Sprachhelm is a personal space for thinking about language: grammar, history, structure, meaning, and the strange ways humans encode thought.
Posts here will be informal, exploratory, and unapologetically right-wing.
I got the idea for creating this platform from the problems I've been facing during my presence (a couple months) commenting at a linguistics site known as languagehat, which I discovered by chance. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the administrator there is a self-described anarchist with a highly disagreeable shitty personality and a censorious mindset. Unsurprisingly, the most active commenters tend to be wokeists who imagine ‘fascist’ provocations everywhere.
To get a taste for what kind of light-headed individuals we're talking about and to entertain the readers, here's my last few comments on the site, which were (like many others) unjustifiably deleted. By ‘unjustifiably’ I mean that they were respectful and didn't contain any explicit or implicit personal insult against any other commenter.
I started off replying to someone who wrote this:
“Language Hat pondered the question of (H)EUREKA in 2010. Nobody knows the answer; speculations include (1) the spelling was influenced by other Greek words starting with eu-, or (2) the story about Archimedes was transmitted only through Latin texts, in which the Greek word was written without breathing marks.”
I replied: ‘‘It's obvious why the h was dropped in English transcription. It would force people to pronounce ‘hewreeka’ instead of ‘yureeka’. The latter seemed more natural because it lined up with other beautiful -eu words, like eugenics.’’
Someone else replied to this: “you’re not really trying at this point. Just say 88 and get it done with it. What was the other shibboleth, some number of words? 14?”
To which I said: ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’ve never been part of this crowd. I've mentioned before that my favorite music is Bach. You think a person like that hangs out with lowlifes? I hate the behavioral and mental disorders associated with extremism. I am a mild reactionary and elitist, an oligarch in the ancient sense of the word. I want 10% less democracy, not one-party rule despotic nonsense. The ancients distinguished between oligarchy and tyranny, a nuance often lost on the allegedly more clever moderns’.
To that, the same person who effectively accused me of being a Neo-Nazi said: ‘‘I just ignore anything you write. It’s a habit I have from other blogs. I have done that for more than twenty years. I just scroll down. There’s always one or two trolls.’’
This sort of behavior is infuriating to any person with a sense of honor but of course we're dealing with leftists here, people with a well-known tendency to eschew all conventional notions of propriety and decency. Resisting the urge to deliver a harsh but justified insult to the person, I said: ‘If you're not gonna read my replies to your bullshit then don't talk to me or about me. Got it?’
One of the administrator's lackeys e-mailed him that he should come and ban me. I was not surprised at how dishonorable and womanly this act is because I know that when it comes to leftists, the instinct to snitch on people comes naturally. Does the history of left-wing parties show any different?
A couple days previously yet another comment had got arbitrarily deleted and I was accused by one of the administrator's chief ass lickers for being a ‘fascist bot’. I told them that I am getting tired of their censorious nonsense and would create a new space on linguistics called Sprachhelm from ‘langauge + helmet’. The name was conceived as a direct mockery of ‘languagehat’.
Sprachhelm is now here.