Journal articles on the topic 'Idiolect style'

This article analyzes the concept of "idiostyle", its connection the term "idiolect", researchers’ different views to the co-relation of these two terms, which often contradict each other. The article presents the views of researchers who consider “idiolect” a broader concept, which includes “idiostyle”, those ones who believe, conversely, that “idiostyle” is a hyperonym, and “idiolect” is a hyponym as well as those who consider these concepts to be interchangeable. A conclusion is drawn as to which concept may be considered broader. Various approaches to the study of “idiostyle”, the concept of "translator’s idiostyle" and the influence of the translator's individual style on the author's idiostyle on the example of the works of George Seferis are studied. The stages of formation of the individual style of the writer are also studied in this article, as well as the process of translation of poetic works, features of the external and internal matrix of the poetry, etc. The tasks and difficulties faced by translators in the work on the translation of poetic works are considered in this study. The article examines the difficulties in reproducing the individual style of the author and "muffling" the idiostyle of the translator when translating poetic works. The knowledge of the idiolect of the Greek writer George Seferis has been improved in this article. The main factors of formation of George Seferis's idiostyle are determined. The author’s life path is researched and his poetry is analyzed to determine the characteristic features of his individual style. His life experience, worldview, historical events, traditions and innovations in his works, etc. all formed his specific individual style, which was explored in the article. The poetry of G. Seferis and its translations into Ukrainian by Hellenist translators such as Iryna Betko, Ivan Drach, Svitlana Yovenko, Maryna Maryschuk, Oleksandr Ponomariv, Larysa Skyrda, Tetyana Chernyshova, and Andriy Savenko, are analyzed in terms of reproduction of the internal and external matrix of the poetic work and idiostyle of the writer. The works of different translators are compared in relation to the dominance of their individual style over the idiostyle of the author.

Idiolect of T.T. CloeteIdiolect in particular has a prominent poetical component. In this article it is shown that this view can be traced back to earlier as well as concurrent statements by Cloete, the critic. It is established that the views of Cloete on the essence and meaning of verse as a literary form of art are reflected in his poetry. He has, for example, stated that the visual elements incorporated in modem artistic texts contribute in an essential way to their meaning. This view correlates strongly with his personal style as a poet and the thematic preoccupation with ‘the eye’ in Idiolek. Typical aspects of his lexicon are also determined because the repetitive use of certain words is part and parcel of literary idiolect. A resume of the findings of this article is compared with and corroborated by the reception o f Cloete’s first four volumes of verse. It is concluded that Cloete’s dual role as a poet-critic is complemented by the religious base on which he stands and that these components contribute to the essence and quality of his poetry. In him we indeed have a successful union of instinct, intellect and faith.

The article attempts to categorize such notions as personal language, idiolect and idiostyle in artistic texts. They are decisions and possibilities, which are specific to each author, of developing a message through an individual choice/selection of resources disposed of by the code. The article exposes external linguistic designation of the artistic text’s language with regard to a specified class (category) represented by an author. Two designations are distinguished thereof, i.e. profession-lectal (priests) and bio-lectal (women). Each of these categories of artistic texts’ originators functioned within the specified frames of model texts specific to the distinguished class of authors.

Background: The paper focuses on the communication with a target group within the fitness industry. The purpose was to analyze the idiolect, meaning the distinctive and unique use of language of a Polish fitness trainer, Ewa Chodakowska, and to characterize the role of her specific linguistic choices in the endeavor of encouraging individuals, primarily females, to participate in workouts. Material/Methods: For the development of categories and an understanding of the relationship between the various concepts, the techniques of a grounded theory were used. The method chosen to investigate Chodakowska’s idiolect was the content analysis, in which both written and oral content came under close scrutiny. Results: Chodakowska’s particular style of interacting with fans originates both from a “professiolect” typical of all fitness instructors and her personal attitude to physical activity. The very unique use of language includes both verbal and non-verbal communication. Chodakowska has an informal, direct and personal approach to the followers. By using a ‘we’–form and addressing her female fans with funny and warm expressions as my dearests, my sweethearts, babes, she builds a feeling of group solidarity and develops a long-term customer loyalty. An important part of her idiolect are exaggerated commendations, hyperbolic expressions of applause, sophisticated maxims and adages, by use of which she tries to activate an intrinsic motivation in her fans. Her methodological explanations during workout are extremely illustrative. Noteworthy are her creative and imagine-producing metaphors, including names of her workouts: Scalpel and Killer. Conclusions: It can be argued that her distinctive speech, rather than practical competences within fitness workout planning, is Chodakowska’s main asset and key to popularity.

The aim of the paper is to present the results of the analysis of the idiolect of the French President Emmanuel Macron in the context of political events presented in the president’s addresses to the nation. The following tasks are solved in the work: the mechanisms of the influence of his speech on the recipient are determined, the aspect of an interdisciplinary dialogue between political science and linguistics is reflected, attention is drawn to the context of the discourse of E. Macron against the backdrop of a changing world, challenges in France's domestic and foreign policy. The analysis of the idiolect of E. Macron from the point of view of the implementation of its communicative functions was also carried out. The conclusion of the article is informative for the increment of knowledge in sociolinguistics and political linguistics. The main result of the study was the conclusion that the individual style of E. Macron is distinguished by the desire for a neat, cautious, but at the same time bold attitude to the word. The specificity of his speech is manifested at all linguistic levels, namely at the phonetic level, clearly defined in terms of diction and arrangement of pauses, linking and accentuation by declaring, at the lexical level in a peculiar choice of vocabulary, in some cases outdated, uncommon words, as well as in the use of metaphors and phraseological units, at the syntactic level – in the use of complex syntactic constructions and anaphoric repetitions. This specificity draws attention to itself, it defines the president’s idiolect as a person striving to take the country's development to a new level, to take care of the nation, at the same time emphasizing his rather tough position in relation to the whole world.

