| zenicurean ( @ 2009-06-05 06:47:00 |
| Current music: | The Decemberists - Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect |
He will then proceed to settle the generic "they" thing.
Like most languages enamored with prepositions, English is entirely dedicated to the art of concealing where things actually are. A casual tourist will discover that doing things around the house does not involve rakes, restaurant cars supposedly situated on trains don't require grappling hooks to access, fighting over something doesn't mean you have to be able to fly, and so on. Often it takes ages for a reasonable person to figure out that the words "to" and "from" only have the most tenuous and metaphorical relationship with the physical world.
But the real affront is what's called preposition stranding, which, much like all known Polish, is to language roughly what Cthulhu is to geometry. What you do is that you take these tiny little words you can never get straight, sever them from their beloved nouns with a hacksaw, and then sort of casually throw them around the sentence in order to cleverly mislead your enemies.
Using the dread Necronomicon, I intend to raise the hungry spirit of Japanese Horror Movie Bishop Robert Lowth. He will then proceed to haunt the English-speaking world, wailing and moaning most piteously in Latin, until such time as everyone agrees to fix this. This is the sort of chicanery up with which we shall not put.