Have you thought about learning to speak a foreign language? If so, then why not learn to speak Tranzian? A good grasp of Tranzian will enable you to rub shoulders with bureaucrats, lawyers and Outreach Co-ordinators the world over and conversational fluency is easier than you might think. Tranzian is widely used in travel, business, culture and nagging.
Not only will the ability to speak Tranzian broaden your horizons and help you to make new friends but it will also give you an air of supreme self-righteousness that opens doors and, more importantly, state purse-strings.
So, come on, let us learn to speak Tranzian. Here is Lesson 1:
Violence against women is a “cancer” in every society affecting at least one in three women, human rights body Amnesty International has said.
One in three, two out of every four, over half, the majority. The statistics are hardly worth quibbling about. This is purely an academic exercise and should not be confused with actual facts.
Amnesty’s secretary general Irene Khan urged governments to enforce laws to stop attacks on women and girls.
So, class, we see in this example that there are laws against attacking women but governments cannot be bothered to enforce them. Okay so far?
Female genital mutilation is one of the abuses being targeted by Amnesty.
The organisation says it affects 135 million globally, and these cases, along with so-called honour killings, should be treated as human rights crimes by governments.
So we have ‘female genital mutilation’ which, in English, is called ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ and ‘honour killings’ which, again in English, are pronounced ‘murder’. However both of these English phrases translate into Tranzian as ‘human rights crimes’.
Thus we learn what a useful language is Tranzian. In circumstances where using the plain English terms will cause embarrassment or discomfort, you simply reach for the anodyne Tranzian lexicon of faux-rights to make yourself sound terribly important and caring without actually offending anybody.
Now for Lesson 2 and since you have all been such good and responsive students, I am going to give the answers in advance:
Q: Why is it that governments are not enforcing crimes like murder and rape?
A: Because they are far too busy farting around trying to enforce bogus ‘human rights’.
Tranzian cannot be learnt from the outside like this, David. It has to be learned from within. A true Tranzian speaker must actually view the world in terms that “verify”, for example, a typical Derrida gem. So when the latter opines something like,” Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if such a thing exists, takes place as the experience of the impossible,” we, as tranzis, will automatically concur. A moment’s confusion or the slightest hint of an ironic question reveals our latent disposition towards back-sliding, if not complete unsuitability for the great project of cultural egalitarianism. It’s tough being a revolutionary since Ron and Maggie cut off old Karl’s classical nuts.
Hi Guessedworker!
Can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this on Samizdata before, but tranzians can save themselves a lot of trouble by using the postmodernism generator,
which on a totally automatic basis creates any number of genuine deconstructionist texts you want.
Try it here.
Charles, this is too much fun.
“Reality is unattainable…..[…]…The subject is interpolated into a neosemantic narrative that includes narrativity as a paradox. “
Sylvain, i’m not sure this is funny at all.
The point is, of course, that if modernist appropriation holds, we have to choose between surrealism and dialectic theory. And remember that while Derrida promotes the use of dialectic prematerialist theory to challenge capitalism, surrealism implies that society has significance, but only if Lyotard’s essay on modernist appropriation is invalid. I suppose you could say that in a sense the subject is contextualised into a textual paradigm of narrative that includes truth as a paradox. An abundance of dematerialisms concerning dialectic presemanticist theory may be revealed.
Clear as mud, if you ask me.
Hi Charles,
Haven’t seen around for a while. Have you sussed the gang of cultural reactionaries that has taken to hanging out at Sammy? They are all ex Mel Phil commenters, not hereditarians exactly but bright and right.
I hadn’t come across the Postmodernist Generator. What a laugh! Thanks for the link.
I generated several pages out of the Postmodern Generator and I use them as fill-in text for documents I’m designing. Kind of like “lorem ipsum…” but funnier.
The Postmodernism Generator scares me. I can’t reliably discern between something it generates, and much of the drek I was obliged to read in grad school. There’s something wrong with that fact folks.
Were I feeling truely masochistic, I’d dig up a volume and give you a sample. But I’m not, so I won’t.