Pro-Russia protesters in Luhansk, Ukraine Shamil Zhumatov / ReutersAfter visiting Argentina in the 1970s, the novelist V.S. Naipaul reflected on the “colonial mimicry” of Buenos Aires. “Within the imported metropolis there is the structure of a developed society. But men can often appear to be mimicking their functions,” he wrote. “So many words have acquired lesser meanings in Argentina: general, artist, journalist, historian, professor, university, director, executive, industrialist, aristocrat, library, museum, zoo: so many words seem to need inverted commas.” Naipaul’s brilliant observation about the illusory reality of “inverted commas” (otherwise known as quotation marks) applies not only to last …read more
Source: The Atlantic
