My real life villains ... are people with sloppy language habits, who don't articulate their words clearly, especially in call centres. Linguistic laziness is making it difficult for us to understand what our fellow citizens are saying.
[. . .]
When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. [. . .]
Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. [. . .]
Quotations are in a perpetual struggle for survival. They want people to keep saying them. They don’t want to die any more than the rest of us do. And so, whenever they can, they attach themselves to colorful or famous people. “Nice guys finish last” profits by its association with a man whose nickname was the Lip, even if the Lip never said it [. . .]
The adaptive mechanism benefits both parties. The survival of the quotation helps insure the survival of the person to whom it is misattributed. [. . .]
Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. “As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed” borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. [. . .]
[. . .] 'You had quite an interesting message in that play, about power relations in the pedagogic context. I wonder if you intended it to be a comment on the micropolitics of caste?'
'I am from the Dalit community,' Jiva said quietly. 'Many Dalit artists are protesting against inequality and injustice in this country. I belong to a group on campus called Students for Democracy.'
'That's extremely interesting—I mean the democracy part—though not entirely news to me. I notice that many Dalits are talking the language of modernity and democracy.' Chunky set a clutch of folders on a side table and pushed the rest back into the briefcase. 'Isn't that teleological-progressive, humanist-Hegelian metanarrative a problematic anachronism? It makes us forever a part of the dialectic of a type of progress that was imposed on us by colonialism—you know, a model of progress that is not our own.'
Jiva could tell from the way his lips were moving, and from the way his grinders were wearing down, and from the way he did not need to breathe between sentences, that Chunky was suffering from acute codswallopitis.
'I don't think Dalits so far have had a real part in this famous democratic narrative, ' she said, shrugging. 'Just when we start demanding real democracy, you say that we should think of something else.'
Chunky thrust the accusation away with fluttering hands. 'Oh, I'm not suggesting that we vacate the discursive space of democracy altogether,' he said. 'I would merely advocate that Dalit ideologues situate the debate more carefully in the aporetic embrace of global capitalism before foreclosing on future strategies of political dissent. To put it slightly differently,' he said, 'you need to map the practices of codification, representation and discursive control under the sign of Western universalism before you re-mobilize the moribund, discredited, and perhaps always-already impossible liberal-democratic discourse of human rights. [. . .]
to pluto/be plutoed: to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.Plutoed was voted the Word of the Year for 2006 by the American Dialect Society.
