Potpourri (That's just stuff that falls outta trees!)

Right. Random posts.

• Infinitives can be split in English (maybe). But the canard is that "presciptivist grammarians tried to make English work like a Romance language", and that's why they thought they can't be. Only, there is no such thing as a split infinitive in a Romance language—literally, the concept doesn't exist. Any preposition in an infinitive is added to the stem, forming a composite stem—convenir out of con and venir; one says rapidamente convenir. But...split infinitives are possible, but forbidden, in German—it's schnell mitzukommen not zu schnell kommen mit. One wonders—did Old English share this trait with German, but then lose it under French influence after the Conquest? It would make sense—the grammars the court of Henry V used when they decided to switch to English, would probably be based on a written form, with many archaic rules, rather than their contemporary vernacular. Acknowledging that, though—that it was the work of native sources, not some evil foreign sympathizers—might disrupt the xenophobic, specifically anti-Romance, narrative the English have peddled since the Hundred Years War.


• So I'm writing a fantasy story—and yes, it's got elves, trolls, and that sort of thing; I happen to like them. Anyway, for my Elvish language, I decided that the usual method—copying Tolkien by using Welsh phonemes and Finnish word-formation and grammar—just wouldn't do. Instead, I used a modified Muskogean sound-pallet, the word-formation and verb modals from Lakota, and a clause-structure from...one of those Native language groups, I forget which (either Muskogean again, or Algonquian). And as I was trying to write names and sentences in it, and realizing how the verbs worked related to their subjects (the names involve verbs because the adjectives are actually stative verbs), I realized: I'd been doing ergative grammar, and it wasn't really all that hard. Apparently some things really are a lot less confusing in practice than in theory.


• So my 12-year-old brother and I have been playing with Nerf guns (yes, guns, "blaster" is a spineless euphemism), and I noticed, the things are designed by gun nuts. The rifle (I don't know its name, the modular one), has:
  • detachable barrel
  • detachable stock
  • multiple Picatinny rails for sights and lights
  • 6-7 shot detachable box magazine
  • an emergency ejector gate(!)
  Yes, that's right, if a Nerf dart gets jammed inside the gun, you can actually pull open a little door and clear it manually like a misfired 5.56 NATO round in a fricking M16. I approve, gentlemen, from the bottom of my black heart.


• So, seriously, what's with the need people feel to badmouth monarchy? Whenever the concept of a king comes up, some little apple-polisher, fresh from getting extra credit in civics class, will pipe up with a catechism-recitation of how much better a government based on merit is. Maybe; there's two objections to the statement, one more fundamental and one less.
  
  The less fundamental is that a government based on merit will always function as an aristocracy (indeed, it's the literal translation of aristocracy). Aristocracy is actually the most corruptible system because of its tendency to be dominated by a clique, becoming an oligarchy—it's harder for a monarchy to become a tyranny because there's a lack of peer pressure. There's also the issue that position being based on "merit" is not conducive to humility in a governing class, which reinforces that tendency to become a clique.
  
  The more fundamental issue is, this world contains no such thing as a government based on merit, unless "ability to buy better ads in an election year" and "ability to play the corrupt system for political advancement" are considered merits. Because, however, the theory is that the government is based on merit, the ruling class get the same lack of humility, but without the actual merit that might have partly mitigated it. That is, we've got oligarchies, without them ever having been aristocracies.
  
  Before you shoot your mouth off about other systems, look at your own—and then only criticize the true totalitarians, who've managed the Herculean achievement of being worse than you.