On the Square Today

In his latest On the Square column , David Mills laments the privileged place of anger in our culture:

You see this in the reaction to Occupy Wall Street. For liberal writers, the ragtag group encamped near the Stock Exchange are expressing admirable anger at . . . whatever target the writers want attacked. Even conservative writers often said something like “They’re rightly angry at corporate America . . . ” before criticizing them. In either case, the fact that the Occupiers feel angry at something, whatever exactly it is, is credited to them as virtue and a reason to take them seriously. Few on either side even suggest that the anger may not be genuine, healthy, and properly directed.

Also today, Nicholas Frankovich on the new translation of the Latin mass :

Within the mind of any single translator of a liturgical text, formal equivalence and functional equivalence are always at work, opposing each other here, cooperating there. Formal equivalence by itself would give you translatorese, the awkward, often inscrutable prose of the sort that crude translation software is apt to serve up. Functional equivalence by itself would do as good a job of ensuring that the English representation of what was written in the original language was mangled, as any peculiar background music that complicated the passage but might be essential to discerning its tone would be cheerfully ignored, all in the interest of raising what the translator calculated to be the signal-to-noise ratio.