I finally understand the sense of the order of Baronets of Ulster: they’re obviously the knights that say…
No, I can’t do it!
He was just his usual asshole self. Essentially, I criticized him for being an ass in a thread and he accused me of doing so because of his history. At the time, I didn’t know his history. I do now, hence my post above.
For much better example of hypocrisy, see post 67 of this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=368880&page=2
I have to learn to do the cool post links. Damn techological incompetence!
The post# is its own link, and opens a window containing the post you want.
[ url = http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7369340&postcount=51 ] text without the spaces= this post
NI!
Have you been hitting the sauce lately, Poly? I seem to be seeing a bugger of a lot of puns from you in the last few days…
And after reading this entire damn thread, all I can say is, it takes a very special type of mindset to continue to insist on one’s correctness, all overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and revel in the delusion of a mass board vendetta. I’m sure this will further entrench that belief. I’m thinking of doing a thesis on it. I’ll call it “The Barry Bonds Syndrome.”
Should we assume this refers to all of your posts previous to the quoted one as well?
Contrapuntal, you are persecuting the poor boy.
Lissener,
Are you my ex-husband? Damn!
I’ve never known anyone else to remain argumentative after being proven wrong for so long.
I’m no language scholar, so I can’t add to that discussion, but I’m familiar with honor, courtesy and kindness - your refusal to apologize for your nitpicking (in error it seems by the evidence) and your insistance in beating the poor dead horse page after annoying page makes it seem to me that you are lacking in these important qualities.
Just suck it up and apologize. What’s so difficult?
Well, if he can’t handle my weak shit he needs to get his lame ass up on outa here, know what I’m sayin’?
I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to look at or respond to this thread too much over the past couple of days. However, Excalibre, Polycarp, and many others have done such a good job of responding to lissener’s arguments that I really have little to add. Regarding the various cites that lissener provided, all they do is demonstrate that while castellano can be translated as “Castilian;” it does not mean that this is a correct, “official,” or “authoritative” translation. A good translation is one that is going to best convey the meaning of the original in the target language. In this case of the Spanish constitution, the best English word to use is “Spanish,” as has been the conclusion of everyone with expertise on the subject who has expressed an opinion in this thread, including a number of native Spanish speakers, individuals fluent in Spanish as a second language, translators, and linguists. The fact that the translations cited by lissener have caused him so much confusion is reason enough to consider them poor.
Regarding the issue of lissener’s behavior, my perception of it has changed a good bit, in that I am now pretty much convinced that lissener, at least at some level, is delusional, where before I just considered that one possibility. As I said in the OP, I sincerely do not mean this as an insult, but an observation. I don’t get the impression that lissener is merely posturing here for the benefit of an audience, but actually believes that he is correct about the issues; that he has been debating in a dispassionate and mature fashion; that his only motivation is to discuss a bit of arcane trivia that is of no personal importance to him; that he is the injured party in all of this; and that he somehow deserves an apology from me. Lissener lives in some alternate universe where all of this is true. He is genuinely bewildered by the fact that no one else sees things the same way.
On this basis, I am going to withdraw a couple of things I said about him, specifically that he is “truly detestable” and “vile piece of shit.” I don’t think lissener actually has an accurate enough perception of his own behavior to qualify for those particular insults. Not knowing him personally, it’s difficult to evaluate just how much responsibility he has for being unable to understand and control his own behavior. I don’t, however, regret starting this thread, since the behavior really did have to be addressed whatever lissener’s actual motivations.
Unfortunately lissener’s world-view being so wildly askew leads him into behavior that ends up being quite obnoxious. What’s worse, since he apparently doesn’t understand what he is doing wrong, he is very likely to repeat it (as he has throughout this thread). While I do hope this thread may have some effect on lissener’s future behavior, I don’t really expect that to happen unless his perceptions somehow change.
So lissy here sent me an email. Rather than responding to it directly, I decided to do so here, since I want everyone else to get a chance to enjoy my sparkling wit and clever turns of phrase and all that shit.
Warning: The following is long and boring and probably most of you don’t care anymore. But I have this distant hope that maybe, just maybe, if I summarize one more time, that lissy will stop whining that no one’s listened to his arguments and citations.
I believe, though I’m not certain, and I’m way too damn lazy to check, that Colibri first brought up the possibility of cowardice. I agreed, though I hereby retract the claim that he is a coward. Given that our lissy was eventually willing to discuss the issue here (and that his initial failure to do so is what motivated us to speculate on the color of his belly), I don’t maintain that he’s a coward, but I do continue to believe that he’s wrong, and that he’s intentionally deceptive in his summaries of the argument.
