[ExI] abandoning hope

[David C. Harris]

What beautiful illustrations of how an idea expressed in one language 
(Italian, economics) is never perfectly translated into another 
language.   That's what the teachers were talking about when they said 
that learning another language gives one understanding of other 
cultures' way of experiencing reality.  Might even demonstrate the 
Worfian Hypothesis, that language controls our ways of thinking.  Great 
illustrations!

  - David

Spike wrote:
>>>>> Abandon hope all ye who enter here
>>>>>           
>>>> No, damn it!
>>>>
>>>> "Abandon ALL hope, ye who enter here."
>>>>
>>>> Actually, it is "*any* hope".
>>>>
>>>> Stefano Vaj
>>>>         
>> Ja, there was meaning lost in translation.  Dante was urging hell-goers to
>> abandon irrational exuberance.  ... spike
>>     
>
>
> This comment came from an experience a couple weeks ago on a plane heading
> east.  I was reading Greenspan's Age of Turbulence, which isn't a comedy,
> but I got to hee hawing over one passage, the other passengers found out I
> am a maniac.  The passage is on page 176, where he was talking about an
> address he made to the American Enterprise Institute on 5 December 1996.  If
> you recall the headlines of 6 December, Greenspan was quoted as having
> uttered the market slaying two words "irrational exuberance."  I took a
> whooping that day, and didn't appreciate it at all.
>
> In the book, he gives a complete transcript of that speech and what was
> going on at that gathering.  The dinner was delayed so they were bringing
> out cocktails beforehand.  It was a very dense, wonky, economics
> professorish speech.  Afterwards he seriously wondered what, if anything,
> the guests had taken from his talk.  From that transcript on pages 176 and
> 177 of Turbulence, it is clear he absolutely was not in any way suggesting
> that the stock market was overvalued.  The press people in attendance
> latched onto those two words in a speech that was all over the intellectual
> map, wrote headlines with "irrational exuberance" and took scandalous,
> figuratively violent, liberties with the content of Greenspan's speech,
> which smacked down the market.
>
> For some odd reason I found this hilarious.
>
> spike
>
>