For all the pejorative uses of this word whenever applied to a particular individual, in a more abstracted breakdown of the concept there are two relevant kinds of stupidity. And while both have similar outcomes in any given context, they have vastly divergent causes. The first kind, actual stupidity, occurs when a person acts against their own best interests or against those of any others implicated in the action. A person’s actual stupidity is willful, coinciding with that person’s full knowledge of the range of its potential negative consequences. A concrete example would be that of a DUI repeat offender, who chooses to drive under the influence in successive instances…
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Let the world pummel itself in the full throttle of its terrible self-examination. To this end, there is another source of evidence to be added to the mountains of films, books, treatises, analyses, documents, and first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, the most salient proof of the bestiality of the human species as well as its cosmic self-humiliation. And this should last until the extinction of the species itself. If an alien race somewhere in the universe ever mistakes us for an intelligent species, half-asleep and navel-gazing in our corner of the Milky Way, this fact of our history should stand as a permanent refutation of that absurd judgment—we are more…
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“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” Marcel Proust writes the preceding lines at the end of the first magnificent and spine-tingling flicker of a volume of his longer odyssey, In Search of Lost Time. In this quotation alone,…
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The way of the dodo, they say. But in this short article, ensconced in the vast anonymity of the Internet, I wanted to mention the value of a select group of people who are becoming fewer and fewer as the years of the twenty-first century continue blowing by in a windstorm of words, language, and digital innovation: those who read a physical copy of the newspaper, the holdouts, the good-old traditionalists who have always pushed the envelope when it mattered. Come to me, your greatest cheerleader—I invite you to remain connected, but only at a distance, my kindred spirits of the printed word floating somewhere in the world. We can…
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Because Spanish and English are two different languages with a myriad of histories, cultures, and ways of conceptualizing the world, they use different rhetorical strategies to form ideas and construct sentences. These strategies and their results in written discourse—which, after all, is the most pertinent for the translator—can be not only interesting but entertaining in their own right. Any time spent dwelling on the comparative gems of the Spanish and English languages is time well spent; anyone who is lucky enough to be translating between these two languages is like a manic switchboard operator consumed by their own manual dexterity and the demands of so many flashing lights. The difference…
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Knowledge Organization and Dissemination In a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected, consumers and businesses alike have come to inhabit a marketplace of goods and services that have also become increasingly globalized and technology-driven. In this modern-day context, marketing as an academic field and commercial practice has become all the more pivotal for businesses and companies. And as a corollary of this importance of marketing for businesses, there is an evident need not only for multilingual marketing but also for the translation that enables this multilingual marketing. In a thriving and often chaotic modernity, the translator in the field of marketing has never been more important. The last few…
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In the wake of every origin story that makes its way into the popular imagination—be it in athletics or academics, politics or entertainment—there is the same tendency to elevate someone who has attained a measure of success above their prior conditions. Human beings, as has often been said, love the story of the underdog, and no doubt the opinion of the majority would see injustice in considering those who were previously impoverished as anything but the sovereign architects of their own destiny. This is the narrative most appealing to the media and the one usually tolerated by the general public, especially in view of the hardships probably endured by the…
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We have a world aflame with the chatter and mile-a-minute passions of the Internet; access to technology that spans every imaginable medium; exposure to more people and more places than ever before; the fleet and evanescent flicker of thoughts and ideas uttered by those who are both anonymous and celebrated, top of mind and ushered into oblivion. Never has the challenge of integrating the thoughts and ideas of others been more overwhelming—or more imperative. In view of these modern challenges, there is a matter in the whole frenzy that it bears emphasizing: it is worth being cautious about the nature of eloquence, expertise, and the appearance of intelligence. We are…
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Action is of the utmost importance. How could it be otherwise? How many people have said again and again that the utility of knowledge is in its application, that knowledge is useless unless applied to the world of action or taken advantage of for some ulterior purpose? Something has to be made of knowledge, they say. And yet almost everything about my own experience, together with that of many others, has told me that knowing is not something that exists just for the sake of action. Thinking of knowledge and action together as a battle, in allusion to that lovely catchphrase trumpeted on the 80s television show G.I. Joe, I…
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In the second episode of the wonderful 2000 Dutch documentary series Of Beauty and Consolation, which features 26 interviews with 26 of the world’s leading turn-of-the-century scholars, authors, artists, and intellectuals, the late Roger Scruton makes an insightful diagnosis of what is likely to be one of the great human conundrums of the twenty-first century: while we have more information as a society as well as more access to more information than ever, our understanding of the world and ourselves, at least as a society and human collective, has less conceptual coherence than at any other time in human history. The result is a deficient collective and individual ability to…