In short, he responded to the pit thread. With every bit of the grace, dignity, and dedication to the truth that he showed in the original thread in GQ.
This is simply false. lissener now maintains that he meant something different than the only natural interpretation of his words in his original post and those immediately subsequent; nevertheless, whether or not he understood the truth, the words he spoke were indisputably wrong, and he has not even tried to produce a single cite to demonstrate otherwise. Despite the fact that he won’t defend those words and doesn’t still contend that they were right, he admits only that he wrote in a confusing manner. Sure, the argument got personal - but that’s because there’s no genuine factual matter to debate, something that lissener has implicitly acknowledged in his disclaiming of his original words. See the end of this post for a long, probably boring, attempt of mine to summarize the arguments that constituted the body of this thread, in order to provide evidence that - all his whining to the contrary aside - all his claims have been addressed and, frankly, demolished. One sentence summary: Colibri was right to call lissener “wrong”.
No. Because the only real topic of debate here was whether lissener was right or wrong. I have pointed out the major factual errors in his original post - which he, implausibly, claims he didn’t mean; those, in and of themselves, were absolutely sufficient to merit a pitting when he refused to retract them and instead began whining that he meant something different. The arrogance of his original attempt to correct Nava and his ugly conduct in the original thread are only further reasons.
It’s unfortunate that lissener has used his real skill so successfully - he has confused the discussion, he has claimed that he was mistreated, he has falsely accused Colibri of insulting him, and he has attempted to rewrite history. lissener’s real skill, as demonstrated time and again, is getting into incredibly long, stupid arguments over irrelevant minutia, and dragging normally sane posters - in this case, Colibri - into his craziness. All of those things made the subject of debate almost opaque; nevertheless, a return to his original words reveals clearly what he meant, and that he had the arrogance to correct Nava (a Spaniard) and to argue out of ignorance with Colibri (fluent hispanohablante and resident of Panamá), with Polycarp (thoroughly informed on the subject of Spain’s minority languages), and with me (who hopes he’s shown his chops.) Examination of lissener’s subsequent posts reveals that, if we take him at his word on what he “meant” rather than examining his words, there is no factual matter up for debate! He has recast his original position to the point that it matches what the rest of us told him precisely. That’s why the argument focused on him - because the only matter worth debating was his deceptive tactics. No facts were in question.
The actual truth of the matter was first explained to him quite nicely, and a better man than lissener would have recognized that sometimes, a situation benefits from the personal insight of our group of dedicated amateurs’ collective experience; uniquely, this thread involved several people with very real expertise in the area - something lissener could have used to his advantage to understand the situation better. At very least, he might have responded to logical arguments and the citations offered his way. Ideally, he could have asked questions upon recognizing that he didn’t know about the subject and those around him did. Instead, he offered up tortured reasoning about what was “technically” correct and tried to weasel around his own previous words. His only goal was to be “right” - whether that meant lying about his original words, coming up with tortured or nonsensical logic, or simply whining in a pathetic enough manner that maybe someone would feel sorry for him.
The sad part is that lissener could have learned an enormous amount if he had actually been curious about the situation; in fact, I think the knowledge in this thread ended up flying fast and furious, so I hope onlookers enjoyed it, though lissener’s twistings and turnings seemed to stop him from lissening.
lissener is sad that we didn’t get to have a real debate - about what? What topic here is suitable for a debate? “What name should Spanish be called?” “What is the name of Spanish?” Those aren’t interesting topics; factual matters are not subject to debate and this one would have been mind-numbing. Nor would they have generated argument since all of us agree that both names are used and have their purposes! There are no factual issues under argument here whatsoever, though lissener has tried to imply that there are. (This, I think, explains his continual vagueness and difficulty formulating a single assertion to be discussed.) The only real issue here was lissener’s conduct. It was a display of his arrogance that he correcting a room full of people who understand the subject when all he had was half-assed attempts to Google things he didn’t understand. And it was a display of his foolishness that he couldn’t simply back down and admit he was confused, when it was such a minor, minor matter.
Long Boring Bit
His cites are, well, evidence that the word Castilian is used, occasionally, in place of Spanish. As I have mentioned several times, I myself have used this word. There is no question but that it is a name for the language; I maintain that it is not appropriate for most uses in English simply because it’s unclear; it’s useful when discussing the language in a historical context, particularly before there was a Kingdom of Spain; it’s also somewhat useful as a potentially more neutral descriptor when discussing minority languages.
