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Wooden Language
Wooden language is language that uses vague, ambiguous, abstract or pompous words in order to divert attention from the salient issues.Caparini, Marina; Fluri, Philipp (2006). ''Civil Society and the Security Sector: Concepts and Practices in New Democracies'', LIT Verlag Berlin–Hamburg–Münster, . The French scholar Françoise Thom identified four characteristics of wooden language: abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete, tautologies, bad metaphors, and Manichaeism that divides the world into good and evil.Michiko Kakutani"The death of truth" ''The Guardian'', 14 July 2018 The phrase is a literal translation of the French expression ' which appears to have been coined by Georges Clemenceau in 1919, and became widely used during the 1970s and 1980s after being brought back into French from Russian via Polish. In France, wooden language is commonly and strongly associated with politicians and the conditioning at the National School of Administration, as attested by intell ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Françoise Thom
Françoise Thom (born 1951) is a French historian and Sovietologist, honorary lecturer in contemporary history at Paris-Sorbonne University. A specialist in post-communist Russia, she is the author of works of political analysis on the country and its leaders. Early life and education Françoise Thom was born in Strasbourg, 1951. Her parents are René Thom, a mathematician known for his theory of catastrophes and winner of the Fields Medal, and of Suzanne Helmlinger. Françoise has two siblings, Elizabeth and Christian. Thom has a degree in Russian. Career She lived for three years in the Soviet Union, then taught Russian in secondary schools in Ferney-Voltaire and Calais. She is a research associate at the Institut français de polémologie. In 1983, she defended a thesis entitled , directed by Alain Besançon at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. She was then appointed lecturer in contemporary history at Paris-Sorbonne University. In 2011, she presented ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tautology (language)
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea, using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional. Intentional repetition may emphasize a thought or help the listener or reader understand a point. Sometimes logical tautologies like "Boys will be boys" are conflated with language tautologies, but a language tautology is not inherently true, while a logical tautology always is. Etymology The word was coined in Hellenistic Greek from ('the same') plus ('word' or 'idea'), and transmitted through 3rd-century Latin and French . It first appeared in English in the 16th century. The use of the term logical tautology was introduced in English by Wittgenstein in 1919, perhaps following Auguste Comte's usage in 1835. Examples * "Only time will tell if w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared with other types of figurative language, such as antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy, and simile. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the "All the world's a stage" monologue from '' As You Like It'': All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts, His Acts being seven ages. At first, the infant... :—William Shakespeare, '' As You Like It'', 2/7 This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage, and most humans are not literally actors and actresses playing roles. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manichaeism
Manichaeism (; in New Persian ; ) is a former major religionR. van den Broek, Wouter J. Hanegraaff ''Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times''SUNY Press, 1998 p. 37 founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian Empire, Parthian prophet Mani (prophet), Mani (AD 216–274), in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the conflict between good and evil, struggle between a goodness and value theory, good, spirituality, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs are based on local Mesopotamian religious movements and Gnosticism. It reveres Mani as the final prophet after Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus. Manichaeism was quickly successful and spread far through the Aramaic language, Aramaic-speaking regions. It thrived be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Splitting (psychology)
Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both perceived positive and negative qualities of something into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism wherein the individual tends to think in extremes (e.g., an individual's actions and motivations are ''all'' good or ''all'' bad with no middle ground). This kind of dichotomous interpretation is contrasted by an acknowledgement of certain nuances known as "shades of gray". Splitting was first described by Ronald Fairbairn in his formulation of object relations theory; it begins as the inability of the infant to combine the fulfilling aspects of the parents (the good object) and their unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object) into the same individuals, instead seeing the good and bad as separate. In psychoanalytic theory this functions as a defense mechanism. Relationships Splitting creates instability i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" was calqued in dozens of other languages. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as ''interpretatio germanica'': the Latin "Day of Mercury", ''Mercurii dies'' (later "mercredi" in modern French), was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (*''Wodanesdag''), which became ''Wōdnesdæg'' in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English. The term ''calque'' itself is a loanword from the French noun ("tracing, imitation, close copy"), while the word ''loanword'' is a calque ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges Clemenceau
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (, also , ; 28 September 1841 – 24 November 1929) was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920. A key figure of the Independent Radicals, he was a strong advocate of separation of church and state, amnesty of the Communards exiled to New Caledonia, as well as opposition to colonisation. Clemenceau, a physician turned journalist, played a central role in the politics of the Third Republic, most notably successfully leading France through the end of the First World War. After about 1,400,000 French soldiers were killed between the German invasion and Armistice, he demanded a total victory over the German Empire. Clemenceau stood for reparations, a transfer of colonies, strict rules to prevent a rearming process, as well as the restitution of Alsace–Lorraine, which had been annexed to Germany in 1871. He achieved these goals through the Treaty of Versailles signed at the Par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michel Butor
Michel Butor (; 14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator. Life and work Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille, the third of seven children. His parents were Émile Butor (1891–1960), a railroad inspector and Anna ( Brajeux, 1896–1972). He studied philosophy at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He taught in Egypt, Manchester, Thessaloniki, the United States, and Geneva. He won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Fénéon and the Prix Renaudot. Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, ''La Modification'', for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
General De Gaulle
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (; ; (commonly abbreviated as CDG) 22 November 18909 November 1970) was a French army officer and statesman who led Free France against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 in order to restore democracy in France. In 1958, he came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister of France, President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) by President René Coty. He rewrote the Constitution of France and founded the French Fifth Republic, Fifth Republic after approval by 1958 French constitutional referendum, referendum. He was elected President of France later that year, a position to which he was 1965 French presidential election, reelected in 1965 and held until his resignation in 1969. Born in Lille, he graduated from École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, Saint-Cyr in 1912. He was a decorated officer of the World War I, First World War, wounded several times ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
École Nationale D'administration
The École nationale d'administration (generally referred to as ENA, en, National School of Administration) was a French ''grande école'', created in 1945 by President of France, President Charles de Gaulle and principal author of the Constitution of France, 1958 Constitution Michel Debré, to democratise access to the senior French Civil Service, civil service. It was abolished on 31 December 2021 and replaced by the Institut national du service public (INSP). The ENA selected and undertook initial training of senior French officials. It was considered to be one of the most academically exceptional French schools, both because of its low acceptance rates and because a large majority of its candidates have already graduated from other elite schools in the country. Thus, within French society, the ENA stood as one of the main pathways to high positions in the public and private sectors. Originally located in Paris, it had been relocated to Strasbourg to emphasise its European c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Newspeak
Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania. Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy. In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractions of Newspeak—''Ingsoc'' (English Socialism), ''Minitrue'' (Ministry o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism. Orwell produced literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is known for the allegorical novella ''Animal Farm'' (1945) and the dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949). His non-fiction works, including ''The Road to Wigan Pier'' (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and ''Homage to Catalonia'' (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Blair was born in India, and raised and educated in England. After school he became an Imperial policeman in Burma, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
