Mark Liberman takes issue with the criticism Ralph Fiennes has for Twitter, in which he says our language is being “eroded” by our habitual use of “truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.” Twitter restricts posts to 140 characters, though there are several ways around that. Liberman did some word analysis and reports, “The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP’s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters.” He says the character restricts motivates some of us to pack the information into our tweets.

Leberman also reports on the word and sentence lengths in U.S. Presidential addresses, in which mean word length has dropped 5% in Inaugural and State of the Union addresses since George Washington’s first speeches and mean sentence length has dropped 50%.

Clearly, the presidency must go, for the sake of American English.

This call to celebrate a literary holiday in St. Crispin’s Day seems jaded, but maybe I am ignorant of King Henry V true character and the context of his war with France. I like this holiday idea though. Today, friends, is St. Crispin’s day. From Shakespeare’s Henry V:

“He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,


Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,


And rouse him at the name of Crispian.


He that shall live this day, and see old age,


Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,


And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’


Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.


And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”

Guy Patrick Cunningham writes, “In Henry V, Shakespeare offers us an opportunity to see the horror that results from pursuing winning only for its own sake. This is why St. Crispin’s Day ought to belong to Shakespeare’s play, and not the historical Henry’s battle. Because by reading, rereading, or simply thinking about the play, we are reminded that there is often a difference between the achievements that usually get remembered and the achievements that actually make people’s lives better.”

Here’s a summary of the Battle of Agincourt, which Henry won on October 25, 1415.

This is a commercial posing as a short film on creative desire. I suppose the bottom line for a commercial is the sale of drinks, specially the energy drink, Burn. But this bit of video is calling us to create out of our own image and don’t let hardship, like a tornado, get in the way.

Perhaps the video I embedded here last night changed (because I think I double-checked its availability). Here’s another link to the video.

Mark Tubbs invokes Screwtape to say Christians entirely misunderstand equality. “[T]hey consider it bad form at best, and supreme, ‘sinful’ arrogance at worst, to evangelize others or even to encourage one another because it suggests they may be possessors of a superior spiritual experience!” he says. As long as we are more concerned with our reputations than the truth, we will avoid talking to others, even believers, about real life (meaning spiritual truths).

The post refers to Chesterton’s thoughts on humility. Here is part of the man said about that:

… what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.