[H]istorically Americans have been notoriously careless in recognizing their own visionaries.
Arguably there have been three great classic quests in American literature, Herman Meville’s
Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883),
and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
— MICHAEL PATRICK HEARN, The Annotated Wizard of OZ (1973)
Extracts
[Supplied by a sub-subroutine encoder]
[It will be seen that this lowly sub-subroutine encoder appears to have merely
skimmed the surface of the cloud while surfing the internet in search of snippets he
could anyways find on any site whatsoever, sacred or profane.
Therefore, you must not, in every case at least, take the
higgledy-piggledy statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for
veritable gospel lambda.
Far from it. As touching the ancient authors, as well as an excerpt from a Wikipedia article
here appearing, these quotes are solely valuable and entertaining, as affording a fleeting
glance at what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung
of litanies of languages, in more than one language and solar system, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor producer of sub-subroutines, whose commentator I am.
Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no liquor of this world
will ever warm; and for whom even Wild Turkey would be too weak; but with whom
another sometimes loves to sit, and feel core-dumped upon, too; and grow convivial
upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full glass and draining pockets, and in
not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much
more pains ye take to learn the next lit language and her myriad libraries—standard,
ad hoc, public, and proprietary—by so much the more shall ye for ever go underappreciated
if not unemployed entirely, should ye miss the next bus or, heaven forbid, grow old and not move up.
But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your
hearts; for your predecessors who coded before you have created great big balls of mud
in every language imaginable, making tar pits of
ABC,
B,
C,
D,
and E patiently awaiting your arrival.
Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
tar-laden glasses!]
Many readers are no doubt thinking, “Why does Knuth replace MIX by
another machine instead of just sticking to a high-level programming
language? Hardly anybody uses assemblers these days.” Such people
are entitled to their opinions, and they need not bother reading the
machine-language parts of my books. But the reasons for machine language
that I gave in the preface to Volume 1, written in the early 1960s, remain
valid today . . . I cannot afford the time to rewrite my books as
languages go in and out of fashion; languages aren’t the point of
my books, the point is rather what you can do in your favorite
language.
My books focus on timeless truths.
— DONALD E. KNUTH, The Art of Computer Programming, Fascicle 1 (2005)
The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, found in 1799,
inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis,
Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King
Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian
using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script, respectively,
while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only
minor differences between the three versions,
the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
[I]f you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said
to you in any form of language. . . . the poor Bable fish, by effectively removing
all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more
and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
— THE HITCHHIKERS’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself
freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
The whole world spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary.
Now, as people moved eastwards they found a valley in the land of Shinar where they settled.
They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire.’
For stone they used bricks, and for mortar they used bitumen.
‘Come,’ they said, ‘let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven.
Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we do not get scattered all over the world.’
Now Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.
‘So they are all a single people with a single language!’ said Yahweh.
‘This is only the start of their undertakings!
Now nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there,
so they cannot understand one another.’
Yahweh scattered them thence all over the world, and they stopped building the city.
That is why it is called Babel, since there Yahweh confused the language of the whole world;
and from there Yahweh scattered them all over the world.
— Genesis 11:1-9
The New Jerusalem Bible
It was 1970 when publisher Clarkson N. Potter decided to follow my Annotated Alice with
an Annotated Wizard of Oz. Would I be interested? No, I said at once. I did not feel I knew enough
about Baum and Oz. Then a summer or so later came an unsolicited proposal for an Annotated Wizard
by someone named Michael Patrick Hearn. He was then an English major at Bard College. Potter
sent it to me for my opinion, and I suggested he sign him up. After he turned in the manuscript
in person, Potter phoned to ask me if I knew that Michael was only twenty!
— MARTIN GARDNER, Preface to the Centennial Edition of The Annotated Wizard of OZ (2000)