The article deals with the features of the use of language aesthetic means of novostyl’ in the prose texts of the Ukrainian writers, representatives of postmodernism in fiction. In the creative work of the authors (I. Rozdobudko, I. Karpa, Tanya Maliarchuk) the typological features of the renewed idiolect were reflected, a number of changed norms in the system of text creation and image creation were recorded, and innovational processes in modern literary speech were reproduced. The following features are characteristic for their artistic discourse: the updating of the lexicon, the use of non-normative and slang language practices, and the destruction in the organization of the language use. The writers' texts are in close connections, in the language-stylistic sense, while denoting the individual-authorial differences of the idiostyle, the search for peculiar language-literary manners of writing.

And Here Lies a Buried Vampire: Sayings, Proverbs, Idioms in Translations of Selected Works by Andrzej Sapkowski into Russian This paper elaborates on ways of proverbs and sayings transition, presentin A. Sapkowski’s works, into Russian. Gathered material was discussed from the perspective of both original and translation texts. Analysis covered idiomatic phrases, created by the author, as well as real, existingones, that were subjected to different kinds of modifications in the Polishtext. The presence of this kind of stylistic devices can be considered in a context of realization of the author’s idiolect features in translation text, which makes proper transition of described units so vitally important. It is due to the fact that they become a distinctive feature of Sapkowski style, and should be reflected in the Russian text.

Authorship verification rely on identification of a given document is written by a particular author or not. Internally analyzing the document itself with respect to the variations in writing style of the author and identification of the author’s own idiolect is the main context of the authorship verification. Mainly, the detection performance depends on the used feature set for clustering the document. Linguistic features and stylistic features have been utilized for author identification according to the writing style of a particular author. Disclose the shallow changes of the author’s writing style is the major problem which should be addressed in the domain of authorship verification. It motivates the computer science researchers to do research on authorship verification in the field of computer forensics and this research also focuses this problem. The contributions from the research are two folded: Former is introducing a new feature extracting method with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and later is propose a new more efficient linguistic feature set for verification of author of the given document. Experiments on a corpus composed of freely downloadable genuine 19th century English Books and Self Organizing Maps has been used as the classifier to cluster the documents. Proper word segmentation also introduced in this work and it helps to demonstrate that the proposed strategy can produced promising results. Finally, it is realized that more accurate classification is generated by the proposed strategy with extracted linguistic feature set.

The article is devoted to the study of author’s individual style from the point of view of linguocultural conceptology, which combines linguocultural and cognitive approaches in order to study the features of the author's way of verbalizing socially important concepts. The material of the works of the famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende has been alkalized to illustrate lexical and semantic features of her individual style, reflecting the social and historical realities through the author's worldview. The methods of linguocultural science and cognitive conceptual linguistics have been combined in the research, helping to realize the correspondence of objective and subjective worldview in the individual author's style. The article deals with the differences between the linguistics terms "linguistic personality", "individual style" and "idiolect" and scientific approaches to their study. It is determined that the peculiarities of I. Allende's novels are the use of a considerable number of lexical units for the designation of geographical, biological and everyday realities, reflecting the specifics of the people’s life. The description of spiritual,philosophical and religious concepts through the use of expressively and value-colored vocabulary reflects deeply the peculiarities of the people's worldview. In the course of the semantic-cognitive analysis of the lexical units inherent in the writer’s works, it has been found out that the individual author’s world view does not in any way harm the reproduction of the common national and cultural people’s heritage, since the author is a carrier of a common conceptual sphere, formed in his consciousness due to the society where he/she lives. The verbalization of socially significant concepts in the writer’s novels is determined by her moral, ethical and value attitudes inherent in most members of the society.

The author points at some methodological problems connected with a dictionary of Bruno Schulz’s Polish, conditioned mostly by its implied audience. In comparison to other lexicographic projects, such a project would have to take into account the sources of the lexical items listed in dictionaries, their number in relation to the language as a sum total of such items, the ordering of Schulz’s vocabulary, and the meaning of words in his idiolect, compared to their commonly accepted meaning. The differences under consideration imply that even though the dictionary may prove useful in the research on common Polish – its history, linguistic norms, and semantics, in the first place it would meet the needs of both literary scholars and linguists specializing in Schulz. They would find in it well organized material to study the writer’s imagination, the linguistic world picture of his works, his style, his artistic inspirations, the ways of connecting ideas, and his linguistic mastery in general. Besides, such a dictionary would be helpful for common readers, as well as translators of Schulz into foreign languages and scholars from abroad. The theoretical assumptions and practical options involved will depend the primary goal of the project.

Abstract This paper describes the analysis of possible differentiation of the author’s idiolect in the space of semantic fields; it also analyzes the clustering of text documents in the vector space of semantic fields and in the semantic space with orthogonal basis. The analysis showed that using the vector space model on the basis of semantic fields is efficient in cluster analysis algorithms of author’s texts in English fiction. The study of the distribution of authors' texts in the cluster structure showed the presence of the areas of semantic space that represent the idiolects of individual authors. Such areas are described by the clusters where only one author dominates. The clusters, where the texts of several authors dominate, can be considered as areas of semantic similarity of author’s styles. SVD factorization of the semantic fields matrix makes it possible to reduce significantly the dimension of the semantic space in the cluster analysis of author’s texts. Using the clustering of the semantic field vector space can be efficient in a comparative analysis of author's styles and idiolects. The clusters of some authors' idiolects are semantically invariant and do not depend on any changes in the basis of the semantic space and clustering method.

