Non ho mai avuto una forte simpatia per Prodi,a parte le volte che lo incontro in bicicletta bardato come la buonanima di Pantani, non posso fare a meno di sorridere.Oppure quando rilascia le interviste col suo marcato accento emiliano e quella cadenza a me tanto cara che gli da quell'aria di gentiluomo di fortuna.

Questa volta il Professore mi ha colpito.Bravo.Non ci sta se ne fotte del trucchetto da osteria targato Arcore e affronta fiero il pubblico ludibrio e avverte "Non cascateci!Le intercettazioni sono un valido strumento al servizio della Magistratura."

L'antefatto.

A casa Berlusconi c'è bisogno di una spintarella perchè il disegno di Legge che ha come oggetto impedire alla Magistratura di usare le intercettazioni telefoniche come strumento da usare in istruttoria,salvanto ancpra una volta baracca e burattini venga finalmente approvato(Si vota nei prossimi giorni)

Beh, certo ai solerti e geniali collaboratori del Premier gli strumenti non mancano devono solo scegliere.

Viene battezzato Panorama ( Gruppo Berlusconi main target Italia dei benpensanti) per pubblicare delle becere intercettazioni telfoniche che hanno come protagonista Prodi che raccomanda il genero e la figlia per chi sa quale questione,comunque aiuti ai propri familiari.

Panorama esce oggi in edicola con questa copertina:

Solerte la solidarità di Berlusconi che, seppur ancora in vacanza, non tarda a inviare messaggio di solidarietà al povero Prodi.

Capisco che si fa fatica a credere nell'intelligenza di un popolo che da 15 anni si rende oggetto di sberleffi da parte di un team di circensi che mirano solo a risolvere le proprie questioni, a salvarare e mettere da parte capitali fingendo di lavorare per il bene comune.

Ma questa, signori....è come quando alle scuole medie si andava dalla ragazza fidanzata col più bello della classe a lasciarle il bigliettino sotto al banco "Lui sta con te solo perchè gli fai toccare le tette e se ne vanta con tutti!".

Oppure come "La nuova Alitalia non peserà sul bene pubblico!"

E i 7.000 esuberi? Ci sono le Poste Italiane a rilvere il problema!!!
Non è una barzelletta...è quello che è stato detto!
Ma come fa un popolo intero a restare inerme difronte a tutto questo?!
Ma la gente cosa pensa?Ma la gente pensa?Boh!

Lettura del giorno:


In linea anche l'articolo di Gabriele Padullà oggi in edicola su Ddonna di Repubblica
Pag 21

"What I have most wanted to do . . . is to make political writing into an art." George Orwell

George Orwell was a passionate observer, thinker, and writer. The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, observes that Orwell's novels and essays "still resonate around the world as peerless examples of courageous independence of mind, steely analysis and beautiful writing."

Most widely known today as the author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), during the 1930s and 1940s Orwell published insightful and scrupulously honest essays in left-wing intellectual periodicals. From August 1938 until October 1942 he also kept a diary, with subjects ranging from how many eggs his chickens were laying to the weather to World War II.  

Seventy years to the day, The Orwell Prize is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. The "domestic" diaries began on August 9th, 1938/2008. The "political" diaries will begin on September 7th, 1938/2008. The diaries are word for word as Orwell wrote them, including original spelling errors, "indicated by a ° following the offending word."

In addition to Orwell's exact words, the blog includes footnotes written by Peter Davison, who edited The Complete Works of George Orwell and the text of newspaper clippings Orwell pasted into his diary. As you'd expect from a blog, the entries include many links. Here's an example:

August 21

21 August, 2008 by orwelldiaries

Yesterday fine & fairly warm. Went in afternoon and saw Kit’s Coty,¹ a druidical altar or something of the kind. It consists of four stones arranged more or less thus:

The whole about 8’ high & the stone on top approximately 8’ square by something over a foot thick. This makes about 70 cubic feet of stone. A cubic yard (27 cubic feet) of coal is supposed to weigh 27 cwt., so the top stone if of coal would weigh about 3 1/2 tons. Probably more if I have estimated the dimensions rightly. The stones are on top of a high hill & it appears they belong to quite another part of the country.

