1.
Subjunctive mood is why we say, "If I were you" instead of
"If I was you," and "We suggested that Bob listen to some Over
the Rhine" instead of "We suggested that Bob listened to some over the
Rhine."
Basically a social class and education marker in the first instance; in the
second, descriptive of actual language use in most cases. But I'm not the
person for this question. Marie is the person for this question.
:)
I had to confirm the answer with my Grammar textbook.
2.
Mattrick Messino, who (let me
affirm) I appreciate very much asks: "If I form a "skin-head"
band, and sing about white supremacy, is it art because I've worded my racism
poetically and set it to music?"
It may be art, but it will be
vile. Whether it is propaganda or not depends upon its deliberate
suppression of obvious alternate points of view, use of misleading rhetorical
tactics, *intent* to mislead (sufficient but not necessary), etc. Whether
it is art depends on its artfulness. Artful propaganda can exist;
propaganda can be a sort of art.
The point is not to be sure what's
art and what's propaganda, but to be sure when you've been hit with propaganda
that you know it, and to understand when something is beautiful or
not.
Is it possible to be beautiful and
vile? Is there beautiful racist propaganda? I'm probably not going
to spend ten years developing a philosophy about this, but I'm gonna hypothesize
right now that anything as ugly as immoral hatred will never be also
beautiful.
The obvious retort here is that it
may be beautiful to the hater. In the abstract, this retort is nearly
impossible to answer, really; but I still don't think the hater has his eye on
beauty. Show me a specific hater's art, and I'll make specific claims
about it. Otherwise, it's hard to get anywhere with this sort of
debate.
So . . . Where is the line between
propaganda and art, and where is the line between beauty and ugliness?
These are not solvable questions: it's enough to know that the questions
exist.
Art criticism is not very useful in
the abstract.
When the object is in front of us,
only then can we call a heart a heart or a spade a spade.
And on that subject . . .
.
3.
Calling a spade a spade. The
"racist" etymology seemed wrong to me, so I checked. As I
suspected, the phrase is much older than the bad slang
"spade." Enjoy:
This file is an excerpt from the September
1997 version of Mark Israel's AUE FAQ.
The file was re-generated Tuesday 4
December 2001 18:15 GMT.
To see the full AUE FAQ at Mark Israel's Web site,
click here.
"to call a spade a spade"
-------------------------
is NOT an ethnic slur.
It derives from an ancient Greek expression: ta syka syka, te:n
skaphe:n de skaphe:n onomasein = "to call a fig a fig, a trough a
trough". This is first recorded in Aristophanes' play The Clouds
(423 B.C.), was used by Menander and Plutarch, and is still current
in modern Greek. There has been a slight shift in meaning: in
ancient times the phrase was often used pejoratively, to denote a
rude person who spoke his mind tactlessly; but it now, like the
English phrase, has an exclusively positive connotation. It is
possible that both the fig and the trough were originally sexual
symbols.
In the Renaissance, Erasmus confused Plutarch's "trough"
(skaphe:) with the Greek word for "digging tool" (skapheion;
the two words are etymologically connected, a trough being
something that is hollowed out) and rendered it in Latin as ligo.
Thence it was translated into English in 1542 by Nicholas Udall in
his translation of Erasmus's version as "to call a spade [...] a
spade". (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations perpetuates Erasmus'
error by mistranslating skaphe: as "spade" three times under
Menander.)
"To call a spade a bloody shovel" is not recorded until 1919.
"Spade" in the sense of "Negro" is not recorded until 1928. (It
comes from the colour of the playing card symbol, via the phrase
"black as the ace of spades".)
4.
Hello, Amy Joy. :)
That is all,
Fred