For a long time I had pillaged all the books for the respectable hard facts: names, dates, places, words of songs, opus numbers. The authorities spit out these facts time after time and arrange them like so many cherry-stones around an empty plate. Time spent unearthing these things in libraries, compiling endless lists, tended paradoxically to cast doubt on what I thought I knew at the start. Writing about music appeared to involve an oath to connect nothing, to question nothing and to disturb nothing. I began to query my own r

That crowd in the streets rending its garments and uttering lamentations will now disperse: Wordability is back online. Memo to other bloggers who use WordPress: beware of 2.5.1. Oh it wasn’t only that, hell no, it never is. At the same time, the ISP had a hissy fit and Filezilla suddenly had the wrong settings, so uploads were vanishing into the ether. It has not been pretty, but it’s over, the champagne is flowing, and soon the words will follow.

My 13 year old was rumbled today for mucking around during a speech in assembly and given a detention (chiz). Nowadays kids are required to sign a confession, usually dictated by a teacher, and parents are required to countersign. In these documents the word inappropriate is sure to occur. I duly signed, after adding a note that his behaviour had been, in fact, ‘discourteous’.

As one who has done more than his share of mucking around I tend to take these things lightly. But the lad wanted to know why the amendment and once I explained (courtesy is necessary because we are bored and protects us in our turn when we bore others) he announced that he now felt bad about what he’d done. Welcome to the moral life, kid. It’s what they don’t teach you at school.

‘Inappropriate’ is to teachers what ‘life style’ is to those who work in public health. Consider the words of a professor of medicine writing in the current issue of Monash Magazine.

The combination of immunology and stem cells ‘as body repair kits’ will provide patients with ‘non-rejected’ treatments for many if not all degenerative diseases caused by poor life style selection such as smoking and diet . . .

A lot to think about there. I particularly like ‘non-rejected’, as in ‘non-dead’.

Prospect Magazine’s annual ranking of public intellectuals generated a long list of 100 names. To establish who was truly who, 20,000 online voters then chose their top 5 and Prospect has now published the final list in rank order.

The list reflects a problem with all but the most carefully-controlled web-based surveys, the influence of fan-sites. Here’s David Herman:

Word spread around the internet very quickly, and at least three of our top 20 (Chomsky, Hitchens and Soroush), or their acolytes, decided to draw attention to their presence on the list by using their personal websites to link to Prospect

When everyone was exposed (harrumph) to at least a little verse, they were also taught that one of the sins of the prose writer is to lapse into metre. Here are two consecutive sentences from an entertaining review of a new book by Ferdinand Mount (via Arts and Letters Daily)

His frozen heart unfreezes and his readers cry thank God.

Nothing succeeds like failure if your blood is blue enough.

Whoops. Maybe we survivors from the period are the only readers who notice and care? Doubtful: I suspect people catch a slightly iffy scent but can’t track it down.

From a 1967 internal report (released 1978) by the Inspector General of the CIA (and you should see his uniform!):

. . . There is a third point, which was not directly made by any of those we interviewed, but which emerges clearly from the interviews and from reviews of files. The point is that of frequent recourse to synecdoche – the mention of a part when the whole is to be understood, or vice-versa. Thus we encounter repeated references to phrases such as “disposing of Castro,” which may be read in the literal sense of assassinating him, when it is intended that it be read in the broader, figurative sense of dislodging the Castro regime. Reversing the coin, we find people speaking vaguely of “doing something about Castro” when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him. In a situation wherein those speaking may not have actually meant what they seemed to say or may not have said what they actually meant, they should not be surprised if their oral shorthand is interpreted differently than was intended.

_ quoted in Joan Didion, Miami, 1987

Ah, the advantages of a liberal education. It would be embarrassing to compare even this rather cumbersome example of the Inspector General’s prose with any of the recently-released ASIO transcripts.

In context (readers of Didion might agree) hr quotation of this passage reads like a rhetorical ploy-within-a-ploy. Precisely this kind of analysis, although considerably more subtle, is what she delivers in Miami, as in all her non-fiction from Salvador onwards. And like the Inspector-General, she pays the price of a certain laboriousness. In a world of crazy language, however, spelling it out may constitute a virtue.

That said, there is the question of Didion’s own copious use of synecdoche . . .