Look at that, - [best motivational books of all time .TXT] 📗

“Who is the donkey?”

“Our language, who do you think? Me?”

“What’s wrong with our language?”

“It’s extremely problematic. Where do I even start. With contract verbs it is an absolute pandemonium, with the deponent ones total chaos, with their aug-ment complete mayhem, with the middle voice past progressive an utter mess, participles are conspicuous by their absence, which and that are ubiquitous, while the female gender terminating in -ις has become a matter of ‘belief’. No one seems to care a tuppence about it however, the end result being that whenever the demotic doesn’t suit us we turn to the katharevou-sa. And vice versa. We can never get anywhere that way though.”

“You’re on a roll, I see, I must have pulled on a sensi-tive cord. Are the feminists not right, at least? Is there not a misogynistic undertone in your work as well? Promptly though, I’m being notified by the studio that we need to go on a commercial break.”

“To begin with, I am a feminist myself, in the sense that I stand for complete equality between the two sexes. In everything. As well as, therefore, the right

Are you completely nuts? You’re having a go at our language? You dare forsake all the blood that’s been spilt for its sake?

A fucking mess, maybe?

- What is it you want after all, a return to katharevousa?

- I wish I knew what I wanted.

Simos Panopoulos - Look at that

167

for one to be sarcastic about the other. After all, sar-casm is the salt of literature. From thereon, however, if in my book I rubbed salt in one of the two sexes’ wounds, deep down it isn’t the weaker one. And…”

“That’s all the time we have, Mr Panourgias, let’s put a semi-colon on that, hopefully we’ll talk again at an-other opportunity in the near future. Dear friends, we welcomed today the controversial author Simos Pa-nourgias who, with his book Look at that, caused a frenzy. We will be together again next week, same day and time, with yet again another exceptional guest who tells it like it is. Because that’s our show’s motto, don’t forget. Until you hear from us again, so long.”

Hold on, you’re kind of ruining it now. Weaker? How d’you figure?

+ “under special conditions, it’s true, due to our interlocutor’s persistence with anonym-ity.”

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