Sociolinguistics deals with linguistic variations such as dialect, idiolect, genderlect, register etc. It deals with ways of using particular languages and the social roles of speakers of these languages. It is the speaker-oriented approach. Genders have different characteristics in the use of language, which lead to the gender differences in language. The present study was conducted to analyze the gender-based linguistic variations (variations at discourse and communication level) in Urdu language. Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect theory is the theoretical Background of the study. She has presented six sets of language contrasts that are used as instrument to analyze male and female conversations. It is commonly believed that women language is more sophisticated, apologetic as compared to men. These differences are called gender preferential differences in a patriarchal society with their own fancies and whims. The hypothesis is that men and women have different ways of communicating, based on male and female perception of the world as they are made of different things and contrasting style. The qualitative paradigm used in this study. Direct observation, interview and tape recording are used as tools for the data collection. Recorded conversation has been transcribed and analyzed to provide data from which these issues have been discussed. The researcher has analyzed Urdu language conversation among Urdu speech community living specially in Sialkot, according to Tannen’s speech contrasts. The data was analyzed manually. The findings show that variations occur due to the use of various linguistic devices, style, topic of discussion, power etc. This study is limited to the Urdu speech community. The limitation of my research is that I observed the language of middle class Urdu speech community not the other classes. In this research, I only highlighted variations at communication level, and delimited all other variations such as morphological, syntactic, phonological variations. Future researchers can study these aspects. The study will benefit the whole society in creation of awareness about non-sexist language to give a psychological identity of females in Pakistan.

este trabajo trata de las alusiones literarias en la traducción de textos españoles, sobre todo de los artículos de opinión accesibles en Internet. Con la creciente divulgación de la lengua española, y en consecuencia de los estereotipos de la cultura hispana, es más patente que el contacto entre lenguas no coincide con el de las literaturas locales. Además, las nuevas formas de comunicación en Internet, donde accedemos a ediciones digitales de prensa, foros, etc., plantean nuevos retos a la traducción, porque incorporan tanto los registros y contenidos de la cultura de masas como los de la alta cultura. Ésta se manifiesta en frecuentes alusiones a la literatura española, que independizadas de su contexto original se han convertido en las denominadas palabras aladas. Por tanto, un traductor debe elegir entre varias técnicas de traducción para reflejar en la lengua meta un impacto, un juego de palabras, una pretendida mezcla de registros o un idiolecto, que en la lengua original se producen a través del uso de alusiones literarias.Tthe article tackles with the subject of literary allusions in translation of spanish texts available on the internet. Along with the spread of spanish language, among which the spanish stereotypes have their important impact, we realize that the reciprocity between languages does not convey the subtle liaisons found in the local literary content. Contemporary means and manners of virtual interaction, within which we find newspages, blogs and forums, constitute further challenge in rhetorical model of translation. It is due to the fact that a blended styles and contents of discourse, which mix the mass culture with a high one, can be observed in texts addressed to all different audiences. In case of the participation of the high culture we may encounter certain allusions which became independent from its origin: so called winged words. Hence, a translator shall adopt a technique of translation which would convey in the target language the literary modes such as pun, witty remarks, styles of utterances or idiolect, which are, in the original texts, attained by the mentioned literary allusions.

The article discusses the idiolectic features of the adjective reshitel’nyi and the adverb reshitel’no in Fedor Dostoevskii’s writing style. Conceived as one lexical item, reshitel’nyi and reshitel’no have a semantic structure that includes three blocks of meanings: quality/mode of action; discursive meaning; intensity (corresponding to the lexical function Magn). The dictionary definitions suggest that all of them were common to reshitel’nyi/reshitel’no in Russian language of the 19th century. Ноwever, a corpus-based study shows that reshitel’nyi/reshitel’no in discursive or intensifying use is one of Dostoevskii’s idiolectic patterns. The study comprises 1219 contexts from Dostoevskii’s five great novels and from Leo Tolstoy’s, Mikhail Saltykov Shchedrin’s, Ivan Turgenev’s and Ivan Goncharov’s literary texts accessible in the Russian National Corpus. The analysis reveals the closeness of intensification tо discursive meanings up to nondistinction. Almost half of the contexts extracted from Dostoevsky’s texts are discursive or intensifying uses of reshitel’nyi/reshitel’no. This share is much smaller for the texts of other authors (12%, 22%, 15% and 14% respectively). The article considers some types of contexts and constructions that refer to discursive or intensifying uses of reshitel’nyi/reshitel’no in Dostoesvskii’s literary texts.

“Zadania praktyczne rewolucji w zaborze rosyjskim” is an original lecture edited to appear in a written form. This caused de-individualisation of the language in which the message is conveyed, limiting idiolectic properties (they have textual rather than systemic nature) and giving the linguistic material of the text exclusively all-Polish features. The style of this text balances between determinants of a nearly academic lecture and features of a political presentation including persuasive elements.

Abstract This paper explores register variation in diaries and travel journals during the early and late Modern English periods (1500–1900), based on the case study of preposition placement, specifically preposition stranding (which I refer to) and preposition pied piping (to which I refer). Findings show that diaries and travel journals in general have a similar frequency of stranded and pied-piped prepositions, but that sharp differences emerge in their diachronic evolution. The trends suggest that the two registers generally follow the same historical drift towards oral styles previously observed in non-specialised registers, albeit at different rates and with only a moderately oral-like pattern in the nineteenth century. Also of note is that the frequency of stranded prepositions in diaries is lower than expected. I will argue that, although norms on ‘proper’ style and eighteenth-century prescriptive norms of ‘correct’ English play an important role, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, one should also take into account register-specific characteristics such as the topic and purpose of the text, the setting in which it is produced (private/public), the participants involved and the production circumstances of the text. Likewise, idiolectal differences should not be underestimated, since they can on occasions skew results.

In the presented paper, I am making an attempt to demonstrate the most important, in my opinion, characteristics of the language used by people with autism as ones arising directly from disrupted or completely different cognitive processes taking place in their minds. Such individuals lack, in the fi rst place, the fundamental cognitive skill being the awareness of their own and other people’s mental acts. The absence or insuffi ciency of the theory of mind gives rise to disorders in acquiring the linguistic worldview, inability to decode fi gurative meanings, failure to use langue in order to maintain contact, and failure to speak of language itself, and many more. Autistic people are characterised by the metonymic cognitive style, which uses the potential of the so-called systemising skills. Instead of thinking of other people, what to say to them and what should be said to them, people with autism think of the things that do not require familiarity with the theory of mind and are not as complex as humans. Keywords: autism – theory of mind – idiolectal worldview – language functions – metaphor – metonymic cognitive style

