Aphorisms by Alex Auswaks
Posted on July 8, 2008
Filed Under Aphorisms |
By day, Alex Auswaks is the mild-mannered manager of the Crimebuff website, which is devoted to all kinds of mystery and crime literature, including but not limited to Agatha Christie, Russian-language mysteries, and Cold War Intrigue & After… The site even has a section on How to Write a Mystery. But by night, Auswaks is a secret agent aphorist, with a special interest in aphorisms about language. He calls his collection “Aphorisms of a Life Misspent with Languages” and here are a few:
A common language leads to a common misunderstanding.
If you spend enough time learning languages, you’ll end up with nothing to say in any of them.
Despite what they tell you, language is not to communicate thought but conceal it.
Travel with foreign currency beats travel with foreign languages.
We’ve abandoned anything the Greeks and Romans ever taught us, so why the hell do we stick to their grammar?
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One difference between the Continent and Britain is that English has a simpler grammatical structure (declensions and conjugations) than, say, French and German. Like a distressed traveler, English has thrown out superfluous baggage in the course of its evolution. But for anyone who has not grown up with it, English pronunciation (much less consistent than that of French)and idiom can be the devil.