Dante, the one-hit wonder

[Victor Steinbok]

All lists of this type will be inane and superficial and will succeed in
only one thing--getting everyone to complain about who was or was not
included on the list, neglecting the fact that they falling into the
same superficiality trap. Such a list can only exist in a culture
obsessed with ranking everything from milk to porn stars, so the outcome
is not particularly surprising. David Letterman got it exactly right by
making fun of rankings for over 20 years now--with no one noticing what
it is he is actually doing.

But there is something else in the original post by Rader (at SFGate)
that grabbed my attention:

> I foreground the U.S. only because it means both cultural capital and
> book sales.

This deserves the spot in the OED right next to the Mark Twain quote
from 1892 and a linguistics comment from 1962:

> 1892 'M. Twain' /Amer. Claimant/ xvi. 153   We could do a prodigious
> trade [in portrait-painting] with the women if we could foreground the
> things they like, but they don't give a damn for artillery.
> 1962 S. R. Levin /Ling. Struct. Poetry/ ii. 17   Foregrounded
> linguistic elements..call attention to themselves.

At least, Twain used it with irony.

I am not trying to be prescriptivist here and whine about verbing of
"foreground". But I /can/ give a self-proclaimed English poetry expert a
hard time about the style of his own prose--especially when what he's
really trying to say is that he puts the US front and center because of
its cultural imperialism (which is really just a large tumor on English
cultural imperialism that prevailed until WWI).

The ridiculousness of this bush-league prattle borders on the sublime
when Rader quotes his correspondents in earlier posts, which the
"project" was still in development:

> * I laughed the hardest at bthogan's post, who, though writing from
> Philadelphia, asked us to look to England:
>
>> Let's not neglect John Lillison, England's greatest one-armed poet
>> (and the first person ever to be hit by a car; he died). Whom among
>> us can forget "Pointy Birds"?
>>
>> Oh pointy birds
>>
>> O pointy pointy
>>
>> Anoint my head
>>
>> Anointy-nointy
>>

This is nonsense, I tell you! (The "Whom" was a dead giveaway...)
Everyone knows that the world's first road death victim was Bridget
O'Driscoll (or was it Bridget /Driscoll/?) in 1896. The poor woman, 44,
desperately tried to defend herself with an umbrella against an
onrushing car, speeding at 2 miles per hour. At the inquest, Coroner
William Morris classified the incident as an accidental death but
allegedly said, "Such a thing should never happen again."

Wiki does one better:

> The world's first road traffic death involving a motor vehicle is
> alleged to have occurred on 31 August
> 1869.^<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#cite_note-48> An
> Irish scientist Mary Ward died when she fell out of her cousins' steam
> car and was run over by it.

This, however, was not someone "hit" by a car. Still, it leaves me
wondering what early drivers had against Irish women.

(In case you're wondering what's going on, John Lillison was a fictional
poet quoted in The Man With Two Brains. I'm not sure Rader knows this.
Lillison made a comeback in LA Story. Lillison was supposed to have been
killed by car in 1894. http://goo.gl/1hS3G  More here:
http://goo.gl/twX0g  Lillison does have his own Facebook page:
http://goo.gl/TMl9R  Make that TWO Facebook pages: http://goo.gl/3JdZQ )

     VS-)

On 3/7/2011 11:38 AM, George Thompson wrote:
> > From today's NYTimes:
> In February Dean Rader, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, set out to discover history's 10 best poets (much like Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times recently did for composers).  [his top poet i Pablo Neruda]  In second place was Shakespeare, whose name, according to Mr. Rader's "shockingly unscientific measurements," appeared most frequently in reader e-mails, followed by Dante, who Mr. Rader said was the most controversial pick, because "he's only well known for one poem ('The Divine Comedy')." Western literary greats like Walt Whitman, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens also appear on the list with the Eastern favorites Rumi and Li Po, whom Mr. Rader called "the great poet of drunkenness."
>
> So 6 of the top 10 write in English, and the list is rounded out by a Spanish, an Italian, a Persian and a Chinese poet; no poet who wrote in Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, German . . . . . measured up.
>
> Did I mention that no Greek or Latin poet could make the cut?
>
> I post this just to show you folks that Linguistics isn;t the only field of study beset by ninnies.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/books/07arts-THE10BESTPOE_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=dante&st=cse
>
> GAT

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