¹Kit’s Coty House is the chamber of a long barrow (an ancient grave mound) not far to the north of Aylesford. Peter Davison

*You can view an image of this entry here. The Orwell Prize

-Julie

The times reports that:-

The sex lives of council-tax payers are being secretly monitored by local authority inspectors to establish whether residents claiming single person’s discounts are really living alone.

OK, so I understand why the councils do this even if I don't agree. They are so wastefull and strapped for cash that they don't want anybody to claim the single occupier discount of 25% even if the cost of surveillance costs more than the money saved by discouraging false claims.

But it gets worse,

Undercover snoopers are being used to find out how often lovers visit and whether supposedly single residents are sharing a bed every night with the same person.

So the council stasi actually take up position to spy on people no doubt with their binoculars focused on the bedroom windows.

But that's not all,

Councils are also demanding that householders give access to their bedrooms in return for the single-person discount. Inspectors can use the searches to check bedrooms for evidence of live-in lovers not disclosed to the authorities.

Claimants of a 25% discount for single people in Thurrock, Essex, have to sign a form authorising “the council or its agents to make inquiries to corroborate this claim” and “inspect the property”.

So, in other words, if you want the discount you have to sign a form that lets the council snoopers rummage around in your underwear draw and you as a council tax payer are totally unable to stop this invasion of your privacy.

We have already seen local councils use anti terrorist laws to spy on the parents of kids who want to use council schools and draconian fines for slightly overfilling litter bins so the lid doesn't shut fully and now we have this.

Goerge Orwells "Big brother" totalitarian police state is alive and well in Britain in 2008.

Looks real, doesn't it.

Os diários de George Orwell, iniciados em Agosto de 1938, estão a ser publicados no blogue Orwell Diaries.

Mais informação em Público: George Orwell, o 'blogger' póstumo.

If you just graduated from high school, you're already familiar with how little deviation from the 'group perspective' is allowed. If you're just entering college, then you have a great opportunity to start thinking for yourself! In college you'll be able to seek out others that feel the way you do, persuade others of your beliefs and do heavy-duty research to verify your beliefs. It's also an opportunity to have an open mind for the first time in your life. You'll be free to explore ideas, dangerous ideas, in the privacy of your dorm room, the library stacks or under the stars on the quad. After all, religion and politics are the most fun and interesting topics to talk about and debate with your friends, complete strangers, or that cute girl at the frat party. Believe us, you're not going to stand out in the crowd as the laid-back frat brother or the flirty girl that loves bar parties. Those are a dime a dozen.

Please join us in the quest to break the phenomenon of 'group think'. At riseupRochester we encourage diverse views on diverse issues. Have something to say? Write an article here! Disagree? Leave a comment.

Won't you join us? Make your college experience something worth remembering, somthting worth looking back upon. I hope that this site will be come yours just as much as it is ours at this point. College is a battleground where hearts and minds are won over with ideas. So throw your ideas into the mix!

"Lastly, tea -- unless one is drinking it in the Russian style -- should be drunk without sugar.  I know very well that I am in a minority here.  But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavor of your tea by putting sugar in it?  It would be equally reasonable to put pepper or salt.  Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter.  If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water."

~George Orwell, "A Nice Cup of Tea" appearing in Evening Standard, January 12th 1946

Beautiful!  I fully agree, unless of couse the tea is Iced in which case I prefer the Southern standard with a whole hell of a lot of sugar.

In a May 2008 essay for The Times of London, playwright Tom Stoppard, the British son of Czech émigrés, explained his long-held contempt for his more hyperbolic comrades in the theater. “I felt myself out of patience with people who, from 1968 onwards, would denigrate this country that adopted me, this country that I’d adopted, as some kind of fascist police state. It just seemed so embarrassing that those countries that truly could be described as such were very, very different from Britain.” In Stoppard’s acclaimed 2006 play Rock ’n’ Roll, a meditation on Czech resistance to Soviet occupation, one character upbraids his daughter for her lazy use of the term, grumbling that many in her generation “think a fascist is a mounted policeman at a demo in Grosvenor Square.”

To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of “fascist” will ring familiar. And almost as clichéd as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than “someone I vehemently disagree with.” As an indicator of a particular set of political beliefs, “fascism” has become a perfectly meaningless pejorative, a political cudgel that is obtuse and imprecise by design.

