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April 14, 2006
I wonder...
I am quite convinced that soon enough, the vocabulary of the historians is going to become limited to "I wonder..." and "..., so I guess my question is...", or at least Historians' English is going to develop this syntactical feature and it becomes prominent to start all sentences with them. It will be sort of like Ancient Greek were almost without a fail, as ge or de was inserted as the second element of the sentence, without any reason or point whatsoever.
I think the fact that most of the modern study of history is either revisionism or a type of micro-history trying to eventually challenge the long-held beliefs, has led historians to lack a lot of self-confidence. Nothing is certain for them anymore. If you believed that Louis XIV was the poster-boy of absolutism or that the Yongle Emperor was an idiot for stopping Zheng He's maritime expeditions, now you have to give up and re-learn that Louis was actually much bound by the executive power of local institutions and that Yongle was doing the right thing. So, you cannot decide on what you should think or what you should say.
As a result, at a talk or any sort of conference, the format for asking questions is that you give a bit of a half-chewed, not-at-all-sure-of-this reason for why they are asking their questions, and then you say "...so I wonder..." or "...so I guess my question is..." and then ask a lame question. I have now switched to guessing at what point in their "questions" my fellow historians will include this injection. Some are in a hurry and do it fast, and some give a speach before getting to the point. It is a cool game, it takes away the boredom of being at yet another talk about the "ideas of space and place in Byzantine hagiography" or "image and self-concious in Civil War America" or "Jews and economy during the Third Reich".
Poof!
P.S.: For no reason at all, I created another blog on the blogspot, a place to write short, quotation like entries. Visit my Short Attention Wisdom...
Posted by Khodadad at April 14, 2006 07:24 PM