Ayn Rand Exposed. ATLAS SHRIEKED: Ayn Rand’s First Love and Mentor Was A Sadistic Serial Killer Who Dismembered Little Girls. This article first appeared in Alternet. There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare.
It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude? It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays Charlie to the American right-wing’s Manson Family.
Read on and you’ll see why. One reason why most countries don’t find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Tweet. Evolution. 1274434745_evolution-of-the-alphabet.gif (GIF Image, 988x200 pixels) Majestic plural. The royal "we" or majestic plural (pluralis maiestatis in Latin, literally, "the plural of majesty"), is the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office, such as a monarch, bishop, or pope.
The more general word for the use of we to refer to oneself is nosism. However the use as majestic plural (to denote the excellence, power, and dignity of the person who speaks or writes) is the most common one. Western usage[edit] In the public situations in which it is used, the monarch or other dignitary is typically speaking not only in his or her personal capacity but also in an official capacity as leader of a nation or institution. The habit of referring to a leader in the plural has further influenced[citation needed] the grammar of several languages, in which plural forms tend to be perceived as deferential and more polite than singular forms.
Popes have used the we as part of their formal speech with certain recent exceptions. Non-Western usage[edit] Generative grammar. Early versions of Chomsky's theory were called transformational grammar, and this term is still used as a general term that includes his subsequent theories. There are a number of competing versions of generative grammar currently practiced within linguistics. Chomsky's current theory is known as the Minimalist program.
Other prominent theories include or have included dependency grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, categorial grammar, relational grammar, link grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. [citation needed] Chomsky has argued that many of the properties of a generative grammar arise from an "innate" universal grammar. Proponents of generative grammar have argued that most grammar is not the result of communicative function and is not simply learned from the environment (see the poverty of the stimulus argument). In this respect, generative grammar takes a point of view different from cognitive grammar, functional, and behaviorist theories. Syntax. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language. Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules.
Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages. Early history[edit] Works on grammar were written long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini (c. 4th century BC) is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.[2] In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax. For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title.
The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. Modern theories[edit] Notes[edit] Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. The sentence's meaning becomes clearer when it's understood that it uses three meanings of the word buffalo: the city of Buffalo, New York, the somewhat uncommon verb "to buffalo" (meaning "to bully or intimidate"), as well as the animal buffalo.
When the punctuation and grammar are expanded, the sentence could read as follows: "Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo. " The meaning becomes even clearer when synonyms are used: "Buffalo bison that other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison. " Sentence construction Bison engaged in a contest of dominance. A comic explaining the concept The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo".
Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives: Buffaloa buffalon Buffaloa buffalon buffalov buffalov Buffaloa buffalon. "New York bison New York bison bully, bully New York bison", or:"New York bison whom other New York bison bully, themselves bully New York bison". Usage.