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drbelanger73

Beer is good for you.
I was just yammering with Celerity about education. Currently I am on duty reading More's Utopia for my Brititsh Lit class. I couldn't resist posting this little blurb I found in the begining, seemed spookily appropriate:

"...For men's tastes are so various, the tempers of some are so severe, their minds so ungrateful, their judgments so foolish, that there seems no point in publishing something, even if it's intended for their advantage, that they will recieve only with contempt and ingratitude. Better to simply follow one's own natural inclinations, lead a merry, peacful life, and ignore the vexing problems of publication. Most people know nothing of learning; many despise it. The clod rejects as too difficult whatever isn't cloddish. The pedant dismisses as mere trifling anything that isn't stuffed with obsolete words. Some readers approve only of ancient authors; most men like their own writing best of all. Here's a man so solemn he won't allow a shadow of levity, and there's one so insipid of taste that he can't endure the salt of a little wit. Some dullards dread satire as a man bitten by a hydrophobic dog dreads water; some are so changeable that they like one thing when they're seated and another when they're standing."

I love the fact that in the begining they used it's as a posessive when it is actually supposed to be a shortening of it is. I also think its funny that so many contractions are used in the translation. It adds a stink of perspectivism to the work that bothers me. More was a classically educated man, and likely wrote the book in Latin. I'm quite sure he did not speak English in such a manner, or perhaps that is my own perspective...

They more things change the more they stay the same I guess...
 
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