οἱ πολλοί -- λαουτζίκος -- πολλοί

I know, you can't read the title.  That's OK, neither can I.  No, I take that back.  I can read the title and I can understand it.  It's the reality behind the meaning that I can't understand.  I thought that I would give you a different flavor.  This has been a culturally challenging day, so I figured a little dose of culture would not hurt anybody.  So, I wrote the title in Greek.  It is late, so I didn't go to the character map to get the language in the all upper-case format.  I just got it where I found it...on Google, of course.  Should I complain to Sergei that he doesn't make it easy enough to get Greek caps?  If I did, he might make it work.  Allow me this digression.  Several years ago, I did make a remark to Google about the lack of Greek alliterations in the search engine and the translation gadget.  I only gave one example.  I said that if the Google in Athens and Sparta could be used in Greek, it should be possible to have Greek language results to searches and translations in the United States.  I got a nice letter back and inside of one year, Google had Greek.  
Back to work.  I am a person who does not have much faith in what is politely called, in English,  "the people" and in Greek "Hoi Polloi."  Now I used Greece as an example because this is the civilization that is touted as being the mother of democracy.  Well, you see where that has got them.  You also see where it has got us.  You also see where it has got a lot of others as well.  I know that there is another side to this opinion, but I for one think that "the people" don't generally make very good decisions about a lot of things.  One of the most interesting examples of making stupid decisions is to be found in an early book of the Bible.  Read chapters 8 to 10 of the First Book of Samuel.  It is the story of when Israel demanded of God to give it a king.  Yegads, what idiots!  They got a king all right...Guy by the name of Saul.  A flaming idiot he was.  Not only that, the ones who came after him do not have a long and illustrious history.  You can get that image by reading the Prophets.  
You think, oh yeah, what they needed was rule by the people, grass roots stuff.  OK, bring on the Greeks.  In comes Alexander himself.  Oh, no.  This is worse.  Alexander didn't last long.  Neither did the Greeks in Israel...So you know what?  The Israelite kings turned to the Romans for help and support.  Oh, that was a real smart move!  Heee.  Aren't these people ever going to learn?  The answer is, "NO."  
3,500 years later, here we are.  We don't have a king either.  Maybe we should have one.  Oh yeah?  They got one across the Pond.  HHmmm...
You're now saying to yourself, "Where is Dion going with this?  This isn't a thought, it's a rant."  Rant?  No way.  It's only a rant if it has nasty words in it.  This is clean as a whistle.  So far.  Actually, I want to make the point that crossed my mind today during the heavily multi-cultural funeral rites that I presided.  I had prepared myself for the mix of cultures to be present.  It was interesting to be there and to be in charge of the process.  Everybody behaved.  Of course, anyone can stand ANYTHING for only an hour, right?  Then on the drive back home I listened to the news.  What a mistake!  Complaints about the new Coca-Cola Can; Gossip about 9-9-9; Comparing Newt to a newt; Nasties about Mormons; Warnings about Sharia; Advice of how to ship 25,000,000 Mexicans back south of the border; Gnashing of teeth about the rejection of the "Scientific" assurances that human life, as such, begins at conception; Assurances that we should follow the British lead and close our embassy in Tehran [we did that in 1974];  Assuring us that it is totally unnecessary for our children to be forced to learn "cursive;"  Crying and wailing for more taxes to be assessed against the Millionaires and Billionaires.  Through it all I remembered how just recently how a man who didn't know the fundamental grammar rules of our major language was elected president, and now we have to listen to the same crowd who did that, tell us how to save our beloved homeland from disintegrating.  
Hoi Polloi indeed.  Bring on the clowns.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  How does that square with the famous Greek aphorism, Όλες οι κάρτες, "Everything passes."  Yeah, maybe.

BABEL, QUITE A TOWER [PART ONE]

LA TOUR DE BABEL

1 The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words.

2 While men were migrating in the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to one another, "Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire." They used bricks for stone,     and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth."
5 The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men had built.
6 Then the LORD said: "If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do.
7 Let us then go down and there confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says."
8 Thus the LORD scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.
Before I get started, let me ask you if it looks to you like God was a little confused in His old age.  Look at what verse 5 says and then what verse 7 says.  The Bible is full of this kind of stuff.  Someday I'm going to write a humorous book about God's Alzheimer's condition.

