His entire speech to Laertes was clear and actionable advice. And his advice to Ophelia was likely necessary for the time. Had no clue people thought him a fool until today.
The advice might sound sensible in isolation. But immediately after, Polonus hires a spy to report on Laertes conduct in Paris, and literally instructs the spy to slander Laertes in order to trick people into revealing if these slanders are correct. All this from the man who in the previous scene said "This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Shakespeare quotes should not be considered in isolation, they are always part of a larger context. Taking Polonious advice at face value is like the people taking the "greed is good" or "coffee is for losers" speeches at face value.
Because of the length of the play, the scene with the spy is often cut, since it doesn't directly concern Hamlet and doesn't really lead anywhere (we never hear from the spy again). But without this scene, Polonius advice to Laertes stands alone and is taken in earnest. The scene with the spy shows it is all dishonest bullshit which plays into the larger themes of the play, e.g. Polonius later using his daughter as bait and spying on Hamlet.
As advice, it's fine. The humor comes from the context. He's dumping this mountain of adages on his son, a full-grown man, in lieu of a goodbye.
I don't buy the article author's contention that these are "dad jokes" or that Polonius is self-aware. He may be the best parent in the play (a low bar), but he's still a deliberately comic figure.
I think this view has changed over time. Polonius’ advice was my late father’s favourite passage in Shakespeare. I was surprised, at university for a degree in Literature, to hear that it was thought of as a bunch of passé rambling.
And nowadays I agree 100% with my dad - it’s great advice.
Absolutely, as someone that got 10+ hours of sleep year round for multiple years in high school (early bedtime, early waking), the dread of having to sit in a class and learn horrendous nonsense was more of a motivation to sleep in then actual physical necessity. I suspect it's the case for many adolescents who see little value in secondary courses.
The quality of spoken English goes down over time as well, and as far as I know the English language has no institute or governing body which attempts to regulate it. It seems to me that the languages erode regardless of the rules in place to become more convenient for people. It is a shame culturally but at the same time it is difficult to blame people for speaking conveniently. It will be interesting to see where this takes both languages in 50 to 100 years.
Why is it a shame culturally? What values are you using to establish that one form of the language is "good" or "pure" and another is "worse" or "eroded" and why should others subscribe to that value system?
Languages change and always have, people noting this is as old as written record about language. People have also always been complaining about it, and ascribing to it some meaning about the increasing degeneracy of the youth or the decline of society or whatever.
The language obviously continues to work fine for the needs people have of it, as it always has. You don't need to like the changes, but you should understand that that is an aesthetic judgement and nothing else. It doesn't indicate or represent anything "going down" or a cultural loss of any kind.
I can agree with this line of thought, however, I feel obliged to warn you where this supposed reality can lead and I want you to consider if this violates any other beliefs you may hold. Another poster mentioned that the English have a rather strong dislike of prescriptivism, I think this is true, although I only have anecdotal evidence for this. Following this I find that the English and there derivatives in America also have a strong belief in multiculturalism, or the idea that varying cultures/perspectives strengthens a group. I would say that in certain intervals these two cannot coexist. Taking the example of french Canadians, they are considered to be relatively intolerant compared to the rest of Canada when it comes to religion, culture, language, immigration, and other facets of multiculturalism in an attempt to protect themselves. Yet it was that same multiculturalist mindset that saved them when the English let off and accepted them into Canadian goverment, giving them many rights even above the rest of Canada. So you can see that the lack of defence against cultural change inevitably results in another culture with a more defensive nature taking ground... But if you attempt to fight back it wouldn't be multicultural of you... So you can see that these two beliefs conflict at certain extremes. Karl Popper would have considered this to be an example of the paradox of tolerance (And I would add intolerance, as too much language purity gets you into a situation where your parisian institute bans the word poggers).
With this in mind I find your purely relativistic idea that all languages are equal, or more importantly that we should treat them as all equal, as somewhat misguided, and in many ways supremacist (it is easy for the culturally dominant, in this case the english, to wave hands and act like everyone else is irrational for trying to protect their culture, when it is implicitly understood if they don't then English will swallow it whole).
If this was a valid argument than Modern English is also a rump language which was vandalized by countless French and Latin loanwords and that lost its grammatical correctness when people stopped conjugating verbs and using grammatical genders.
Old English was a way more complex language, akin to German and had a different form for each person. For instance, to shine was "sċīnan", and the present tense was
- ic sċīne
- þū sċīnst
- hē sċīnþ
...