The article highlights a complex of problems addressed by linguopoetics, the science that concerns itself with the language of fiction and poetry. Linguopoetis as the study of imagery, its rules and means aims at revealing the potential power of tropes in literary texts; more importantly, it provides understanding of the principles that govern text organization in terms of the philosophy of knowledge, the unity of language and thought, the linguistic picture of the world. The system of ideas and images presented in literary discourse requires a holistic approach rather than the discussion of separate text fragments, i.e. the analysis of ‘vertical context’. Comprehension of metaphoricity presupposes generalizations at the level of the semantic structure of the whole text with its colloquialisms and metaphorical imagery, transformations of figurative and non-figurative meanings, stylistically neutral and marked elements, connotative layers and additional new meanings. A distinctive feature of modern literary texts is deviations from codified literary norms; such divergences create ‘freshness’, originality of expression; they create unique images providing deep psychological insight and eloquence. The study of modern literary discourse involves investigation into the general characteristics of national idiolect, its specificity, authors’ ideostylistic features. The analysis of individual styles of writing, on the material of modernist prose and poetry in particular, makes it possible to establish current literary trends and innovative tendencies in modern Ukrainian literature.

Woman in T.T. Cloete’s 'toepasslngs van dante' In T.T. Cloete's fourth collection of poems, Idiolek (1986), several references are made to the poetry of Dante Alighieri. At the core of this collection are three poems under the heading "toepassings van dante". The first, "Silhoeët van Beatrice", is a description of the outline of Beatrice's naked body. The second poem, "mooi marilyn monroe foto in rooi", is based on a pin-up of Marilyn Monroe posing naked against a backdrop of red velvet. Although these two women are almost exact opposites - Beatrice possessing a divine beauty and an almost Christ-like nature, whereas Marilyn Monroe is portrayed as a dumb blonde and sex symbol of the fifties - the two poems are suspiciously similar in style and content. Both women are portrayed as being fundamentally perfect ("fundamenteel perfek"). In symbolizing the same virtues, they lose their unique and contrasting characteristics, and merge into a symbol of female perfection. Although the third poem, "columbae", does not have the Beatrice/Marilyn Monroe-figure as subject matter, it can be read as dealing with the issue of individuality and uniqueness, thus commenting on the previous two poems.

In general, language as a community communication tool is usually used by certain groups of people who belong to the language community. Language communities are those who feel that they own and use the same language. Community members have different backgrounds and social status. For example there are differences in employment, education, and so on. As a result of differences that occur variations in language. This study aims to describe the form of 1) variations of idiolects, 2) variations of dialects, 3) variations of registers, and, 3) variations of code switching made by K.H. Ahmad Muwafid in the Reconciliation Lecture on the Role of Youth in the National Frame at Karangdurin Islamic Boarding School, Madura. This research uses descriptive qualitative method, with data collection techniques in the form of SBLC techniques and note taking techniques. The data validity technique uses data triangulation. The results showed that K.H. Ahmad Muwafiq uses idiolastic variations, namely 1) the use of regional languages such as Javanese or Madurese, and Betawi, and there is a mixture of Arabic, 2) the use of Javanese words, 3) the use of hyperbole and metonemical language styles, and 4) pronunciation of existing words in Arabic. K.H. Ahmad Muwafiq uses East Javanese, Madurese, or Sundanese dialects. K.H. Ahmad Muwafiq uses the list of priests. K.H. Ahmad Muwafiq did the code switching. The benefits of this research are expected to be insight into various languages in the world of preaching.

The article considers the issues related to the semantic, grammatical, stylistic and technical difficulties currently present in machine translation and compares its four main approaches: Rule-based (RBMT), Corpora-based (CBMT), Neural (NMT), and Hybrid (HMT). It also examines some "open systems", which allow the correction or augmentation of content by the users themselves ("crowdsourced translation"). The authors of the article, native speakers presenting different countries (Russia, Greece, Malaysia, Japan and Serbia), tested the translation quality of the most representative phrases from the English, Russian, Greek, Malay and Japanese languages by using different machine translation systems: PROMT (RBMT), Yandex. Translate (HMT) and Google Translate (NMT). The test results presented by the authors show low "comprehension level" of semantic, linguistic and pragmatic contexts of translated texts, mistranslations of rare and culture-specific words,unnecessary translation of proper names, as well as a low rate of idiomatic phrase and metaphor recognition. It is argued that the development of machine translation requires incorporation of literal, conceptual, and content-and-contextual forms of meaning processing into text translation expansion of metaphor corpora and contextological dictionaries, and implementation of different types and styles of translation, which take into account gender peculiarities, specific dialects and idiolects of users. The problem of untranslatability ('linguistic relativity') of the concepts, unique to a particular culture, has been reviewed from the perspective of machine translation. It has also been shown, that the translation of booming Internet slang, where national languages merge with English, is almost impossible without human correction.

