2 extensions from my last two posts

1) History of America day two of legitimate class

Well, honestly, calling it a legitimate class might be a bit of a stretch. We watched a movie for an hour. But that´s not why I´m bringing it up. Oh no. The subject of the movie was what made it noteworthy: Atlantis.

I may not have been able to understand much of the spoken content of the movie because the acoustics were horrible and I would have been struggling to understand it in English, but I could read place names, and, unsurprisingly, they were all concentrated around Greece. Greece? Oh right, because of Greece´s long history with the western hemisphere... clearly not.

The only justification I can come up with is that there was a theory "in the air" in Europe in the 16th/17th centuries that suggested that the peoples of the ancient lost civilization of Atlantis were those who populated the Americas. That theory, though lacks practically any modern day support, as can be seen through the most superficial of Google searches. In which case, I have to conclude, that we´re talking about Atlantis for no reason whatsoever.

The second item on my list is a little grammatical equivocation made unfortunately by the New York Times. In today´s article about Hertha Müller winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, the following sentenced appeared as the introduction: "Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile, on Thursday won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature."

The problem, I hope, is self-evident: imprecise prepositional selection. Normally, when we talk about the oppression of something, we talk about the oppression of a group of people who are on the receiving end of the oppression. In this case, however, the author has done the reverse, I presume. Dictatorship is not something we usually think about as being oppressed, although I suppose by authoritarians, perhaps dictatorship has been going through a period of severe oppression in the United States.

Anyway, given that this phrase, "the oppression of dictatorship" caught my eye, I thought I might share it with all of you. Some pictures already posted on facebook; the rest will come soon.