Tom West

Comment Threads

• NotABotNet commented on An exercise in futility
  I am reminded of a fair amount of Larry Niven's oeuvre, here, Charlie, where censored and bleep stand in as new swear words,thanks to their prevalent use in censoring a previous generation of swear words. Or the reverse -- "idiot" became disfavored because it started getting applied to dumb people instead of just to mentally retarded people. More recently, advocates for the disabled have tried to get people to stop using "retarded" because they feel it's pejorative of their clients. "Special" got used for a while until it fell to the same fate. Last I heard, we're now supposed to...
• Gregory Muir commented on An exercise in futility
  I'm right there with you on advertising. I'd love to see your take on it in the other conversation. One of the most influential novels from my youth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants...
• paws4thot commented on An exercise in futility
  Thanks; been AFK (At Eastercon; hi to everyone I met there) since 1/4 ~22:00. As a Scot. I'm well aware of Calum Cille and of the fact of his exile from Ireland (to Iona, Western Isles, Scotland) but wasn't aware of the reasoning....
• elward commented on An exercise in futility
  Re Clean Reader: What a pinnacle of cockstaggering fuckwittery. Welcome to the tenth circle of Heck. What I really want to know is what are the child-friendly versions of the words being discussed here? When the first Harry Potter book was sold in the US, the title was changed (leading to much confusion in Canada where we saw both British and American editions). I just assumed that the reason was to keep children from asking their parents what a philosopher was, because the parents themselves wouldn't be able to answer the question. As noted above: "The app is the brainchild...
• Damian the surprised commented on An exercise in futility
  I submit that those critics don't know what they're talking about and are idiots. I agree. However this was at one time a popular view and spread by University English Departments. See specifically Whimsatt and Beardsley 'The intentional fallacy', which argues the author's intention in any text might be interesting but is neither available nor relevant to a critical reading. The text was supposed to stand for itself as a discrete artefact. This was more or less the defining position of the New Critics, or the T.S.Eliot through to F.R. Leavis intergenerational gang. Like many of their positions, it may...