There is nothing about the term that makes it better for, in general, describing the official language of Spain. As has been pointed out, the ultra-literalistic translation of castellano to Castilian is not valid and is not normal. Though as lissener proved, indeed, Castilian is the usual term in translations of the Spanish Constitution, and were I translating that section (for what it’s worth; translation is a skilled task and I’ve never done it) I too would use the word Castilian.
lissener’s contention is one of the following ideas; I’m not sure which, as his argument has changed several times. Either (1) because Castilian is used in English translations of the Constitution, it’s better whenever you reference “official languages” of Spain, even when making no direct reference to the Constitution; or (2) that all he was saying originally was that Castilian was equally good a descriptor and he was just pointing out a bit of “arcana”.
(1) is an incredibly minor and stupid semantic argument; moreover, it’s not supported by his original words. I have addressed the point thoroughly; the two words, in this context, mean exactly the same thing, though Castilian has, as Polycarp noted, an possibly confusing additional meaning (the dialect of the regions of Old and New Castile in particular). There is nothing about the term “official language” that mandates using the precise wording of the Constitution in describing it, though this appeared to be lissener’s implication through much of the discussion. That’s nonsense; even if I were mentioning the U.S. Constitution, I might make references to “separation of powers” or “checks and balances”, though those terms don’t appear in the document and were originally coined by Montesquieu (or whoever translated him into English) - the significance of those phrases is clearly present in the U.S. Constitution, though the phrases themselves are not. In short, there’s no logical reason why I should have to maintain the exact same wording as the Spanish Constitution in describing its official languages.
(2) is simply implausible based on the original words he used and the next few posts; I have endeavored to address why I don’t believe him - “It’s my understanding that, technically, ‘Spanish’ is a generic term that includes the languages you mention plus Castilian” is clearly an attempt to correct Nava on the preferred nomenclature of her own language. It was not snarky, but it was arrogant simply in that he was attempting to correct a Spaniard - and an extremely well-informed one at that - on what the name of her native language was. He eventually argued based upon the strict wording of the Constitution that “Spanish” could somehow be taken to include all of the native languages of Spain, but he made no effort to distinguish between the noun sense of naming a language and the adjective sense of describing something’s origins. Nava had used it in the noun sense, in which it unambiguously describes the language called Spanish or Castilian; what he said in response clearly entails that “Spanish” the noun is some sort of umbrella term that includes other languages. And all whinging aside, I don’t think his wording was particularly unclear here; my argument for what he meant is based upon a close reading of what he said and the next few posts. It’s my belief that stated clearly that the word “Spanish” is used to describe other languages as well, which is false. (It’s not a ridiculous idea, either, as “Chinese” is often taken to include all of the Chinese “dialects”, which are easily less similar to one another than Catalan or Galego is to Spanish.) The trouble is that this plausible idea was simply wrong, and Colibri was right to call him on it. In short, while lissener was not wrong in pointing out that Castilian is used to identify the language, he was wrong when he made his original argument, that it is somehow better, more correct, more technically accurate, or what-have-you. While he is trying now to confuse history and claim that he was just offering up the interesting fact that Spanish has two names - under which argument he would have been right, as it certainly does - examination of his original posts reveals that he was not making that argument.
I’m elaborating and rephrasing here, but all of these things are points that I’ve made before; as far as I can tell and as honestly as I can say, I have rebutted every part of lissener’s argument thoroughly and completely, though it took many twists and turns. lissener has, in his utter dishonesty, virtually ignored these points and continues to say that his “cites” prove that he’s “not wrong”. I have demonstrated clearly why this is not the case; simply gathering citations and plopping them down is not enough to prove a point, at least when those citations don’t directly address the issue. Note that I am not, and have not, argued that “Castilian” cannot mean “Spanish”; I have offered reasons why I think it’s generally the worse choice in English, but I cannot imagine correcting someone over it either way.
lissener, do you speak Spanish?
He’s simply an Evil Clown.
I think many people here would love to read lissener’s answer to this question, and many of us think we already know the answer. But he must be fluent in Spanish, because arguing about semantics with a bunch of native speakers, fluent second-languagers and other experts without actually knowing the language himself would just be nuts. Right? Oh, yeah. Colibri kinda said that already.
lissener, a question:
Quien es mas macho? Lloyd Bridges o Ricardo Montebaun?
Esto es una palabra? Ricardo Montalban, claro.
This will not prove much. Even with my small amount of Spanish, I know the answer is Khan!!! 
Crotalus absolutely spot on summation of the entire problem of the thread.
Priceguy:Evil Clown is probably close but I am afraid of what that will make me or any of us, it was suggested recently that I am basically Me Too.
Jim
I think the word you’re looking for is “pregunta” not “palabra”. Just sayin…
su sea incorrecto, Lloyd Bridges es poquito mas macho.
Do you mean “¿Quien es más macho, Lloyd Bridges o Ricardo Montalbán?”
Sorry, it grates me when people forget the ¿. Carry on.