Author Archives: David A Johnson

Lane Greene’s Talk on the Wild Side: Why Lan­guage Can’t Be Tamed came across, in its ini­tial read­ing, as a scat­ter­shot col­lec­tion of top­ics relat­ing vague­ly to the way the pro­nun­ci­a­tions, words, and gram­mars of lan­guages will change with time so long as those lan­guages con­tin­ue to live and have peo­ple speak them. What makes the […]

In the Mel Brooks par­o­dy “Space Balls”, the vil­lain­ous char­ac­ter Darth Hel­met brags to Lon­es­tarr, the pro­tag­o­nist, that, “Evil will always tri­umph because good is dumb.” This trope appears in fic­tion often, and some writ­ers rely on it almost entire­ly. The medieval­ist his­to­ri­an and cul­ture crit­ic Steven Atwell has observed that one of the central […]