Friday, May 28, 2004

I'm visiting family and friends in the Boston area right now, and went (of course) to the Harvard Coop and spent a very pleasant afternoon browsing and reading. I came away with an interesting book by Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish writer who is best known for the publication of the diaries he kept during the Nazi era from 1933-1945: I will bear witness. His book on Nazi language has recently been translated into English under the title The Language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. The book was originally published in Germany in 1957, and translated and published in English in 2002 (presumably after the success of the English translation of the diaries). It has many amazing insights into the Nazi misuse of language and the way that such official misuse can simply enter into one's ordinary linguistic usage without even thinking. I'll post some examples when I get the chance.

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