One of my favorites is when the All Knowing, All seeing, All powerful God goes down into the Garden and asks, "Where are you"? (Gen. 3;9)
Or my other favorite, when God "...remembered Noah and all the animals in the ark..."(Gen. 8;1)  Sheesh!  Who put Him in charge?
Hey, get back to the Tower if Babel.  

Oh, yeah, I forgot.  I was too busy remembering that God forgets too..."

Anyway, the question is, how many of you have had to learn a language that you knew nothing about going in?  Raise your hands, boys and girls.  Hhmmm, just what I thought.  Lots o' fun, ain't it?  I suppose it can be tough trying to learn a language without being in the country where the lingo is spoken, written and thought in all the time.  I tried that, five times.  Once with German and once with Japanese.  In the German class I lasted for three sessions.  For the Japanese class I lasted for two.  Great record!  See Latin, Hebrew and Greek below.

As far as I am concerned, language classes are the worst waste of time invented by humans, ever.  Except for the teachers.  You know, the ones who take your money knowing full well that you'll never dominate the tongue until you go to Japan.
Then there are the seven years of book-learnin' Latin and the six years of the same for Greek and the four years of Hebrew.   I learned more Latin in the first six months of listening to Latin in a classroom and answering when I was called on than I did in the entire seven years of book-learnin '.  I'm still fairly good in Latin.  Even wrote a blog post or two in Latin to ridicule the bozos who shout and scream because they want Latin Masses.  I wonder why they never submitted comments?

I did get something out of Greek.  I still know the alphabet and I know several words.  I still have to resort to sign language for the call of nature, though.  Oh, yeah!  
Hebrew was fun, really fun.  Nothing serious there.  I mean, come' on!  A language with NO VOWELS?!?**  So I kidded myself through four years and I can't remember 5 of the 24 characters in the Hebrew alphabet.
Now, in Italian, I did better.  First, "Coca-Cola" was easy to learn.  The tough part there is that "Coca-Cola" is of the feminine gender in Italian.  Second, the writing is the same as ours, and, there are only 22 letters, vowels included.  BUT, they have an extra consonant, "gl" and it took me slightly more than two years to master it.  Don't believe the clowns who tell you that Italian is "easy".

Of course it is easy if all you want to say is "Passa mi la pasta, per favore."  To get beyond that and to be able to speak in public and to write grammatical Italian is one eye-bulging heavy lift.  Oh, by the way, I still remember the Italian alphabet.
Spanish has been a challenge.  24 letters, including the famous "ll" which is not 10% the challenge of the Italian "gl" but you have to understand that it does not come in the same section as "l" in the dictionary.  The killer in Spanish is the mastering of the verb forms.  I thought French was bad.  Spanish puts French verbs to shame.  Now that I have had to stop drinking alcohol, I have forgotten all the Spanish I ever knew.  When I speak Spanish, I still impress the daylights out of the listeners with the strange sounding words that come out of my mouth every now and again.  They sound Spanish, but they are really Italian words looking for equal time. 
Then there is Ilokano.  Ah, yes.  No verb "to be".  So you wind up talking like Yoda all the time.  "Nice girl." "Nice Girl?"  "NICE girl."  "Nice, Girl."  "Dog big."

"Dogmine." [Note the "mine" is not separated from "dog".]  One of my favorite stories about language has to do with Ilokano.  It's for when I explain how to become fluent.
Tagalog is a passive language for me.  I understand, but I do not speak well.  It does have the verb "to be."  By the way, Ilokano and Tagalog have the same way of writing that we do.  Both languages have about 24 letters [who cares?].  They, like Vietnamese, have the added consonant, "ng" and it has a different pronunciation value in all three of the above mentioned languages.  It took me a long time to master the Ilokano "ng".  I have never mastered anything in Tagalog.  I just mentioned Vietnamese because I wanted to appear smart and metro-sexual.
I'll get to part two later.  There I will philosophize about how to become fluent in a language that you know nothing about.

The sad thing is, God is getting even with us for thinking we are so smart, and we are still not believing that He's in charge. What a mess!  

See Bible quotes above.