A Love Of Language

Rendition (noun). Interpretation, rendering of dramatic role, musical piece, etc. (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Some people call me pedantic. Now I take some pride in that. It means, to me, that I pay attention to detail, that I like all my commas in the right place, that I don’t like unnecessary apostrophe’s, that I like words spelled correctly. I like that in me. What’s wrong with wanting to be correct? What’s wrong with having a love of language, and wanting people to have some respect for it? And this love of language extends to wanting other people to mean what they say, especially politicians. But they are devious bastards those people. Their deviousness knows no bounds. They will take a word, a perfectly innocent word, and give it a meaning that none of us will ever have imagined could be associated with that word.

How can anyone do that? How can anyone just stand up at a meeting and say:
“You know, Mr President, I think that it’s a wonderful idea, but what we’ll do,see, is just to keep it sweet with the media people, if they ever get to hear about it (har, har!) is, we won’t call it ‘transportation of suspects to another country in order to torture them and cover our tracks’, see that’s just too many words. No, we’ll give it a simple title that couldn’t possibly offend anybody. Let’s say, I know - rendition!”

Rendition! You’ve got to hand it to them, the devious, black-hearted fuckers. This is a word that reminds people of a poetry reading. How far away from torture can you get! It was bad enough when poor old Dan Quayle tried to tell a class of school kids that potato ended in an ‘e’, but this is beyond an outrage. They are fucking with our language and they can not, they must not get away with it. This is what we used to tut-tut about in our superior free-thinking, western liberal way when the Soviet Union was extant. Wake up for fuck’s sake! Especially you people with the vote in the home of the fucking brave! A lie is a lie. And the biggest fucking lie of all is that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. No, that's just an insinuation they want people to believe, the biggest lie is that they are in Iraq to free it from terrorism, to give the people democracy. If it wasn't so tragic you would have to laugh, but if they keep repeating their lies in language nobody understands anymore, they'll get away with it.

Listen to language. Listen to language like this:

And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son ?
And what'll you do now my darling young one ?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
And the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my songs well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
© Bob Dylan