It's certainly entertaining to dwell on the ways our newfangled word-delivery programmes can foil our pursuit of precise language.
Poetry is a trampoline pursuit whose tension of language, image and passionate purpose send us higher than our own leaps can unaided.
What unified these and other Elevator Repair Service productions was Collins's pursuit of the physicalization of language: he's less interested in stories that move in synch with words, like most traditional theatre, than in how bodies travelling through space at odd or unpredictable angles can make us hear and experience language differently.
Indeed, Sophia had many virtues, both cultured and innate, to recommend her as an ideal candidate for marriage to the unprepossessing Peter, but it was her immediate and canny pursuit of everything Russian — church, language and customs — that predicted the transformation of a girl who might otherwise have been a historical footnote into "the pre-eminent royal personage in the world".
It's liberated her – who was already, God knows, so bold and free – and given her the nerve to go for the pursuit of pure pleasure in language: sounds, rhymes and half-rhymes, clever consonances and assonances, sheer love of words, the simple saying of them, the surprise of hearing them new again.
The rise of inter-disciplinarity has not diminished the hyper-specialization in the academy, and the resultant pursuit of status through esoteric language has deepened the gulf between humanists and the public.
Probable cause for the first: The pursuit of a new musical language was conducted with the same rigor as the attempted absolute order of the systems that produced the aforementioned disasters.
If you have a little extra money to throw at the pursuit of learning the Russian language, go to Amazon or Google Product Search and find yourself a copy of Pimsleur Russian I - or find it some other way.
A different leftwing orientation, agreeing with this determination to universalise justice and mutual respect, sees with dismay that the multicultural egalitarians have made themselves easy targets for rightwingers by being guilty themselves of a kind of oppression, hounding those who fail to adopt scrupulously undiscriminatory attitudes and language in pursuit of their otherwise admirable aims.
I believe that in pursuit of such equal opportunity the language can and should be desexed in many ways--for example by reconstructing sentences to read, "Let us all do our duty," instead of "Let each man do his duty"; but the awkward substitution of person for man in such monstrosities as freshperson and person hole covers can only make feminism seem foolish and retard its progress.
