Welcome to my online journal. I will essentially be keeping this blog as a journal for friends and family to see what is going on in my life and what I am generally up to. I have done this before in two other instances when I was abroad, but I want to do it while at home as well.
The name ‘Manifestly Absurd’ comes from one of my favorite essays written by Mark Twain. In this essay, called “The Awful German Language”, he is complaining about how ridiculously illogical the German language is. I myself am a student of German and so I can sympathize with him. The name is taken from a paragraph in which he complains about the ability in German to have “subsentences”. Here is the paragraph:
“We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people. For surely it is NOT clearness–it necessarily can’t be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough to discover that. A writer’s ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor’s wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the woman’s dress. That is manifestly absurd. It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.”
You can find the full text here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html.
I hope you enjoy what I have to say and I look forward to getting this blog off the ground.
