Last fall for an anthropology paper I read a book entitled Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg. The book is a series of short essays about language and is a really fun read. Under the section SYMBOLS is an essay about how we talk about/represent/symbolize important historical events and why. He mentions 9/11 and I thought today would be a good day to share it.
Nunberg is insightful, clever and quite entertaining. I highly recommend this book and it's fairly inexpensive on Amazon. You'll probably hear more about Nunberg from me as the semester progresses so I thought this would be a good place to start. Click on the pages to view them full size.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
A Date to Remember
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2 comments:
Looks like a great book. I read the essay on 9/11 (thanks for scanning it) and found that he's getting at one of the questions we raised in class today -- language that grows conventional and abstracts itself from the think or the original idea. I gave the example of nostalgia having to do with home. His example is the difference between calling the infamous date 9/11 or September 11, and he much prefers the latter because it's closer to our lives and less abstracted.
I think I heard this guy on NPR awhile back...very interesting. Thanks for posting the scans...
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