The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
The Times finds a small group of people who it quotes being concerned about the decline of marginalia. What they are really concerned about, I’d argue, is the losing the exclusive capacity to gain a limited view into the private lives of dead strangers.What’s really at stake in this ‘problem’ is the way we construe public and private. The value of marginalia is for the most part the voyeuristic thrill of seeing the private made public. The digital age will create more forms of annotation, more commentary, more 'marginalia.’ But it won’t have the same creepy snooping quality. And that’s a good thing.
When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness? More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in literature? The world is, of course, often quite unpleasant, and any brainlessly pain-free book purporting to show truth can and should be dismissed as unrealistic contrivance. But while contrived cruelty may seem more artful than contrived sentiment, it’s still contrivance.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBztGX-2i1M?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]
via BoingBoing
Only after the online movement had gained an impressive offline momentum in Tahrir Square did Mr. Mubarak’s associates choose to switch off the Internet for a few days, further revealing their incompetence. It’s not that the Egyptian regime lost the online battle. They simply never entered it to begin with. It wasn’t the Internet that destroyed Mr. Mubarak—it was Mr. Mubarak’s ignorance of the Internet that destroyed Mr. Mubarak.Other authoritarian regimes are taking cues from the events in Egypt, toughening their Internet controls. The Syrian government lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube—nominally as a “concession” to opposition groups—but this was almost certainly done in order to more easily monitor public dissent. During the ban, Syrian dissidents could always get access to Facebook by using various tools for circumventing censorship and concealing their identities. This made Facebook slow and cumbersome to use, but it provided an extra degree of protection from the prying eyes of the Syrian police. Now that the ban has been lifted, the general population will flock to Facebook and expose themselves to the attention of the authorities.
In Sudan, Oman Al-Bashir has promised to extend electricity to the remote corners of the country so that his supporters can go online and defend him on Facebook. Meanwhile, the country’s police officials have been distributing false information about protests via social media sites and text messaging in order to lure and then arrest anyone who shows up at the advertised venues.
You could say ‘the face of the deep’ was found or chosen or selected by the 1611 translators, but you can’t say it was theirs. And, in that respect, the coinage joins 'let there be light’, 'am I my brother’s keeper?’, 'be fruitful and multiply’, 'pillar of salt’, 'bald as a coot’, 'let my people go’, 'by the skin of my teeth’, 'tender mercies’, 'the spirit is willing’, 'a man after his own heart’, 'vanity of vanities’, 'sign of the times’, 'wages of sin’, 'all things to all men’, 'eat, drink and be merry’, 'fight the good fight’, 'through a glass darkly’, 'grave, where is thy victory?’ and 'the powers that be’ among phrases that appear in English versions of the Bible published long before the King James translators took up their pens.Celebrants of this year’s anniversary have enjoyed pointing out the ironies of the translation: that it was commissioned to mollify the losing faction at a religious conference; that far from 'inventing the language’, it was written in archaic prose; and – most surprising of all – that it was made not by an individual genius but by six largely anonymous committees. But its authorship is much broader than the 53 clerics and one lay scholar who were selected to do James I’s bidding in 1604. Most of the memorable Biblical phrases listed above were coined not in the hallowed cloisters of Oxford colleges or in the sepulchral calm of the Jerusalem Chamber but on the run. Five of the seven major English Bibles of the 16th century were produced in exile; two of their makers died at the stake. Each new Bible was the manifesto of a faction in the religious wars that revolutionised Tudor England, each subsequent Bible a revision and many a riposte. The full, 80-year-plus history of the English Bible is the story of the English reformation; it is spattered with blood and scorched with fire.
But just how many English idioms come from the KJB? When I was writing Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, I asked people how many they thought there were, and received answers ranging from a hundred to a thousand. It was time to do a proper count. So I read the whole work, looking out for any phrase that I felt had come to be a part of modern English.I made two discoveries. First, there are not as many as some people think: I found 257. And second, most of the idioms don’t originate in the King James version at all. Rather, they are to be found in Tyndale’s translation nearly a century earlier, or one of the other major versions of the 16th century. The relatively small total shouldn’t suprise us. The aim of the KJB translators, as they say in their preface, was not to make a new translation “but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principall good one”. They had little choice in the matter, as the guidelines for their work, which had been approved by the king, required them to use the Bishops’ Bible as their first model, making as few alterations as possible; and, when this was found wanting, they could refer to earlier versions. Unlike Shakespeare, they were not great linguistic innovators.
So we mustn’t exaggerate. It’s true to say, as several commentators do, that no other literary source has matched the KJB for the number of influential idioms it contains; but it isn’t true to say that it originated all of them. Rather, what it did was popularise them, so much so that it’s now impossible to find an area of contemporary expression that doesn’t from time to time use them, either literally or playfully.
Scrapping the King James version, in the well-meaning way of the well-educated classes, had a number of effects, the most decisive and the most disastrous of which was to destroy for ever an ordinary, everyday connection with 400 years of the English language. In my northern mill town, many working men studied Shakespeare at the Mechanics’ Institute or the Workers’ Extension lectures. No one thought the language difficult because it is the language of the King James, and we had grown up with that. Shakespeare, like the Bible, was written to be heard; like Shakespeare, the Bible is theatre.King James does not use sub-clauses or dependent clauses; it is a direct English, and one you can still hear, even now, in northern speech, the kind we celebrate in Alan Bennett. The language is grammatically uncluttered, but rich in vocabulary and image.
There is a difference between “obscure” and “difficult”. I accept that, by now, the King James version seems more difficult than it is, but its rewards are greater than its difficulty.
The Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center efficiently dispels the ‘genius’ status awarded to the writer, not because his writing isn’t singularly and bewilderingly excellent (it is, even in draft form), but because it presents him as a human being, one of us. Declarations that Wallace is in some other 'time-space continuum’ are unhelpful because he worked so hard to depict what it means to be a human being in this world, in an age lacking sincerity, but saturated with ironic posturing. With The Pale King, Wallace’s long awaited posthumous novel approaching its release date, we should perhaps brace ourselves for another storm of this type of commentary. But thinking of Wallace as 'Dave’, the writer who slogged through research (the archive reveals he even took tedious classes in tax law to help with The Pale King), sweated each sentence to achieve perfect prose, and strove to depict our own world with unflinching emotional honesty, perhaps makes the work all the more astonishing.