After we started direct communication and collaboration with foreign scholars, we immediately noticed that one of the reasons of miscommunication derives from the lack of discussion of terminological synonymy as well as the concept of a term. For example, miscommunication may occur due to such issues as the understanding and the relationship of such terms as a borrowing and a foreign word, such Lithuanian words as naujadaras, naujažodis and neologizmas which are usually all rendered in English as a neologism, language policy and language planning, etc. In addition, numerous debatable issues arise regarding the use of the term marker and its synonyms in the context of morphology and the choice of different terms to refer to the administrative style (kanceliarinis, dalykinis, administracinis stilius in Lithuanian). There is a tendency to opt for an international term since it facilitates communication with foreign scholars. This article explores terms that deal with language ‘standardness’ used in linguistic research and in written public discourse. In addition, it raises a question of whether it would not be useful to replace the term of common language with that of standard language. In our opinion, the term standard language better reflects such aspects of a given language variety as its normative nature, national status, formality, a consistent and natural acquisition of the language system as well as the application of the acquired knowledge in the processes of language standardisation and language policy. Certainly, replacing a term with a different one is not difficult, i.e. it is a matter of agreement and intention; however, in our case the question seems to be directly related not only to terminology but also to the concepts that they signify. On the one hand, international practice shows that local terms remain local and cause problems in translating them into other languages; on the other hand, it also reflects differences in the content of the terms when they are used to refer to different stages of language development.Several terms were used in Lithuanian linguistics to refer to language standardness. Jonas Jablonskis used the term written language. The scholar emphasised that he chose the term deliberately since he was not aiming at codifying spoken language and since written language was deemed as the most important in his time. The term common language created by Pranas Skardžius entered public use only in 1927. However, after 1950, the term of common language was replaced by the Russian term literary language. It was no better than other terms, it had no traditions in Lithuania but it was important as a political stance of showing how united Soviet linguistics was. Such purposeless change of terms was not accepted well by linguists working both in Lithuania and abroad. This issue was discussed on many occasions in writings by Skardžius, Jonikas and it was debated widely by Lithuanian linguists. The term common language was started to be used again in 1969.Today the status of our language is different: we have the system of established vocabulary, grammar, the whole language system is standardised, we have institutions that set and monitor language norms (State Commission of the Lithuanian Language and the State Language Inspectorate), institutions that foster Lithuanian, standardised language is used in all public domains, its status is established by a special law. As a result, contemporary situation can be defined by two clear terms: 1) Lithuanian which encompasses dialects, sociolects, idiolects and which also subsumes borrowings and jargon since it is part of our daily language which is not regulated by any laws or resolutions; 2) standard language which is understood as a language variety of the highest prestige. We do not suggest that the use of the term common language should be abandoned but we believe it should have a different place in the system of terms. As we are familiar with the way language development processes are termed in other countries the examples of which are provided in the first part of this article, we argue that common language may refer to a certain stage in the development of our language. Thus the language of a pre-standard stage used by the whole nation which has been more or less standardised can be referred to by the term common language. It would involve such language use which occurs in the initial stages of the development of a standard language, i.e. it would no longer refer to some tribal or dialectal language but rather to the general language used by the whole nation or its substantial part which first occurs in a written form and which is standardised only on the primitive or intuitive level without any language policy at the national or any other institutional level. However, this stage is over now and therefore, similarly to Latvians, we have to use the term standard language. In our opinion, standard language is a standardised language variety which is used in public discourse (state management, media, school) and in international communication.

Joachim Dicks writes in his review on Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s latest novel, Frühe Störung,that the author shows continuity by having developed in all of his books a unique and unmistakeable style that he calls ‘the so-called Treichel sound’. Treichel’s style, tone and mixture of thematic concerns in all of his eleven works of prose from Von Leib und Seele: Berichte up to Frühe Störung are indeed recognisable as distinctively Treichel, but has remained an unexplored terrain. The question therefore arises: What is the nature of the so-called ‘Treichel sound’ or his idiolect? Lost is a case in point with regard to Treichel’s idiolect: the narration includes factual historical and autobiographic information that represents both an ‘official life’ and a ‘carnival’, i.e. his representations of lives are determined by two aspects of theworld: the aspect of the piety of seriousness and by the aspect of laughter. This article firstly focuses on the theoretical possibility of using ‘serious’ factual autobiographic and historical information in combination with humour. The most prominent idiolectic traits of Treichel’soeuvre are then introduced, also in order to provide a context for the following discussion of Lost. Here it becomes apparent that Treichel’s humour has a tragicomical and derisive effect with regard to the narrator’s depiction of his childhood, family experiences and his cultural context. The microcosmic family context and the macrocosmic national and international contexts as they were formed because of the Second World War has lead to a loss of the narrator’s identity. The result of Treichel’s manner of dealing with serious contents that includes humour is the creation of a self-concept that can be described as self-exploratory,honest or confessional, self-centred, humorous and critical of German society - and these are also key features of Treichel’s idiolect. This article thus argues that the combination offictionalised serious historical and autobiographic factuality and humour characterises the ‘Treichel sound’.

This article examines Mikhail V. Lomonosov’s translation techniques and idiolect in his A Brief Guide to Eloquence (1748), with most of the examples being translated fragments of European literature. A comparison of the translated fragments from Cicero (the author analyses 82 excerpts from the antique orator’s works) with Lomonosov’s own Latin texts makes it possible to see some features of Lomonosov’s translation techniques. Except for the translated fragments included in the textbook on rhetoric, some of Cicero’s works were entirely translated into Russian in the eighteenth century. The author also compares Lomonosov’s translated fragments from Cicero (Cic. Leg. Man., Cat., Arch., Har. resp., etc.) with translations by K. Kondratovich, which were released twenty years after those by Lomonosov. The aim of the research is to show the peculiarities of Lomonosov’s translations, resulting both from the specifics of his translation techniques and the task of these texts as examples of Russian eloquence. The comparative method allows the author to conclude that Lomonosov managed to adequately convey the content and form in his translations and to recreate the style while closely adhering to the original – all this convinced him that the Russian language ‘stands out among all the languages of Europe in its grandeur and richness’. In Lomonosov’s translation techniques, there is a tendency for word-by-word translation and an attempt to preserve the Latin syntax; there is also a noticeable tendency to replace specific ancient culture-specific concepts with modern ones (a principle dating back to humanistic translations into Latin and vulgar languages). The translator’s adherence to the original is of practical importance for historians of literature and allows us to determine when the original text was taken from textbooks on rhetoric.

