> That's worthy of a Darwin Award.

-- When i saw this, i felt a bit a better about being hated by (Dr.) ACB

Re: Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)
On 3/29/2024 2:46 AM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2024-03-29 09:35:59 +0000, Ross Clark said:
>
>> Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.
>
> That's worthy of a Darwin Award.
>
>> It was three weeks before her body was found.
>>
>> Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
>> called "Words Fail Me".
>>
>> She says:
>> "In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could
>> invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent
>> new words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You
>> cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very
>> obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
>> entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is
>> part of a sentence."
>>
>> Can anyone make sense of this for me?
>
> I can sort of understand that, but not to the point of trying to
> translate it into English.
>
>> Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?
>
> They're the same person!
>>
>> Further:
>> "To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of
>> the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to
>> invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to it,
>> is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can
>> do with the English language as it is."
>>
>> Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf