Word Nerdery
From a BoingBoing post about über-crank Ignatius L. Donnelly, who Charlie Pierce profiles in his book Idiot America:
“Cranks are noble,” Pierce says, “because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.” It’s like the difference between kitsch and dreck–people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better–they’re in it for the money and the power and the fame.
I really really love this kind of semantic hair-splitting. This is where vocabulary really gets interesting: at the shifting hairs-width border between not-quite-synonyms. Our relentlessly Darwinian culture tends to pound the crap out of this kind of “extraneous” nuance — the difference between “less” and “fewer”, for example, is quickly disappearing, and the farther/further distinction is just an annoyance these days. Lots of dictionary definitions seem more like quaint archaeological artifacts that pertinent, present-day concerns.
Still. English is a borderless country on an infinite plane of possibility, and it will gladly absorb anything you dump into it. So there are always new gems to find, if you’re willing to dig.
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