In this paper I examine how transgressive references to gender, sexuality and the body are translated in two texts by the Québécoise writer Nelly Arcan, her debut autofictional narrative Putain (2001) and her final (retroactively auto)fictional title Paradis, clef en main (2009). Throughout her oeuvre, Arcan seeks to liberate women from stereotypical frameworks of reference by asserting women’s gendered, sexual and corporeal subjectivities in previously taboo discourses on prostitution, incest, sexuality, anorexia, matrophobia and suicide. Through her candid and explicit writing style, Arcan elaborates her own specific écriture au féminin which incorporates a linguistic, thematic and physical visualization of women within her texts.These two novels have been translated into English as Whore (2005) by Bruce Benderson and Exit (2011) by David Scott Hamilton respectively. However, analysis of the target texts suggests that neither translator adopts a gender-conscious approach which compromises the specificity of Arcan's idiolect in the Anglophone context. Through a comparative analysis of examples from the source texts and translations under the categories of gender, sexuality and the body, I discuss how the translation practices work counterproductively to obfuscate Arcan’s textual visualisations of women. In terms of references to gendered identity, by removing or neutralising Arcan's grammatically feminised language in Putain, the translator obfuscates Arcan's idea of the importance gender plays in shaping maternal relationships. Similarly, in Exit, Arcan's subversive feminist wordplay is distorted resulting in women being reinserted into patriarchal frameworks of reference. My analysis on Arcan's portrayal of sexuality underlines how sexual euphemisms in the translation downplay the narrator's potential for sexual agency in Whore, while misleading translation choices for feminist neologisms relating to women's sexuality in Exit eschew Arcan's efforts to verbalise women's lived sexual realities. Lastly, inconsistency in the translation of female corporeal vocabulary distorts the neutral tone Arcan employs in Putain to ensure women's bodies are not eroticised and the translator's decision to condense references to the female body in Exit undermines the significance Arcan places on corporeal connections between women. Thereafter, I move on to consider the wider implications of the translative process such as how paratextual elements also have an impact upon Arcan's reception in the target culture. I argue that in both Whore and Exit, the paratranslators intentionally sensationalise the autofictional elements of Arcan's texts. In short, my analysis contends that through a non-gender conscious translation practice, the celebrity of Arcan is promoted in the Anglophone context but to the detriment of Arcan’s écriture au féminin.

Background. The description of the concepts “text”, “style”, “idiolect”, “idiostyle” indicates how much their content does not coincide. In the process of perceiving and understanding the text, the presuppositions and implications, which are components of the implicit information of the entire text, must be restored by the recipient in whole or in part, otherwise the understanding of the text will be incomplete, partial or not achieved at all. Therefore, the mechanism for reconstructing implicitness is one of the most important and universal laws of understanding a work.The purpose of the article is to define the concept of “idiostyle” and consider various approaches to this concept due to the peculiarities of the creative manner of writing of F. M. Dostoevsky, in particular the category of implicitness.Methods. In this work, we resort to such methods as descriptive and linguo-stylistic analysis, because the question of idiostyle in the last decade has acquired a complex character, in accordance with which the analysis of F. M. Dostoevsky’s idiostyle requires a multilevel approach. The research methods are determined by the concept of studying the integrity of the artistic image of a work of art, determined by the intersection of semantics and stylistics.Results. The article gives a general representation of the main features and mechanisms of text formation, exposing the characterological features of F. M. Dostoevsky’s idiostyle, in particular the place and role of the category of implicitness. We perceive discourse as the nature of the presentation of the writer’s works and his distinctive linguistic features. We recognize idio discourse as the communicative and artistic space of the author and the reader, which, in the aggregate and interaction of all its aspects, forms an integral communicative environment into which everyone who participates in the process of communicative activity immerses. The principles of the discourse – text – idiodiscourse – idiostyle correlation are described, idiostyle is defined as an object of linguistics research, the idiostyle and linguistic picture of the world of F. M. Dostoevsky are analyzed, the category of implicitness in the writer's idiodiscourse is considered, the concepts of implicitness, subtext, implication and presupposition are distinguished.Discussion. The appeal to the implicative potential of the detail made it possible to trace the mechanisms of its generation and actualization associated with the process of interpretation, which affects the perception of information by the addressee. Perception factors are associated with the socio-cultural environment, education, character of a person, his worldview and personal experience and form different models of perception, interpretation and reaction. Implicitness in F. M. Dostoevsky’s idiodiscourse is a complex, multifaceted and universal linguistic phenomenon that is responsible for creating depth of subtext and new information, not expressed verbally, but at the same time conjectured (remembered), understood by the reader using various linguistic means, background knowledge, and processes of thinking and is of great importance for understanding the meaning and meaning of the text. Thus, the peculiarities of the interaction of implicitness with the explorer and its manifestation in the writer’s idiodiscourse make it possible to draw a conclusion about a peculiar feature of Dostoevsky’s idiodiscourse.