This argument should sound familiar to anyone who has attended a first-year lecture in political science, literature or philosophy. This argument, right down to the syntax, is an uncredited lift of George Orwell's famous 1946 essay 'Politics and the English Language':

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like ROMANTIC, PLASTIC, VALUES, HUMAN, DEAD, SENTIMENTAL, NATURAL, VITALITY, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion If words like BLACK and WHITE were involved, instead of the jargon words DEAD and LIVING, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word FASCISM has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." [my emphasis]

Moynihan's argument is thus based on a truism most literary types have absorbed as a matter of course. By borrowing, uncredited, this well-known argument of Orwell, Moynihan steals unannounced into our psyche, installing his argument there before he makes it. 'Yes', we agree, 'we must protect the value of words, "fascism" most of all'. Surely, then, Moynihan will follow with a proper definition of "fascism" to set those trigger-happy leftists dead to rights?

It never happens. Moynihan offers no valid definition of his own. Instead, the real, insidious thesis of the article comes clear, retroactively revealing what the title of his article was meant to denote: not Peter's wolf, but Naomi's:

few noticed the runaway success of another, much more shoddily researched fascist-themed tract, this one from the feminist writer Naomi Wolf. According to Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, America is barreling down the road toward a fascist future, following a path well-trodden by Mussolini and Hitler. The Bush administration’s spotty record on civil liberties and the growth of executive power aren’t temporary phenomena, Wolf argues, but portend a greater “fascist shift.” America, she writes, is in the late stages of our own Weimar Republic —it’s a partially free society nearing collapse, “on the verge of a violent police state.”

[...]

Even when not flubbing or oversimplifying the broad details of fascist ideology, The End of America commits the fatal sin of contorting every sinister moment of the 20th century to ensure that it lines up with some aspect of the “war on terror.” It is clearly with Al-Qaeda in mind that Wolf wrote this stunningly ignorant passage on the construction of phantom enemies: “What matters to a fascist leader is not to get rid of the enemy but rather to maintain an enemy,” a piece of analysis that would certainly surprise the families of untermensch liquidated during the Second World War.

It's a clever trick: he manages to discredit Naomi Wolf's argument before she makes it, simply because she has the temerity to use the word 'fascism'. Aside from the fact that Moynihan seems incapable of differentiating between a 'fascist shift' and full-fledged Nazism, by using this strategy Moynihan can deride the comparisons Wolf draws without attacking her philosphical foundation. How can he?—he doesn't offer a correct definition with which to challenge Wolf's. Now, Moynihan pretends even handedness by also critiquing Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism which makes the laughable claim that fascism descends from leftist values, but he reserves his lengthiest and most applied criticism to Wolf. In fact, Moynihan for the most part approves of Goldberg's project, he simply chides the book for its occasionally excessive zeal.

It soon becomes clear that Moynihan is less interested in buttressing the semiotic integrity of the word "fascism" against the onslaught of lazy illiterates than he is in apologizing for free-market liberal capitalism and shoring its borders against principled leftist critique—all under the veil of linguistic pedantry. It comes as no surprise then, that Moynihan concludes not that we should consolidate, solidify and uphold a just and specific definition of fascism, but that we should cease talking about it altogether:

When both sides see creeping fascism lurking around every bit of political rhetoric and action they disagree with, then the term doesn’t need to be reappropriated or redefined, it needs to be buried.

Language must be based on experience, not pedantry. If we bury a word as potent and important as "Fascism", we bury the concomitant essential and unforgettable experience. This is the point Orwell was trying to make, not that such words have outlived their value. It is ironic that Moynihan would use free-market principles to isolate and defend "fascism" from those who would secure its services in the name of social democracy; it is capitalism itself that diluted such political words in the first place. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944):

The general repetition of names for measures to be taken by the authorities makes them, so to speak, familiar, just as the brand name on everybody’s lips increased sales in the era of the free market. The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword. The layer of experience which created the words for their speakers has been removed; in this swift appropriation language acquires the coldness which until now it had only on billboards and in the advertisement columns of newspapers. Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-marks which are finally all the more firmly linked to the things they denote, the less their linguistic sense is grasped.

