Language Follies 16 (Part 2)

In my previous blog entry (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2024/08/language-follies-16.html), I included a quote from George Bernard Shaw, “Every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.” I also included a list of books that Family Circle magazine claimed  

I did not, at the time of writing the previous entry, tie the two citations together; let me do so here.

*

I think Shaw’s statement can be turned around: “Every earnest is a jest in the womb of Time.” In this form it shares space with Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, first appearing as tragedy and then as farce. 

The Family Circle list is just one of many produced by scolds over the years: “Read this,” Listen to that,” “Eat this.” “Visit here,” “Climb there.” The preening self-satisfaction of the scolds gets up my gorge.*

But what I want to focus in on today is something else: how the vicissitudes of time makes a jest—or, better yet—a joke of the scold and his efforts. Look at the FC list. 

It’s six decades later, and we can expect values and judgments to change. But transporting ourselves back to 1965, shouldn’t we have seen what important works were omitted, their places usurped by middling efforts suited  to a middlebrow taste. Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Somerset Maugham are in; James Joyce and Marcel Proust are out. Lawrence of Arabia and C. P. Snow are in; Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, Moliere and Voltaire, Sophocles and Euripides  among the missing. There’s more (like, for instance, only 3 works by women and none by Black writers), but let’s leave it at that. 

I am not proposing my own list to replace the FC one that really didn’t need gestation in “the womb of Time” to prove to be a joke. Somehow human beings (that even includes college students) find their way to sources of knowledge, thankfully, each person’s list being different from everybody else’s. Thus, we expand the collective wisdom of our species.

***

* I discussed another scold’s list (in the form of a smart guy list) here: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2015/01/dont-bother-me.html