Michael Smith, the Martian of Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is having a lot of difficulty in understanding what makes up that strange creature he has just encountered for the first time, the "human." A trip to the local zoo and a cage of monkeys provides the answer for him. There, a peanut is thrown to a small monkey who takes it eagerly. This monkey is immediately bowled over by a larger monkey, and the peanut is stolen from him. The small monkey runs away howling, until it tracks down an even smaller monkey to beat the daylights out of. The rest of the monkeys choose to ignore the entire incident altogether. At this, Michael begins to laugh uncontrollably, so hard that he is unable to stop for hours. A revelatory moment, at last the Martian has understood (in his idiolect, he has "grokked") that fundamental secret of what it is to be human: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts-because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting-of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing" (Heinlein 289). Slovoj Zizek's Lacanian psychoanalytic writings are often based around this same fundamental insight into the human condition: that one should remain aware of the utterly strange and paradoxical chasm that lies at the centre of our psychic make-up. Zizek would consider Michael's laughter at the monkeys an example of concealment of primal trauma via the safety gauge of laughter, for this act of jouissance, as Flieger puts is (taking her cue from Freud): "breaks laws and re-establishes them simultaneously, but avoids tragic conflict by re-routing deadly hostile impulses along a route of substitutive conciliation" (Flieger 65). Behind this jouissance lies the Real,which must be understood as that crucial X factor behind existence, that chaotic "inruption of non-sense" (as Eagleton paraphrases) into the carefully-constructed orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary (42). At this point, then, we might suppose that laughter is a purely beneficial and therapeutic act, halting probable psychosis. This perhaps explains why Zizek is so interested in the cynical strain he has identified as one of modern society's greatest afflictions, which he identifies as a kind of jouissance without the Real. Cynicism is one of the recurring bugbears of Zizek's recent work,stretching back to his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). His theory is grounded in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason (first published in 1983), in which cynicism is defined as "enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which Enlightenment has laboured-well-off and miserable at the same time" (5). Sloterdijk interprets the period of the Enlightenment as the formative period for the development of our modern subjectivity, and Zizek adds (following Lacan) that this is because this period saw the birth of the Cartesian "subject". The performative act of becoming a subject, Zizek indicates, is another way of evading the Real: "subjectivization is a way to elude the void which "is" the subject, it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the subject" (Enjoy 186). The historicity of this cynical attitude is a point that Zizek continually reiterates-the "false consciousness" of cynicism developed because "the Enlightenment project has gone wrong" (136). Such a historicist view points to the finitude of the cynical split. The optimistic obverse of this focus on the past is that one day there may be the possibility for suture. But as for contemporary society, Zizek negates the paranoiac Adornian conclusion that our modern age is a post-ideological one. Instead, he asserts that we are in fact so entrenched in ideology that it is difficult to even distinguish its parameters. There is a breakdown in the relationship between the 'knowledge' and the 'act': "the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask" (Subject 29). A problem is still raised, for while emphasising that cynicism is a much more insidious kind of masked ideology, he also emphasises the absolute necessity of every ideological foundation. The danger lies because the "true" face is kept hidden from view: "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they [i.e. cynical people] overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity" (Subject 32) One of the strategies of cynical consciousness is the "kynical", the attitude to constantly critique society, coined by Sloterdijk) (Subject 29). In recent comedy, one of the chief examplars of "kynical", understated, humour would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's observational style of standup comedy that become so popular during the nineties (i.e. "what's the deal with-airports/queues/etc."). Seinfeld avoids the overtly political in his comedy, but his usual focus on the banalities of the quotidian (as he calls it, the "minutiae") can be interpreted as an attack on aspects of Western consumer culture. The very act of asking the question "what's the deal?" implies a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo of consumer culture, it poses the question "why is our society so strange?" In response to such a question, the audience laughs because it recognises the particular aspect of society that Seinfeld aims to deconstruct. At the same time, an economy of desire is constructed around the act of the laughter itself. For Zizek, cynicism is a self-gratifying gesture that follows the fetishistic logic of "I know very well the truth of this statement, but in the meantime." There is jouissance in the act of recognition (or false consciousness), which of course deflects the original impulse that we presume to be social critique. This "kynicism" performs the opposite effect of Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostraneniye, the method of "making strange" the symbolic language, which Zizek would interpret as the "philosophical experience of 'wondering'" Enjoy 53). Seinfeld's comedy skips over that moment of comprehension, that breakdown to the shock of the Real. In other words, Seinfeld's cynicism yada yada yadas over the point de capiton. Therefore, cynicism is another attempt to reposition the symbolic as the primary level of experience, to usurp the Real with "reality."However, in the turbulent days that followed September 11, we find a counter at least to this "kynical" style of humour (the kind of comedy exemplified in Australia by such TV shows as The Glass House and the now-defunct Good News Week). The satirical show Politically Incorrect was pulled from the air on the American ABC network, after its host, Bill Maher, disputed President Bush's statement that the World Trade Centre terrorists were "cowardly." On the show airing on the seventeenth of September, Maher made the following statement: "we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly-staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. " Au contraire to the show's title, this was perhaps one of the most politically correct statements ever made on American television, and it cost Maher his television show. Politically Incorrect was immediately pulled from the air in many American states (including Washington DC), and the show, crippled by public criticism and the loss of advertising money, was axed soon after. Maher normally utilised a "kynical" standpoint to throw stones at the big Other (i.e. the US political system), and as we have already seen with the example of Seinfeld, the jolting "Real" moment of the humour never seems to happen. Was Maher's September 11 comment one of the sublime instances of the letter "reaching its destination" to the American public? The jolting ostraneniye of this comedy is precisely that here there is no joke, no consoling sedative of jouissance, and the shock that followed in this humour deficit was one of denial and anger. One may argue that this instance provided a more "Real" moment for the American public than the media spectacle surrounding September 11 itself. Zizek writes in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" (posted on the internet on the same day as that episode of Politically Incorrect), that Americans have libidinally invested in images of catastrophe for years. Catastrophe is one of the healthiest signs of the persistence of the symbolic order. By saying "we are the cowards!", Maher was essentially telling his public "we are the enemy!" or "we are the Symbolic!", and for a short time he dissolved the force of the non-existent Big Other. It is no wonder that he was ejected from this symbolic order at lightning speed. Here, I can't help being reminded of Guy Debord's axiom in The Society of the Spectacle, that "in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false". In Zizek's cynical society, it seems to be strange but true that when the joke isn't funny anymore is really when it breaks the most societal taboos. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. "Enjoy!" Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.40-52. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "Has Oedipus Signed Off (or Struck Out)?: Zizek, Lacan and the Field of Cyberspace." Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.53-77. Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 (1961). Maher, Bill. "Politically Incorrect." Screened September 17th, 2001. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by M.Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (1983). Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 (1992). ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999 (1989). Links http://de.indymedia.org/2001/09/7659.shtml http://www.millionflagmarch.com/bill/moreinfo.htm http://www.abc.net.au/glasshouse/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Blackwood, Gemma. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>. APA Style Blackwood, G. (2003, Nov 10). That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>

