Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
Good grief! Horses and gunpowder, Elsie!
The horse arrived in the New World with the Spanish settlements in the southwest. We tend now to picture the Indian on horseback (at least the Western tribles like the Sioux and Cheyenne, less so the Eastern groups like the Algonquins and Iroquois). However, even in the western cases, their "traditional" lifestyle had changed radically only a few generations before.
Gunpowder was a European import as well. Prior to these innovations, the native Americans were very limited in their ability to kill buffalo, especially on the open plains where the herds thrived in the greatest numbers. Think about it. You're on foot. You have a bow and arrow. There's a buffalo herd over there. It's wide open country. You see them. They see you.
You and your buds do tricks like trying to slowly, slowly crawl up to them while cloaking yourselves in the hides of dead buffalo. Once in a while it might work. You're not going to have a big impact on a prairie that's loaded to capacity with buffalo.
This is your defense? To discredit the dictionary? To discredit ALL of them??? Wow! It seems odd that the publishers wouldn't contact an authority like you when they were compiling them, given your regal prerogative of invalidating their conclusions on a whim. It's lucky for Sam Johnson you weren't around when he was putting his Lexicon together. He'd have looked the fool without checking with YOU first!
You'd better drop a line to those gangstas at the Oxford English. A homedawg cain't hawdly unnastan DOSE homies.
It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
Interesting sentence. "It" -- being a singular pronoun -- hardly seems adequate to take a compound predicate nominative ("feelings and emotions"). And the subject of your independent clause ("THAT doesn't require any precision"), which serves to modify that compound plural, is also singular.
Your construction leaves some abiguity as to what exactly doesn't require any precision: emotions and feelings? or the act of "it" becoming "emotions and feelings"?
One might almost think that this sentence lacked grammatical precision.
I would hope that a conservative would not allow the Left to determine his language because that gives the argument to the Left because they, with perfect sincerity, will insist that you have said exactly the opposite of the words you used as you understood those words and if you have accepted the Left's linguistic principles they will have the best of the argument because you let them define the words you use and their definitions are always only conditional.
Samuel Johnson could define "liberal" as "enlightened," but if we all know it means "vacuous and sophomorically idealistic," then Doctor Johnson's meaning is at best irrelevant, a mere parlor exercise.
ALL dictionaries are therefore "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" (your terms). And it is no more valid for me to accept your arbitrary devotion to obsolescence than it is for me to let the Left define my terms for me.
I KNOW the meaning I intended when I used the word "decimate." That usage was perfectly in keeping with modern understanding, so my use of it communicated exactly what I wanted it to. That is the value of words. They are not pretty objects to sit on a mantel gathering cobwebs; they are meant to be taken down and used. Sometimes in their use, they acquire a scratch or two. And some just plain wear out. Others wear down but are then refinished and served up anew.
By the way, you might want to consult any credible English textbook and scan the section dealing with "Run-On Sentences."
There is no such thing as the "noble savage", its liberal myth.
I won't further argue with you. It is fruitless to argue with someone whose words are capriciously transmorphic.
Not much of an 'impact' on ANY of the large animals the poster I was responding to said the proto's wiped out.
Aw, c'mon. Is that the REAL reason?
Put away your thesaurus and get out a dictionary. You're not impressing anyone but yourself. If I'm capricious, then so is the Oxford English Dictionary, and every other lexicon known to modern grammarians. And since that prevalence defines the status quo, it can hardly be capricious now, can it?
On the other hand, this grammatical quibble HAS hijacked the intent of this thread, so maybe we WOULD be better off letting the subject lapse.
As we've seen, a myth that's only half correct.
Maybe they were getting away from pollution? Ya know...higher in the skyscraper./s
Exactly...how do you make change for a copper axe? /s
Not very many of the bison were in central Mexico.
Thanks for bringing up the chronology. My long term memory may have blurred..
I was shown the eroded areas and told the story while crossing the Rockies (NYC to CA actually) with a naturalist in 1969. I think I remember him saying that the dynamite harvesting was near the end of the 19th century and well past the era of the mountan-men and Indian trappers and that it wasn't profitable any more to trap. There were old photographs of the area before it was eroded and desertified (if that is the right word) in a restaurant that we stopped at.
Whatever the beavers were used for 5 or more decades after the hat craze ended I have no idea. The original Astor was long dead and I can find no evidence that his heirs got back into the fur business. That is probably my memory confounding two different stories, or perhaps I was misinformed.
Anyway the idea of the furry engineer being a keystone species that supported a whole web of life stayed with me. On the Central CA coast I am told that there were very large beavers that were killed of at the approximate time of the Siberian invasion and like the areas in the West that I was shown the rainfall is all in the winter. I'm trying to get permits for ponds on farm.
Not on the Pacific coast which was the context of my post that you pulled a segment out of. Yet still perhaps I should have been more detailed--or stated a caveat against categorical reading.
Large areas of the midwest where the buffalo roamed were not well populated with humans due to a lack of iodine in the soil although some prehistoric tribes of mound builders were believed to have trade routes for seasalt. Some tribes consumed the ashes of their dead as a condiment, presumably for minerals.
An excellent, although PC-leaning book I read recently, 1491, is based on the premise that 90 to 95% of the Indians died off by 1600, and that they were the major keystone species in the Americas, having been such for 10,000 years or more.
The result was massive ecological disruption, even without the introduced species. One theory is the huge "virgin forests" of the eastern half of the country, the massive herds of bison and flocks of passenger pigeons were a consequence of this disruption.
IOW, the wilderness the white man found wasn't really wilderness at all. It was more like an overgrown graveyard.
I don't believe all of it, but much of it is interesting, and it blows giant holes in the "white man is bad" theory, often without meaning to. It appears that the natives weren't so inherently great at living in tune with the land. It's just that almost all of them were dead, which makes it a lot harder to be ecologically criminal. Almost a post-holocaust novel type of thing.
In an environment where there are limited resources (like good hunting grounds), the way to get the resources to feed your own kids, is to take them away from somebody else
I'fn I was hungry; I'd go to where the FOOD is; NOT some other direction.
How about wooly mammoths?
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