Today I learned...

[Rath Darkblade]

Today I learned a new joke.

Have you heard about the new movie called Constipation?

It hasn't come out yet.

Gone with the wind, perhaps?

 

[Rath Darkblade]

I like that. Maximum verbosity in term papers is always desirable. Best I ever managed was " Interspecific Hybridization of Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense."

The longest sentence I had ever seen was the 1996 winner of the Bad Writing Contest, from Plato etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution by Professor Roy Bhaskar. It went as follows:

Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelian provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistomologic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkgaardian and Nietzchean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

Some sentence are too important to understand, and it would be difficult to improve on this one. It's a splendid piece of prose, and I'm certain many of us will attempt to read it aloud without taking a breath.

 

[Iain Aschendale]

The longest sentence I had ever seen was the 1996 winner of the Bad Writing Contest, from Plato etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution by Professor Roy Bhaskar. It went as follows:

Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelian provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistomologic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkgaardian and Nietzchean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

Some sentence are too important to understand, and it would be difficult to improve on this one. It's a splendid piece of prose, and I'm certain many of us will attempt to read it aloud without taking a breath.

That's 131 words. The late Iain M. Banks made a hobby of creating monster sentences. For example, this one from The Algebraist clocks in at 167:

Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and - when it suited them - single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when - or even geological ages after when - you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection travelling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of ‘What the fu--?’ before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.

Same book, this guy is 181 words:

The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human\non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary’s head as a punchball.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

That's 131 words. The late Iain M. Banks made a hobby of creating monster sentences. For example, this one from The Algebraist clocks in at 167:

I entered a story in a competition back in old town that purposely had several run-on sentences, the first two of which came in at 70 words each, which was accidental but clear evidence that serendipity was on my side. Another measured 108, a few others around the eighty to a hundred mark, but the longest, according to my just now check, comes in at 151 words. Other pieces I've written also have extended sentences but less deliberately so. I do love a good, nurturing sentence.

 

[DLC]

That's 131 words. The late Iain M. Banks made a hobby of creating monster sentences. For example, this one from The Algebraist clocks in at 167:


Same book, this guy is 181 words:

That was kinda tedious, having to take in all those 'creations'. I love me a long sentence though.

 

[defaux]

a good, nurturing sentence

I like that way of putting it.

 

[Heartlet Happer]

Same book, this guy is 181 words:

I remember the passage vividly. The place in the story felt so stuffy, like an overbuilt box inside the larger box, distracting reader's attention, guiding into the place of horror with no warning until it is too late to run.

 

[Also]

I couldn't find the clip, but there was a gag in Righteous Gemstones where the money went in a bank style tube up to John Goodman's office, and the prayer letters went downstairs to a room full of people reading the letters and praying. There were dozens of people in cafeteria style tables and piles of letters of each.

Thanks for reminding me — I think there's a season I haven't seen.

 

[Also]

I like to say that if a thing has any actual numbers numbers in it, it's not math but arithmetic. If it contains only symbols, it's math.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

That's 131 words. The late Iain M. Banks made a hobby of creating monster sentences. For example, this one from The Algebraist clocks in at 167:


Same book, this guy is 181 words:

Run-on sentences are fine if they make sense. Consider the following quote from Sir Humphrey, in which he tries to tell the Prime Minister that he had misled the House of Commons:

"Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple, and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts, insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated, is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear." (Translation: "You lied!")

But that quote from Prof. Bhaskar, to me, is impenetrable. What is "the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm"? Why is "Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelian provenance" an "unholy trinity"? And do I really want to know?

 

[JLT]

Mark Twain on the German language:

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with the verb in his mouth."

He was also confounded by gender assignations of nouns. He said it made no sense to have a language where a turnip has a gender, but a maiden doesn't.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

From an evaluation of the 2020 US census: "Among those who identified as White alone or in combination, English (46.6 million), German (45 million), and Irish (38.6 million) were the largest groups."

 

[Iain Aschendale]

From an evaluation of the 2020 US census: "Among those who identified as White alone or in combination, English (46.6 million), German (45 million), and Irish (38.6 million) were the largest groups."

It always boggles my mind that Winston Churchill didn't consider the Irish to be "white."

 

[Homer Potvin]

It always boggles my mind that Winston Churchill didn't consider the Irish to be "white."

Likely he was speaking culturally instead of racially.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

Likely he was speaking culturally instead of racially.

I'd just like to say that racial theories (along with all other things that seek to divide us from each other instead of unite us) suck.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

There are those with whom I do not wish to be united, though the reasons have nothing to do with race.

Anyone got a cite for Churchill not considering the Irish "white"? He considered Irish Catholics to be inferior to white Protestants, with non-white people falling lower on his infamous scale of superiority, but I've not found anything indicating he didn't consider the Irish non-white. Shared research will be appreciated.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Today I learned that today was the first time in modern history that a member of the British royal family had been arrested. The last time was in 1649, when Charles I was executed for treason during the English Civil War.

 

[Naomasa298]

There are those with whom I do not wish to be united, though the reasons have nothing to do with race.

Anyone got a cite for Churchill not considering the Irish "white"? He considered Irish Catholics to be inferior to white Protestants, with non-white people falling lower on his infamous scale of superiority, but I've not found anything indicating he didn't consider the Irish non-white. Shared research will be appreciated.

"Black Irish" is a term that's been around since before Churchill. It dates back to the mid-19th century (appearing in American newspapers), and mostly refers to Irish people with black or dark hair. It's not a racial description, but modern readers often put that nuance into it.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

...mostly refers to Irish people with black or dark hair

Ah, that. My dad was classic black Irish: glossy black hair and blue, blue eyes. However: his side of the famiy got to Ireland by way of the Scottish Clearances, or at least back to Ireland. They'd been crossing and recrossing the Irish Sea for millennia. When I visited near Glenarm in Northern Ireland, our host told me people mistake him for Scottish when he goes overseas. Before the road at the edge of the sea was built, he said it was easier to sail back and forth to Scotland than go overland to Belfast and Larne.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

Today I learned that today was the first time in modern history that a member of the British royal family had been arrested. The last time was in 1649, when Charles I was executed for treason during the English Civil War.

Well ... not only did he scheme with the Scots to invade England, but his wife also schemed with the French to invade England too.

So old king Charlie deserved what he got for being such a schemin' bastard.