Nowadays, it's just "I shine, you shine, he shines", without no distinction except the third person's 's'. It's a vastly simpler language, and yet, it allows people to convey concepts as well as any other language.
A thing I find ironic is that in certain languages that do thoroughly conjugate verbs, there's a way to mock those foreigners who don't know how to use verbs properly. It often happens that those who lack the knowledge of the proper inflected forms use the infinitive everywhere as a stopgap - for instance, one may say in broken Italian "io avere freddo" instead of the proper "io ho freddo", and every Italian speaker would understand it perfectly, albeit a native speaker would probably scoff it off as a blatant sign of a lack of linguistic knowledge.
That's precisely what English went through during the transition from Old to Middle English. People started speaking "broken" English and they kept doing that, and after a while it wasn't broken anymore. Subjunctive tense? That's basically dead in modern English too.
The point I'm trying to convey is, what you consider as the rules nowadays come straight from the broken babblings of the illiterates of yesteryear. If those Roman scholars that were complaining about the broken Latin spoken by their contemporaries had their way, the Romance languages would have never existed. Ironically, the moment Europe dropped Latin and started adopting the "vulgar" actually languages spoken by the people is widely considered the moment Europe truly started blooming again, and a crucial first step towards the literacy of the masses.
Language naturally evolve over time in a way which allows efficient communication, so it's not something which should be controlled. The simpler a language is the greater number of people it will be able to be understood by.
The whole purpose of any language is facilitate communication between people. I would argue that the quality and usefulness of English has increased over time, as it would be very difficult to use English from even 100 years ago in conversation today, as it would lack the words to express every day topics.
>Continuing with a warning: it was found that approximately 60% of people have previously broken off a relationship due to a kiss, possibly due to genetic incompatibility.
I suppose the problem is that in the abortion debate the pro life side believes the unborn fetus is being forced to live (or rather not live) according to another belief system. It's a matter of perspective I guess.
Many did, but many did not, entirety of eastern europe (minus Russia), germany, nordics, balkans, and central european states had no history of colonization or very little, and even then it was not in the regions most associated with migration to europe. Only things besides colonization that come to mind are wars in the middle east, and every country I listed besides germany is too small to matter in that.
They didn't do much colonization because they were too busy fighting wars with each other... For centuries... WW1 and WW2 and even the current conflict is just singular events in long line of internal wars of Europe.
Also something that should not be easily forgotten or ever forgiven is the missionary work by religious groups... Destroying cultures around world. It is sad we have not punished them for that and maybe even banned them to protect the future.
>They didn't do much colonization because they were too busy fighting wars with each other
No, nearly every one of the countries I listed had simply no intention or means to colonize effectively at a profit, has nothing to do with preoccupation with continental wars.
> Also something that should not be easily forgotten or ever forgiven is the missionary work by religious groups
Again, all of the countries I mentioned had very little if not null participation in this, and yet to varying degrees they are being punished for it...
Why not? China has massive influence in many countries, and they seem to retain a lot of their culture while suppressing any internal change/dissent. It would seem to me that many European countries have simply decided they would like to be influenced for whatever reason, not that they are compelled to by some universal rule.
(Relatively) Low rates of foreign immigration despite ageing population, strong central goverment with the intention of weakening external and internal influences (See Uyghurs / western chinese territories for an example of internal influences, for external influences the great firewall is an obvious one, but there are many others), and third a general ethno-nationalist mentality from many, but not all Han chinese, encouraged by the central state and the general culture.
I don't think those things necessarily answer the question. Also, how long has China been at extending their influence abroad? How long does these processes take? Obviously, in the case of Europe, this has been going on for centuries. Influence is inevitable because to influence others you have to be open to be influenced. Chinese that go to these countries to make deals, embassies with workers that grow culturally connected, this is the start. Relationships may tighten beyond this. I could go on.
That situation will be as untenable as Japan’s in the long run, as China also has its own looming demographic crisis. The government will likely open up to more immigration from Southeast Asia, at the very least.
It started out as a pc gaming type thing, so yeah, most of it is men, but the choice of server matters and they have expanded and rebranded a lot. If you are going on political servers it's already not worth it and you missed the point with discord, stick to small servers made by friends, people to play games with, or communities dedicated around 1 thing like open source projects or some specific media, etc. Once servers become too general or inclusive the system breaks, but even then on large servers (political or not), 4chan is not tame in comparison.
