I wish I was back in Oxford. If you are struggling to work or play, and bored of email and twitter, perhaps you need a dose of some good heavy chat... in which case go to the live debate between Neo-atheist icon Richard Dawkins and The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, chaired by Philosopher Anthony Kenny.
I'm going to have to turn it off in a moment, but will listen forensically a bit later. So far it has been remarkably convivial and productive, but with a fair bit of spice too. Dawkins is on his best behaviour, and seems more philosophically nimble than usual. They are kicking the ball all over the place: free will, consciousness, mind, self....
The highlight so far was Williams's question: "If consciousness is an illusion, what isn't?"
Dawkins seemed impressed by the question, and didn't have an answer.
William's point is that the very idea of illusion presupposes consciousness...
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A fellow traveller - hail fellow and well met.
Those poor little worker-bees of our language, the prepositions, are under siege.
I suspect it is an inevitable consequence of the rise of English as a global language. Prepositions are the hardest thing to master in most languages. They are part of the grammar, but also deeply idiomatic. When to use 'burn down' and 'burn up' is a question of both grammar and idiom.
I would imagine those coming from strongly declined language groups find them to be an absolute horror.
And to be fair to Jonathan - who is no doubt a native speaker - it is hard for even we natives to resist the pressure. Our brains automatically pick up new patterns in the speech they hear every day. And without our permission start applying them when putting our own thoughts together into sentence.
It bothers me to distraction when a native speaker writes something like "implemented to" - which I encountered only this morning.
Fear and loathing of prepositions is further displayed in the increasing tendency to get rid of them by stacking nouns and adjectives into faux German hyphen-less compounds.
I recently published an article on this titled "Developing Effective Faux-German-hyphen-less-compound-de-potentiation Strategies"
Fight the good fight Francis - the humble preposition is the Boson of English. Without it meaning could not be communicated between words and sentences would just fly appart into a void of disconnected babble.
Prepositions need their heros.
Thank you Francis. I am not at all bored with thoughtful injunctions like this one, but I trust you understand that the occasional infelicity of language is concomitant with the web log medium!
Dear Jonathan, please don't write "bored of"! I believe it is "bored with". "Bored of" I think comes from the common misapprehension about the source of the contraction in spoken english, "bored 'v". This, I hold, is a contraction of "bored wiv", that comes at last from "bored with". Thanks.