Posts by giovanni tiso
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Anyone else choked on "Little [bloody] Dorrit" at school?
Not I. But I fully see Oscar Wilde's point when he said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing".
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It's actually impossible to achieve true full employment. There will always be people who are out of work.
I hate to harp on this, but even if it were theoretically possible to employ everybody, Bollard wouldn't let it happen. Politicians need the unemployed to have somebody other than themselves to blame for economic inefficiencies and social ills; employers need the unemployed to keep wages low.
In order to defend the welfare state, one needs to look at places (in geography and history) that didn't have a welfare provision
Or that do not have them in the present tense. Do many of us envy the US of A in that regard?
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Grant.
Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.Is that how you say "screw you" in Latin?
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Google's got a good vocabulary.
Handle with care though: it returns over 33 million hits for "millenium".
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I bow to your obvious superiority in your own tounge. ;-)
It's so not my own tongue. Please observe the following (highly contrived) sentence:
I vitelli dei romani sono belli
In Latin, it means "Go Vitellius, to the warring call of the Roman God."
In Italian, it means "The Romans have handsome calves". (In the sense of young cows, not what's behind your shins).
Very, very different languages.
And a depressing thought: I did five years of Latin in high school and this conversation is about as much use as I've had for it.
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Musa is one of three genera in the family Musaceae; it includes bananas and plantains.
Yes, but more specifically the banana is musa sapientum. If you shift sapientum after aure it changes the meaning of the whole thing.
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Musa fixa in aure sapientum est.
You have a muse stuck in your learned ear? I'm all confused now!
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Te audire no possum.
non possum, surely?
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Dickens himself -- like H.G. Welles and Verne, to some extent, since you brought them up -- was unapologetically and blatantly a polemicist against what he saw as the evils and abuses of the day.
The historical and sociological record suggests that reality actually outdickensed Dickensed, by and large. But that doesn't make his accounts any less valid: artists can be chroniclers of their time, too, and a perfectly legitimate source of information about the reality that surrounded them. They cannot be taken in isolation, or uncritically - and who does, honestly? this idea that you have the monopoly on reason and balance is becoming a real pain in the arse, Craig - but in some cases they can be central to our understanding of an epoch. Certainly the case with Dickens, or Twain, or Zola, or Verga. Poring over other kinds of documents - be they newspaper reports, personal diaries, public records, none of them "objective" sources of information either - will help you contextualise his novels, verify the plausibility of their content. But there are plights that he described rather well, which is why we keep going back to that particular well.
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So my call is everyone is right
Spoken like a true linguist!