Wolf is attempting to ground such terms in political experience, because otherwise, they disappear under a shadow of reactionary reflex. Moynihan, eager to defend his free-market mantra, is attempting precisely the opposite: he is attempting to relegate fascist ideology to the past, to sever it from social memory and experience, and to ensure that the trajectory of capitalism—from liberalism to barbarism—proceeds apace.

Dessutom fuskar jag med två författare på L, eftersom Doris Lessing är min högt älskade husgudinna som följt med mig genom åren sen kanske 20-årsåldern och som jag dessutom träffat, medan Selma Lagerlöf var min mormors stora favorit som hon identifierade sig stenhårt med (låghalt lärarinna, med födelsedag 20 november). Jag kan helt enkelt inte välja mellan dem, det känns som ett personligt svek.

Bok: Lord Peters smekmånad av Dorothy L Sayers. Minst fem omläsningar, och Kamratfesten har jag läst ännu fler gånger.

Karaktär: Luna Lovegood.

På O är Joyce Carol Oates svår att gå förbi, även om den senaste jag läste var - det går inte att säga dålig för hon är aldrig dålig, men vissa tycker jag bara hjärtligt illa om. Å andra sidan har hon skrivit underbara böcker, så det måste bli hon. Bubblare: George Orwell.

Karaktär: Orm i Frans G Bengtssons Röde Orm. En härlig skröna som jag läste som barn och sen igen för några år sen när den kom på pocket.

Bok: Ord med historia är kul att bläddra i.

Em meio a uma fase de releituras de alguns livros - passando por Serafim Ponte Grande e Admirável Mundo Novo - entreguei-me, após 6 anos do primeiro encontro, à leitura do clássico 1984, de George Orwell. Ao longo do livro uma coisa ficava martelando na minha cabeça: o fantástico álbum OK Computer, do Radiohead, seria uma interpretação do livro pela banda? As coincidências não são poucas.

Então, para quem se interessar pelo álbum ou pelo livro (ou pelos dois), indico a leitura do excelente texto Radiohead e Orwell - (OK Computer e 1984). 2+2=5, de Yuri Gitahy de Oliveira, publicado em 2003 no Duplipensar.

Imagem: Kitsune Noir

Move over Victory Gin, here's Liberty Sweets!

"Judicial Watch Launches Investigation of Effort to Intimidate Conservatives

Here is something for the George Orwell fans - the Orwell Prize has started putting on a new blog the diary entries of George Orwell, each one 70 years to the day after he wrote them.

O itouch é uma versão sem telefone do iphone, para quem não estava afim (ou não tinha $$$) de um contrato com a AT&T, mas queria muito um gadget desses mesmo assim. Tem todas as funcionalidades do iphone, exceto o telefone, ou seja, permite que você navegue na internet, cheque seus emails e coisa e tal, desde que tenha uma conexão wireless nas redondezas. Basicamente, é um minicomputador (alías, acabei de me dar conta da incongruência da palavra microcomputador nos dias de hoje, mas enfim). O problema é que quando ganhei o bichinho, achei que ele poderia funcionar como um leitor pra livros eletrônicos, e fiquei meio decepcionada quando me dei conta que ele não tinha essa funcionalidade.

Mas isso é coisa do passado. Minha amiga me apresentou a loja Apple Apps, que tem uma infinidade de applicativos para o iphone e o itouch ( e o melhor, vários deles são gratuitos). Até o momento já tenho instalados forca, paciência, tetris (alguém lembra? - eu adorava esse) e outros tantos jogos e trivias. Mas, a melhor parte é que baixei dois aplicativos o STANZA e o eReader, que permitem ler livros eletrônicos diretamente no seu itouch/iphone, na hora em que melhor lhe convier.

Em termos de praticidade na leitura, gostei mais do STANZA, ele é rápido para mudar de páginas, e tem aquela funcionalidade do itouch/iphone que muda a orientação da página automaticamente, conforme a posição do gadget. Mas, como nem tudo é perfeito, até o momento você só pode baixar livros do catalogo online da própria stanza, e apesar de eles terem um bom número de clássicos em domínio público (inclusive alguns em outras línguas, ainda não achei nada em português, mas também não procurei muito), você fica limitado ao que eles oferecem.

