Cocktail Hour

“…We seem to live mainly in order to see how we live, and this habit brings on what might be called the externalizing of knowledge; with every new manual there is less need for its internal, visceral presence…To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which knowledge inevitably declines into information. The master of so much packaged stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forebears: he can always look it up…”

I ran across the above passage [Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve] the other day while reading one of my most favorite authors and it reminded me why he never fails to satisfy. These words manage to summarize, explain, explore deeply and broadly and make me understand an issue which is a constant source of irritation and despair.

At the Great Big Translation Portal one of the most popular features is an area for translators to seek guidance from their cohorts on prickly terms and phrases. Often the questions come from non-native translators of the language in question or from neophytes simply out of their depth. But what always manages to shock me is that the preferred method for arriving at a suggestion is the endless googling of the phrase/term and presenting such “citations” as proper response. As if the mere fact that the translation has actually appeared somewhere on the interwebs confers its respectability and suitability without even a whit of thought given to “context or meaning.”

My irritation at this process generally manifests itself in rants about how people don’t read any more, the educational system clearly sucks, the humanities are no longer being taught, civilization is in decline and, of course, people are bloody idiots.

All true enough, of course, and, as regards my particular peeve, merely being exacerbated by what Barzun describes as the Alexandrianism of our times, one of whose characteristics is a proliferation of reference books and the consequences thereof.

Yes, perspective helps, at least for a few moments.