Progressive aspect and dialogue tags (Page 2 of 2)

Charles_F_Bell wrote:

Temple Wang wrote:

big-horse-droppings-on-an-asphalt-road-picture-

At least Empress Wu has stopped eating dogs and cats.

Hardly.  Season’s just getting started here, Chuck.  Thursday’s Puppy Fritter night at the market downstairs.  Three yuan per skewer.   Alas, I prefer bamboo rat to either, though ... slow roasted with yams.

Hardly.  Season’s just getting started here, Chuck.  Thursday’s Puppy Fritter night at the market downstairs.  Three yuan per skewer.   Alas, I prefer bamboo rat to either, though ... slow roasted with yams.

Lelia ... caught André and Rodney watching her. "The tomato ones are good."

"I like crickets better, thanks," Rodney opined. "Crunchy on the outside, chewy middles."

André covered his face with one hand. "I'm sorry. You cannot domesticate foxes, no matter how young you start."

"Whaaat? You're the one who grossed out everyone in the teachers' lounge with the joke about bad rat." Rodney shook his head. "You cannot translate from Army to teacher, especially not at lunch."

Mr. Lee snorted a little. "He's right. Fresh roasted rat's not bad, but it's got to be fresh." Lelia made a sort of unhappy noise. "Rat is the protein of choice in a number of places, Miss Chan. As long as it's cooked through and fresh, you're reasonably safe."

"Patrick, my love, not everyone has a stomach trained to survive third, fourth, and last world cuisine. Enough," Dolores stated firmly. "No roasted rodents today. The topic is closed."

Temple Wang wrote:

Hardly.  Season’s just getting started here, Chuck.  Thursday’s Puppy Fritter night at the market downstairs.  Three yuan per skewer.   Alas, I prefer bamboo rat to either, though ... slow roasted with yams.

Been done before, Temple.

Lelia ... caught André and Rodney watching her. "The tomato ones are good."

"I like crickets better, thanks," Rodney opined. "Crunchy on the outside, chewy middles."

André covered his face with one hand. "I'm sorry. You cannot domesticate foxes, no matter how young you start."

"Whaaat? You're the one who grossed out everyone in the teachers' lounge with the joke about bad rat." Rodney shook his head. "You cannot translate from Army to teacher, especially not at lunch."

Mr. Lee snorted a little. "He's right. Fresh roasted rat's not bad, but it's got to be fresh." Lelia made a sort of unhappy noise. "Rat is the protein of choice in a number of places, Miss Chan. As long as it's cooked through and fresh, you're reasonably safe."

"Patrick, my love, not everyone has a stomach trained to survive third, fourth, and last world cuisine. Enough," Dolores stated firmly. "No roasted rodents today. The topic is closed."

Patrick Lee's gustatory history is a minor running gag in Alma T.C. Boykin's Familiar series.

I didn't know the origin of Fletcher-Kinkaid.

I was having a dream. A really odd one. Generally my dreams involved a blonde on a beach who was very open-minded. In this case, I was standing on a dock on a lake. The water was a perfect blue as was the sky. There were hills on the far side and they were such a perfect green it was literally unearthly. It was, easily, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t alone, either. There was a guy sitting at the end of the dock trying to get his reel to work. It was obviously snarled. Next to him, to his right, was a bucket presumably filled with bait. And another fishing pole. The guy was wearing a T-shirt and ball cap.

There's a great deal more going on in that paragraph that the grammar alone can descriibe.  The word literally is used correctly.  The narrator, Olivier Chadwick Gardenier (Chad) is very mostly dead, and that old fisherman named Pete in the Saints ballcap is about to ask Chad to go back, black out from pain, and complete a mission of unknown length (but with suffering included), all with just one clue to what he must do.

With that knowledge, read again the adante description.  See how each note fits, sets the stage for what is about to happen.

Was it meant to be easy to read?  Yes.  Was crafted simply?  No.  Is there depth?  Yes.  Will the more careful or practiced reader find more to appreciate than the marginally literate?  Yes.

Isn't this characteristic--that you appreciate it more as you understand more--one of the things we praise in music?

Here's the last third or so of a paragraph from The Shield of Achilles:

... Until the governing institutions of a society can claim for themselves the sole right to determine the legitimate use of force at home and abroad, there can be no state.  Without law, strategy cannot claim to be a legitimate act of state.  Only if law prevails can it confer legitimacy on strategic choices and give them a purpose.  Yet the legitimacy necessary for law and strategy derives from history, the understanding of past practices that characterizes a particular society.

I expect that the Fletcher-Kincaid score of this paragraph will be very high, perhaps beyond four undergraduate years.  Yet the difficulty of the paragraph would not be fully captured even by a PhD level score.

Why does this matter? The answer to this question has been provided by Hegel in his Master/Slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, and was subsequently taken up as a fundamental theme of Marx's own thinking.

When people are forced to create their own material world through their own labor, they are certainly not setting out to achieve a greater insight into the nature of reality - they are merely trying to feed themselves, and to provide their children with clothing and a roof over their heads. And yet, whether they will or no, they are also, at every step of the way, acquiring a keener grasp of the objective nature of world. A man who wishes to build his own home with his own hands must come to grips with the recalcitrant properties of wood and gravity: he must learn to discipline his own activities so that he is in fact able to achieve his end. He will come to see that certain things work and that others don't. He will realize that in order to have A, you must first make sure of B. He will be forced to develop a sense of the realistic - and this, once again, is a cultural constant, measured entirely by the ability of each particular culture to cope successfully with the specific challenge posed by the world it inhabits.

But all of this is lost on the man who simply pays another man to build his home for him. He is free to imagine his dream house, and to indulge in every kind of fantasy. The proper nature of the material need not concern him - gravity doesn't interest him. He makes the plans out of his head and expects them to be fulfilled at his whim.

If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland. What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural ...

Fair enough, Temple.  Charles has a fair argument.  I don't think it invalidates mine, but we understand each other's and are not likely to convince each other.

But I would like Charles to explain why the sample from Ringoe does not make full use of the power of the progressive aspect.  It seems to me that the mixture of progressive and what I read as copula-with-participle-for-predicate-adjective expresses a static, timeliss quality appropriate to the scene.  I'd like to know why he thinks I'm wrong.