Razib responds.
The comment section was helpful, as always. Knowledge was shared and few rows ensued.
Matt McIntosh linked to a
great Orwell article on writing good English.
Razib said that latin words were a feature of nerd speech, which got me thinking: if that's true, then why do nerds usually rate Lord of the Rings as their favorite book?
Whence this strange combination of medieval mysticism and all things science? Nerd culture is obsessed with cold, long words, as Razib says. The more abstract the better. But they also love wizards and magic.
On first reading LOTR the nerd feels a rush of cool air on his face, because he has never read such clarity before. He grasps all the words, instantly - they don't require the usual mental adjustment/translation. All the words are warm and strong: they touch him in a deep place. Here is Tolkien's great climax.
The earth groaned and quaked. The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds, there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise.
What energy!!!! Active verb after active verb after active verb: groaned, quaked, swayed, tottered, crumbled, hurled...The nerd falls back in his seat, defeated, dazzled.
But he doesn't now why this has affected him so much, so he keeps to his Latin. Zinsser can tell the nerd why this keeps drawing him back.J MCT said that every word in the Tolkien climax
'leads to an emotional response in a native English speaker. The point about the latinate vocabulary is precisely, to a native English speaker, that it doesn't.'
This got me thinking. I know from talking to Germans that Tolkien is super-popular there. Is that because of the relationship between German and English. They are both very earthy, blood-and-soil type languages. Do romance language countries like Tolkien as much?
And is the abstract nature of French the cause of the ponderous philosophies they like to throw up?
3 comments:
i think the unifying characteristic of (typical, introverted) nerds is not an aversion to action but an aversion to intuitive social situations which require empathy and intra-personal skills. thus the sword-swinging and earthquaking of Tolkien is just as palatable to nerds as the cold, emotionless objectivity of science.
And the Germans produce no ponderous abstract philsophy? Oh dear. What would Messrs Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, et al think of that statement?
The Germans originate ponderous philosophy. The French play around with it and make it sexy for those who lack the patience to read a 1000 pages of Hegel. (Paul Johnson says so too.)
Clio
Do romance language countries like Tolkien as much?
Yes, some of them do. Tolkien has major followings — and a good deal of translation and original scholarship — in Italy, France, and Spain.
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