Blog Dumped for German: Both Readers Outraged

So the fact that I don't know German keeps coming up as a career-stopper. I've decided to do something about that finally and take Anatoly Liberman's advice. (He was the first one to ask that crushing question "Can you read German?") He recommends reading children's books to acquire reading ability in a new language. Just read regularly without stopping to look things up. I don't know how it's supposed to work, but I'm giving it a shot. I don't have any children's books in German, so instead I'm reading the Gospel of Mark (available on biblegateway.com). I read a passage in Spanish (to help refresh those skills) then in the Elberfelder translation. After I leave Trinity, I'll add Greek to the mix, but I get plenty of Greek right now.

In order to squeeze in this new daily activity, I have to squeeze out some others. I decided to stop reading blogs--mostly blogs of people I don't know (Lileks, Steyn, ...). I don't even read the news online anymore. I will still try to read my peeps Linus and Pirate Jimmy. And post here from time to time. But for know I must go the way of most bloggers....

Pax Christi, yo

The Swineherd

You may or may not be interested, but the background to this short story is this: it's based on a dream that I had several years ago that I have always wanted to put into story form. As G.K. Chesterton said, the short story is like a dream--it is evocative, disoriented, and it ought to stick in your mind for days afterward.

As I reflected on the dream, the themes that it seemed to convey were the burden of leadership, the gravity of ending life, and the terrible moral significance of being human. These aren't necessarily the topics I know anything about, they're just the ones that seemed to show up unbidden in the dream.

Oh, and I know the words that the pig shouted at the swineherd, but they're too terrible to share.

And now the thrilling conclusion...

Anyway, here's the end of my short story. You may want to re-read the rest of it below:

The squeals from the mud hole suddenly jumped in intensity. He scrambled to his feet and ran toward the knot of pigs. A few feet into the shallow puddle, one of them was being torn apart by several others; meanwhile, the rest of the herd kept pressing in to drink. The herder began driving them off, kicking the attackers and beating them with his rifle. All but one scattered; it was smaller than the others, but didn’t seem to care about the herder’s blows. It buried its face in the mangled body of its fellow.

Furious, the herder kicked it in the side of the head. It turned to him and squealed, higher in pitch than the others; and there, in that shriek, he heard human words:

“ __________________!”

He interrupted the horrible words with a yell of terror and began to club the small one with the butt of his rifle. Its squeals returned to wordless sounds and then fell silent.

The sun had gone below the horizon. The light was almost gone. He quickly began to sing the song, touching each pig with his rifle as he numbered it.

On the other hand...

It seems my accent identity comes down to how I pronounce "bag." Or possibly "vague." The last question asks if you pronounce "bag" to rhyme with "vague." I don't pronounce them the same: "bag" has a low front vowel like in "cat," while "vague" has a mid front vowel like in "bake." The quiz may be assuming that my pronunciation of "bag" is standard and is asking me to compare my pronunciation of "vague." I've heard people pronounce "vague" with the low front vowel, and it weirds me out. Actually, my friend Josh (from South Dakota) pronounced it that way. That would suggest to me that the western pronunciation is the one that uses the low front vowel for "vague." In which case, the question is scored wrong--North Centrallers have different pronunciations, while westerners have the same.

BUT--the quiz could be assuming that my pronunciation of "vague" is standard and asking me to compare "bag" to that. I have also heard people pronounce "bag" with the mid front vowel (as in "bake" and "bagel" [don't get me started on people who say "bagel" with the LOW front vowel as in "bat"!]), but I ain't one of them. So maybe North Centrallers are supposed to use the mid front vowel in "bag," and my use of the low front vowel makes me Western rather than North Central.

Upshot: the last question needs to be fixed.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central   "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
The West
The Midland
Boston
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

My supposed accent

I'm not sure how I ended up with a Western accent (although maybe rural western Minnesota is further west than I thought). I might try this again and change my answer to the last question...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West   Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

The Next Three Paragraphs

Some of the pigs were gathering to his right. They had found a puddle of brown water and were noisily jostling each other to drink. The herder sat, leaning on his rifle to lower himself to the ground. The sun was setting, and he knew they would get no farther today. The pigs would not be dislodged from the puddle. He took a drink from his leather canteen and tried to relax his jaw. His hand started toward the bag that carried his food, but he clenched his fist and stopped short. He should wait until morning. A week ago, the last time he had made a fire, he had boiled the last of his meal into a porridge. Now his bag held only the pasty clumps of cooked meal scraped from the pot.

He knew that sleep would be an escape from his hunger, but he dreaded the end of each day. The sunsets made him sick--orange sky blending into a brown horizon. It was strange; of all the things that made him feel ill--the sound and smell of the pigs, the hot sun, the warm stale water from his canteen--it was the vomit sunsets and the coming darkness that made him feel worst.

He stood again and began to sing the counting song. The words were nonsense to him, but he had learned as a child to count the herd with this ancient chant. When he started out across the wilderness with his pigs, he had to sing it five times through to number them all. The heat and the lack of food and water were taking their toll; last night the herder only sang it through twice.

My Assignment

I'm afraid I'll get an F on this one. The only suggestion I ended up using in my piece was Pirate Jimmy's. Sorry. But if it's any consolation, I give you the first three grafs of my story:

The Swineherd

His teeth were wearing down. He tried not to grind them, but if he lost concentration for a moment, he found himself tensing his jaw and temples again. When he awoke each morning, his jaw was sore from grinding his teeth in his sleep. His hunger pangs had pulled his face into a constant grimace; even when he felt no emotion, he was still hungry, and his face showed it.

The pigs were different. No emotion has ever been discerned on a pig's face, and their disfigurement was only the leanness of their bodies. They were perhaps more stubborn than usual and seemed to protest everything with their awful squeals.

There was no one to tell the herder about his face. He had not seen another human being for weeks. A few months ago, from a distance, he saw a figure silhouetted on a hilltop, but neither of them made any effort to acknowledge each other. The herder shifted his course slightly, away from the hill, and drove the pigs a little faster. No one could be trusted in the famine. That's why he carried the rifle.

Read Lileks today

In order to answer the following crucial life questions:

How should a man behave?
Did people in 1928 flip the bird?