No eReader (assim como no Stanza), o livro ficar armazenado no próprio itouch/ipod, mas notei que demora um pouco para carregar para leitura, e também na rapidez com que se muda de página, o que pode parecer besteira, mas com uma página tão curta, acaba que você pode ter que mudar de páginas várias vezes em menos de um minuto. Além disso, o programa não muda a orientação da página automáticamente, você precisa ir ao settings para configurar esse detalhe. A grande vantagem? O eReader permite que você baixe livros de qualquer site que ofereça livros digitais em formato PDB (por exemplo, o girliebooks, que tem uma coletânea de livros de autoras consagradas, e que oferece os livrinhos gratuitamente), além de te permitir comprar livros mais atuais no próprio site do eReader.

Como ambos os programas são gratuitos, baixando os dois você tem uma infinidade de possibilidades. A minha estante eletrônica já tem mais de 20 livros e, como os livros são leves, mesmo lotando sua estante, ainda sobra muito espaço para músicas e vídeos.

Esta semana terminei de ler o primeiro: 1984, de George Orwell. Esse livro é assustadoramente brilhante, um clássico publicado em 1949, cuja mensagem assusta mais ainda por continuar tão atual (ou talvez mais) do que na época em que foi lançado. Para quem não sabe, o termo Big Brother, atualmente tão associado ao reality TV show que começou na europa e é sucesso no Brasil há anos, foi cunhado neste livro, 1984, e se refere a idéia de uma 'entidade' dominadora, que está sempre te observando, sempre te controlando, que sabe não apenas o que você faz, mas, e o que é pior, o que você pensa. Esse livro merece um poste exclusivo, e se um dia criar coragem (ou perder completamente o juízo - o que vier primeiro), prometo escrever sobre ele. No momento, só consigo deixar minha recomendação:

LEIA 1984 de George Orwell.

Aliás, acho que ele deveria ser leitura obrigatória para todos nós. E com isso, vou me despedindo. Bons sonhos a todos. Pelo menos por enquanto, ainda se pode sonhar sem medo (eu acho!). ;)

I've been reading Orwell's diary entries 70 years after they were written.

A beautifully written account of a trip to the loo.

A different kind of Dumpster diving and a new name game.

You may read about racism and Obama on slate.

Speaking of Obama. I've been thinking; what if I do not vote for Obama? Ralph Nader was interviewed on Talk of the Nation, and although he is known to be a bit loony I agree with him on many issues. Although a vote for Nader is a vote lost for Obama, because of the electoral college I have little to worry about. Obama will almost certainly win in Connecticut. Although a Pennsylvanian should be worried about a third party candidate, I am not.

This IS Del.icio.us : Digg It

This is what the notice said: "We know who you are. We know where you live. We know what you did."

The letters of the words were half coloured black (at the top) and half coloured red (at the bottom), almost as though they were dripping with blood - or at least that was how my tired mind saw things.

I couldn't immediately tell the significance of the words, but I am assuming that they had something to do with TV licensing (and what, pray tell, is the point of advertisement if you cannot immediately tell what is being advertised?)

I am sure that the threatening undertones would be fairly troubling to most commuters. But seen at 11:33 by a lone traveller, who went to bed at seven in the morning and had his last drop of alcohol an hour later, they were downright terrifying.

I sought solace in a conversation with a bagel-seller.

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

Samuel Pepys's peeps have been posting his diaries for years. Let's hope for more. Let's see...Dickens, George Eliot, Maugham. While I would prefer reading these things the old-fashioned way, it's interesting to see words of more than 100 years ago -- centuries in some cases -- meet the structures of the Web. You know. Links and stuff.

Politics, protests, patriotism and the pursuit of sporting perfection

Every four years I plant myself in front of the television for two weeks and wear down the cushion of my couch. I find myself enthralled by sports I would otherwise not even have a passing interest in, learning the finer points of gymnastics, dressage, handball and synchronised diving. I eagerly await our anthem blaring over the speakers in a packed stadium, with our hero standing in front of our flag, with our gold medal shining around their neck.I love marveling at the skills of the athletes, getting consumed by the drama of the competition and reveling in the emotions of the winners and the losers.

But should I be watching these Olympics?

After awarding Beijing the games in 2001, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge publicly stated his expectation that China’s human rights record would improve as a result of hosting the games.