Michael Smith, the Martian of Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is having a lot of difficulty in understanding what makes up that strange creature he has just encountered for the first time, the "human." A trip to the local zoo and a cage of monkeys provides the answer for him. There, a peanut is thrown to a small monkey who takes it eagerly. This monkey is immediately bowled over by a larger monkey, and the peanut is stolen from him. The small monkey runs away howling, until it tracks down an even smaller monkey to beat the daylights out of. The rest of the monkeys choose to ignore the entire incident altogether. At this, Michael begins to laugh uncontrollably, so hard that he is unable to stop for hours. A revelatory moment, at last the Martian has understood (in his idiolect, he has "grokked") that fundamental secret of what it is to be human: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts-because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting-of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing" (Heinlein 289). Slovoj Zizek's Lacanian psychoanalytic writings are often based around this same fundamental insight into the human condition: that one should remain aware of the utterly strange and paradoxical chasm that lies at the centre of our psychic make-up. Zizek would consider Michael's laughter at the monkeys an example of concealment of primal trauma via the safety gauge of laughter, for this act of jouissance, as Flieger puts is (taking her cue from Freud): "breaks laws and re-establishes them simultaneously, but avoids tragic conflict by re-routing deadly hostile impulses along a route of substitutive conciliation" (Flieger 65). Behind this jouissance lies the Real,which must be understood as that crucial X factor behind existence, that chaotic "inruption of non-sense" (as Eagleton paraphrases) into the carefully-constructed orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary (42). At this point, then, we might suppose that laughter is a purely beneficial and therapeutic act, halting probable psychosis. This perhaps explains why Zizek is so interested in the cynical strain he has identified as one of modern society's greatest afflictions, which he identifies as a kind of jouissance without the Real. Cynicism is one of the recurring bugbears of Zizek's recent work,stretching back to his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). His theory is grounded in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason (first published in 1983), in which cynicism is defined as "enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which Enlightenment has laboured-well-off and miserable at the same time" (5). Sloterdijk interprets the period of the Enlightenment as the formative period for the development of our modern subjectivity, and Zizek adds (following Lacan) that this is because this period saw the birth of the Cartesian "subject". The performative act of becoming a subject, Zizek indicates, is another way of evading the Real: "subjectivization is a way to elude the void which "is" the subject, it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the subject" (Enjoy 186). The historicity of this cynical attitude is a point that Zizek continually reiterates-the "false consciousness" of cynicism developed because "the Enlightenment project has gone wrong" (136). Such a historicist view points to the finitude of the cynical split. The optimistic obverse of this focus on the past is that one day there may be the possibility for suture. But as for contemporary society, Zizek negates the paranoiac Adornian conclusion that our modern age is a post-ideological one. Instead, he asserts that we are in fact so entrenched in ideology that it is difficult to even distinguish its parameters. There is a breakdown in the relationship between the 'knowledge' and the 'act': "the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask" (Subject 29). A problem is still raised, for while emphasising that cynicism is a much more insidious kind of masked ideology, he also emphasises the absolute necessity of every ideological foundation. The danger lies because the "true" face is kept hidden from view: "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they [i.e. cynical people] overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity" (Subject 32) One of the strategies of cynical consciousness is the "kynical", the attitude to constantly critique society, coined by Sloterdijk) (Subject 29). In recent comedy, one of the chief examplars of "kynical", understated, humour would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's observational style of standup comedy that become so popular during the nineties (i.e. "what's the deal with-airports/queues/etc."). Seinfeld avoids the overtly political in his comedy, but his usual focus on the banalities of the quotidian (as he calls it, the "minutiae") can be interpreted as an attack on aspects of Western consumer culture. The very act of asking the question "what's the deal?" implies a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo of consumer culture, it poses the question "why is our society so strange?" In response to such a question, the audience laughs because it recognises the particular aspect of society that Seinfeld aims to deconstruct. At the same time, an economy of desire is constructed around the act of the laughter itself. For Zizek, cynicism is a self-gratifying gesture that follows the fetishistic logic of "I know very well the truth of this statement, but in the meantime." There is jouissance in the act of recognition (or false consciousness), which of course deflects the original impulse that we presume to be social critique. This "kynicism" performs the opposite effect of Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostraneniye, the method of "making strange" the symbolic language, which Zizek would interpret as the "philosophical experience of 'wondering'" Enjoy 53). Seinfeld's comedy skips over that moment of comprehension, that breakdown to the shock of the Real. In other words, Seinfeld's cynicism yada yada yadas over the point de capiton. Therefore, cynicism is another attempt to reposition the symbolic as the primary level of experience, to usurp the Real with "reality."However, in the turbulent days that followed September 11, we find a counter at least to this "kynical" style of humour (the kind of comedy exemplified in Australia by such TV shows as The Glass House and the now-defunct Good News Week). The satirical show Politically Incorrect was pulled from the air on the American ABC network, after its host, Bill Maher, disputed President Bush's statement that the World Trade Centre terrorists were "cowardly." On the show airing on the seventeenth of September, Maher made the following statement: "we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly-staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. " Au contraire to the show's title, this was perhaps one of the most politically correct statements ever made on American television, and it cost Maher his television show. Politically Incorrect was immediately pulled from the air in many American states (including Washington DC), and the show, crippled by public criticism and the loss of advertising money, was axed soon after. Maher normally utilised a "kynical" standpoint to throw stones at the big Other (i.e. the US political system), and as we have already seen with the example of Seinfeld, the jolting "Real" moment of the humour never seems to happen. Was Maher's September 11 comment one of the sublime instances of the letter "reaching its destination" to the American public? The jolting ostraneniye of this comedy is precisely that here there is no joke, no consoling sedative of jouissance, and the shock that followed in this humour deficit was one of denial and anger. One may argue that this instance provided a more "Real" moment for the American public than the media spectacle surrounding September 11 itself. Zizek writes in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" (posted on the internet on the same day as that episode of Politically Incorrect), that Americans have libidinally invested in images of catastrophe for years. Catastrophe is one of the healthiest signs of the persistence of the symbolic order. By saying "we are the cowards!", Maher was essentially telling his public "we are the enemy!" or "we are the Symbolic!", and for a short time he dissolved the force of the non-existent Big Other. It is no wonder that he was ejected from this symbolic order at lightning speed. Here, I can't help being reminded of Guy Debord's axiom in The Society of the Spectacle, that "in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false". In Zizek's cynical society, it seems to be strange but true that when the joke isn't funny anymore is really when it breaks the most societal taboos. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. "Enjoy!" Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.40-52. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "Has Oedipus Signed Off (or Struck Out)?: Zizek, Lacan and the Field of Cyberspace." Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.53-77. Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 (1961). Maher, Bill. "Politically Incorrect." Screened September 17th, 2001. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by M.Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (1983). Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 (1992). ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999 (1989). Links http://de.indymedia.org/2001/09/7659.shtml http://www.millionflagmarch.com/bill/moreinfo.htm http://www.abc.net.au/glasshouse/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Blackwood, Gemma. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>. APA Style Blackwood, G. (2003, Nov 10). That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>