3 May 04
Why "The Colloquial Tongue?"
I thought the first article in The Colloquial Tongue would be a good opportunity to explain why I selected this title to begin with. The title came to me one evening as I was watching a television program on the local Public Broadcasting Station in Seattle. The show was a multipart series on the De Medici dynasty and their influence on Italian history. The entire series was developed in a documentary fashion, but certain scenes were depicted with character and voice actors (separately, oddly enough).
One of the final episodes (or perhaps the final episode) particularly focused on Galileo, as he was a beneficiary of the De Medici family and tutored a number of the De Medici line as they grew up. At that point in history, the Catholic church had some strong convictions about how the universe operated; namely, the earth was a motionless body at the center of it all with sun, moon, stars, and everthing else spinning around it. Galileo, in his continuous pursuit of observing the behavior of things, began to realize this was a bunch of crap. However, he could not formally say as much in the scientific manner typical of those times or the church would have him burned at the stake for his “heretical” words, so he decided to prepare his thoughts in an informal collection of essays that he passed off to the church as suppositional studies. The essays were eventually collated into a book, which became immensely popular. All of this disoncerted the church a great deal, but Galileo nonetheless managed to stay alive.
In reflection on the success of his book and his clever avoidance of being flambé, Galileo (his character anyway) suggested he was able to pull it off by “writing in the colloquial tongue.” Bingo! As soon as I heard those words, it immediately struck me as the perfect title for this journal, all things considering.
