Nominations please, for the all asshole scale

[Lord Jim]

[loCAtek]

Stop sulking Andrew. You're with a group of people who don't simply accept everything you say without question. This may or may not be unusual for you.

Deal with it.

Not the point at all. While watching the Discovery Channel travelogue this morning, they touched on 'preserving dead languages'; in today's program it was Gaelic, not unlike Cornish. Preservation is not the same resurrection. I agree with AndrewD that resurrection would be common daily usage of the tongue for regular day-to-day interactions, like asking where the bus station was.

In my personal case, my BF's elder family still speak Mayan, but it is dead to the rest of contemporary society, and preserving it, does not usurp the native tongue of Spanish regardless that Mayan was spoken primarily many moons ago.

[Sean]

You know what Andrew, if you were to replace the word 'judgement' with the word 'opinion' in that last long post of yours you might come over as less of an arrogant twat and people might be more inclined to engage in debate with you.

Just a thought... Make of it what you will.

[Lord Jim]

I found that to be a source of ironic bemusement...

That a man so obsessed with the precise definition of terms, and nitpicking at others over them, doesn't himself seem to know the difference between the meaning of the word "fact" and the word "opinion"....

At least as applied to him....

You'd think a real smart feller would be able to sort that one out...

[Gob]

I think it's about time I pulled out from this one, as Andrew and I have fully set out our stalls, and I believe reached an impasse or Mexican standoff.

The membership can decide for themselves whether the Cornish language has been resurrected or not.

[Sean]

The Cornish have a language?

[rubato]

The Cornish have a language?

Do they display organized social behavior? Like shitting in one place and eating in a different one? Then, like ants and rabbits, they must have a rudimentary means of communicating.


yrs,
rubato

[Crackpot]

Do they display organized social behavior? Like shitting in one place and eating in a different one?

That remains to be seen

[thestoat]

The Cornish have a language?

No - they have a pastie

[Andrew D]

How about a dictionary definition of "native language":

your native language or native tongue is the first language that you learn, usually in the country where you were born

MacMillan strikes me as a pretty good source.

Or how about a dictionary definition of "first langauge":

first language
n
(Linguistics) a person's native language

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged strikes me as a pretty good source too.

Native language = first language.

QED

I am not disputing anything about Andrew's evidence or research, only that there is a logical fallacy in his joining together of two completely separate dictionary definitions.

Would that be like finding several dictionary definitions of "native," choosing the one that best fits one's purpose, and then joining it with a completely separate dictionary definition of "language"?

[Gob]

The Cornish have a language?

yep!!

This Parrot Is Speaking In Cornish, Irate Tall Man Tells Pet Shop Owner

The lopsided, inbred troglodytes of Cornwall are set to declare war on the United Nations, after its cultural body, UNESCO, declared the Cornish language officially extinct.

Thirty expert linguists working on the Atlas of The World's Languages In Danger pointed out that Cornish has not been spoken since 1777, except by a tiny hardcore of about 300 fact-proof nutters with bizarre delusions about the glorious resurgence of some mythical Cornish nation that only ever existed in the vacuum of their minds.

However, Jennifer Lowe - development manager of the Cornish Language Partnership, and therefore one of a handful of people in Cornwall whose so-called job does not consist of grovelling to grockle tourists - boasted that there were thousands with a "smattering" of Cornish, due to pig-headed council schemes to cram the defunct, worthless language into the heads of schoolchildren in place of knowledge that might actually prove to be of any value in their lives.

"Thousands of unemployed Cornish youngsters can now grunt, 'me want pasty' and 'you're not from round here' in their native tongue, if you prod them with a stick and promise them a shiny coin," she explained with sadly-misplaced pride.

However, a spokesman for the UN laughed convulsively for five minutes before breathing deeply and saying: "In the deluded fantasies of the Cornish nationalist mind, Truro would be the tin-paved capital of the glorious Kernow superstate. And what does 'Truro' actually mean, in Cornish or any other language? Nobody has the faintest idea. I think that pretty much sums up the tragic futility of Cornish, don't you?"

A shabby, bearded wreck of a man - or possibly a very ugly woman - in the total-unemployment singularity known to the Ordnance Survey as Redruth shouted incoherently to our reporter for several tedious minutes. Expert analysis of the recording later suggested, however, that he was not in fact making an impassioned speech in the Cornish language after all, but merely demanding a pound in a hideously-garbled debasement of English.

http://nevfilter.blogspot.com/2009/02/t ... rnish.html

[Lord Jim]

pig-headed council schemes to cram the defunct, worthless language into the heads of schoolchildren in place of knowledge that might actually prove to be of any value in their lives.

One might make a similarly valid observation about the mandatory study of the Welsh language....

[Sean]

Thousands of unemployed Cornish youngsters can now grunt, 'me want pasty' and 'you're not from round here' in their native tongue, if you prod them with a stick and promise them a shiny coin," she explained with sadly-misplaced pride.

Surely the correct translation into English would be' You're not from round these paaaarts".

And why aren't they teaching them to say, "Gerroff moi laaaaand yer bloody Emmet!" and other useful phrases?

[GrossDad]

The Cornish have a language?

No - they have a pastie

. . . and game hens. The Cornish have game hens.

And the game hens have a choir.

[Econoline]

Okay, rubato...I guess this thread by now contains plenty of nominations for the all asshole scale, huh?

[dales]

Here's a nominee for 2011.....http://wwwirritant.blogspot.com/2011/11 ... -year.html

Asshole of the Year
The current front-runner for this year's asshole of the year award is the former CEO of AIG, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.

If an asshole had an asshole, that asshole would look at Greenberg and think "Jeez, what an asshole!"

<sinip>

Could there be a more perfect representative of the 1%? I drove my company into the ground so fucking hard that it threatened to take down the whole economy. It was so bad that you little tax-paying peons had to bail me out. Now I'm going to sue because I didn't get paid enough for my criminal mismanagement!

Any others?

[Sue U]

Any others?

Stop right there, we have a winner!

[rubato]

Okay, rubato...I guess this thread by now contains plenty of nominations for the all asshole scale, huh?

OK, I'll come back to it.

I intentionally did not define "asshole" because I wanted people to be free to define it however they liked. Although the first examples I gave were of celebrities behaving badly mostly towards their wives but also in personal corruption (Bill Bennett). As the thread has gone on the usage has varied quite a lot so I'll have to think about it.

Is the head of AIG really worse than those who created the financial instruments which brought the US financial world down? Wasn't it actually the creation of "Frankenfinance" the mortgage-backed securities which created the tidal suck which drew all in its wake, Liar-loans and all? Or was it the lack of regulation which is the greater cause?

yrs,
rubato

[Scooter]

The goal of "Frankenfinance" (great word to describe it, btw) was to enable investors to take advantage of opportunities without assuming the underlying risks. The mistake was in acting as if that meant the risks had been eliminated, rather than just spread around. In that respect, AIG, as one of the prime dealers in these risk mitigation instruments, bears as much blame as anyone else. Clearly regulators who did not foresee the potential consequences and thus failed to act accordingly were also to blame.

[rubato]

Lack of regulation has also meant that none of the perpetrators has been charged with anything. All have skipped away with billions in bonuses after fucking the US and most of Europe (except the countries with better laws like Germany).

yrs,
rubato