Arguably this has not occurred. Less than two weeks before the opening ceremony, Amnesty International released a report entitled “The Olympics countdown – broken promises.” The picture painted in the report is reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. Despite the hope of the IOC and Chinese assurances steps were being made, the report says human rights have actually deteriorated as a result of the Olympics. The report presented the findings from Amnesty’s monitoring of the Chinese government in four areas: the continuing use of the death penalty; abusive forms of administrative detention; imprisonment and harassment of human rights defenders, including journalists and lawyers; and the censorship of the internet.

Amnesty accuses China of using the Olympics as a pretext for cleaning up the streets of subversive elements and dissenting voices. Protesters and activists risk being detained without charge, trial or judicial review. Prisoners are also reportedly tortured. Beijing citizens have been dealt forced evictions without compensation as their homes have been demolished in the construction of Olympic facilities. Chinese and international reporters continue to face restrictions on what they can report, for example during the unrest in Tibet in March and on the controversies in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake.

China’s promise to improve in these areas of concern has been broken.

The world’s attention is firmly fixed on China and the Olympics have forced the country to open up. Sure the heroics from the likes of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt captured the bulk of the world’s attention, but people have not stopped speaking out about human rights. It seems that every news bulletin during the past fortnight has included either a story on the restrictions placed on journalists or news of another audacious political protest in Beijing.

Just as the Chinese have sought to exploit the spirit of the Olympic Games for their own propaganda, activists have managed to hijack the event to draw attention to the crimes of the communist state.
China has failed to use the Games to portray itself positively, as the world is well aware of the reality behind the sleek façade.

I don’t think the hosting rights should have been awarded to China but, as a result of the Olympics, people are talking about issues that would have been otherwise ignored.

Some have suggested boycotting the Games, choosing not to watch any of the events. I don’t see how this would be particularly successful in achieving anything to be honest.

And I couldn’t boycott even if I wanted to. I love the Olympics. I remember watching Danyon Loader win his two golds in Atlanta in 1996 on a small screen television at the front of the class when I was 12. Eight years later I recall witnessing Sarah Ulmer win her pursuit race to finally put New Zealand on the medal table in Athens, at some God-awful hour of the morning.

I have tried to catch every minute of this Olympics, from Moss Burmeister’s agonising but impressive fourth placing in the 200-metres butterfly to the golden glory of the Evers-Swindell twins and Valerie Vili. And in four years time I’ll do it all again.

Hopefully the London Olympics will not present a similar moral dilemma.

I was confused. Communal? Had I missed something about a religious genocide perpretrated by China? So I clarified, "Surely you mean communist? They are communists."  

This person waves his hand dismissively. "Communal, communist, same thing. You know what I mean."

"I didn't. And that's why I had to clarify," I replied.

"You writers are all the same. Nitpicking on words, on grammar."

That got my goat for two reasons. One, that people are too lazy to learn to communicate well and when rebuked, gently mind you, assume an air of disdain and exclaim writers! Good, effective communication is the not the sole purview of writers. And two, I DO NOT NITPICK. But that's beside the point.

But taking up the first grouse, I wonder why people think language is not important. Even in school, which were the courses that were considered important for our future and which were the ones that were considered irksome?

Remember the groaning "Oh God, why I have to study English?" Sure, we all groaned the same way about math and science also. But there was a difference. There we meant "Oh God! I'm not prepared enough." Or "Omigod! I'm going to fail and the spend the rest of my life as an auto mechanic," whereas in the case of language we meant, "Oh God, why do I have to waste my time studying active and passive verbs when I could be studying math and avoiding that very future?"

Language falls under the purview of art. And you know what the popular perception about art is. It's good if you have a talent for it but not the end of the world if you don't.

I say, the exact converse is true. When I was in college pursuing a graduate degree in economics, one of our teachers told us, "Learn language first. If you are not articulate, you can be the best economist but it won't matter because you will not be able to put your ideas across."

A word of advice I've never forgotten.

Here's an interesting article I came across on the subject. You might want to give it a peek.

PS: I don't agree with arts not being important either. Sure science and math are the building blocks of a hunger-free, disease-free world. But what good is a developed, modern world if there is no music, no theatre, no literature to beautify it?