The The......Duh.

Once upon a time, when I was in library school (that is Graduate School of Library and Information Science, to the uninitiated), I discovered, whilst tootling through my homework assignment one night, that a literal translation of the phrase Hoi Polloi is "the many" (meaning 'the masses' or the public, etc).  It was thus I uncovered an ongoing controversy regarding the common usage of the article "the" before the phrase, which essentially translates as The The Many.  (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_polloi [wikipedia itself a controversy for another day] for some discussion of both sides of the debate).  

While there are "the many" who argue that a foreign phrase used in English need not be translated so literally--as in they think it fine and righteous to use "the" preceding this and other such phrases, I find it arrestingly irksome to my ears every time I read it in an otherwise well-researched article or book or hear it used by some smart cookie of my acquaintance.  It's not that I am snobbish--so easy for such information to be missed while researching an article, etc. when it is a familiar phrase in the vernacular. It is that I cannot unlearn it, now that I have learned it.  It sticks out like the the nails scraping down a chalkboard to me, like screechingly bad grammatical mistakes or hilarious malaprops ("your [sic] not opposed to do that...")  Cannot untrain my ear to unhear it now...

All this occurred to me as I was reading a review of The Perfect Insult for Every Occasion: Lady Snark's Guide to Common Discourtesy by A.C. Kemp (of slangcity.com and ladysnark.com) this morning which included the thought she "offers her (sometimes questionable) advice to the hoi polloi." Ack!

I mention this as part of my ongoing fascination with stream-of-consciousness in real life (as opposed to being used as a fictional device, a la Ulysses, et al).

How one thought, discovery, passage read, website visited, dream dreamed leads to the next and the next and the next thing (websites visited in succession and contemporaneously is an especially fascinating trail to follow these days.  The bread crumbs are so large, so easy and intriguing/inviting to follow....

Perhaps more on that tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow or the tomorrow after that.  (Looks like a nonsense word now, tomorrow, eh?)

Off into the the day....