203276-1046866542=:2727-- >From karey at charter.net Wed Mar 5 08:35:30 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Received: from mx08.cluster1.charter.net (dc-mx08.cluster1.charter.net [209.225.8.18]) by happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id EBE5F20022 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2003 08:35:29 -0500 (EST) Received: from [209.186.149.176] (HELO AFAC955012) by mx08.cluster1.charter.net (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 3.5.9) with SMTP id 48652524 for percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org; Wed, 05 Mar 2003 08:36:56 -0500 Message-ID: <001b01c2e31b$f8d75940$0301000a at AFAC955012> From: "Karey L. Perkins" To: Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 08:34:39 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0017_01C2E2F2.0FCD48F0" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Subject: [percy-l] "...to the gas chamber..." X-BeenThere: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" List-Id: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 13:35:30 -0000 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0017_01C2E2F2.0FCD48F0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I wasn't sure if it was Percy who had originally said this, or Percy quoting Flannery O'Connor or someone else. I recently came across it in "Signposts in a Strange Land" in the epilogue "An Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy" -- last line (p. 396, Picador). Am I correct in assuming this is a "Percy original" and this is the first time the phrase had been said? Or is he referring to another use of the phrase? By the way, I just finished Tolson's biography of Percy ("Pilgrim in the Ruins") and I thought it was fantastic. Karey ------=_NextPart_000_0017_01C2E2F2.0FCD48F0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I wasn't sure if it was Percy who had = originally=20 said this, or Percy quoting Flannery O'Connor or = someone else.  I=20 recently came across it in "Signposts in a Strange Land" in the epilogue = "An=20 Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy" -- last line (p. 396, Picador). =20
 
Am I correct in assuming this is a = "Percy original"=20 and this is the first time the phrase had been said?  Or is he = referring to=20 another use of the phrase?
 
By the way, I just finished Tolson's = biography of=20 Percy ("Pilgrim in the Ruins") and I thought it was = fantastic. =20
 
Karey
 
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