Favour Ogechi Ani, a young Nigerian woman, has shattered the 18-year-old staggering stupid Guinness Book of Records mark for….wait for iiiiiiiiiiiit…the highest number ever counted out loud.
Starting in October 2025, Favour spent 70 days confined to her home, counting out loud to 1,070,000. The old record was “only” one million, but she was determined to break the record as when in October 18, 1968, American long-jumper Bob Beamon broke the long-jump record at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City by two feet in a sport where records are usually set by centimeters.
“Honestly, it was tough, but my passion for counting kept me going,” Favour said. “I had a lovely team supporting and cheering me up, and it was fun despite the challenges. My determination to achieve this project was a burn-the-boats mission. I never thought of giving up for any reason.”
Wow.
What an idiot.
Ani started live-streaming her daily counting on YouTube, which helped validate her record-setting attempt. Guinness started eliminating dangerous records decades ago, but the pointless, seldom-read (by people with a life) record book continues to tempt desperate people who view celebrity, even the most degrading kind, as worth pursuing at any cost, to do dumb things in the hopes of establishing their places in history. To establish their places in the history of wasting life.
Did you know about this epic achievement? If not, I am cheered: an American news media that is debating Gwyneth Paltrow’s obscene dress at the Oscars is still not so worthless as to publicize the breaking of the “counting out loud” world record.
EA has derided self-centered, objectively useless and wasteful activities in other posts, including running marathons, climbing Mt. Everest, swimming from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage, or breaking the record for “most tattoos of the same musician (Maddona) on the body.” Still, this is special. I’m singing “September Song” these days, imagining what I could have accomplished with a better use of my time and talents. I see someone wasting 70 days of precious life counting just to get her name in tiny print in a record book, and it ticks me off.
This isn’t like complaining that a wealthy mogul has chosen to spend his or her millions on a luxury yacht when they could have been saving the snail darter. Favour Ogechi Ani is young and healthy: there are literally 1,070,000 things she could have done with her time that could have helped others, inspired others, made the world a teeny bit better, hell, something. Make herself more knowledgeable. Learn a skill. In 70 days, you can learn to do slight of hand card tricks to amuse sick kids in a hospital.
Or am I completely wrong to find unethical a woman spending every waking hour doing something objectively useless for 70 days…not just wrong, but hypocritical? Heck, how much time have I spent watching or listening to baseball games, like I will watch the World Baseball Classic finals tonight between the USA and Venezuela while I have billable work to do for paying (theoretically, anyway) clients?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this, which I dread asking…
Is it ethical for someone to spend 70 days doing something that is neither enjoyable, productive, or useful just to set a record nobody in their right mind cares about?
Ethics Alarms 
Who knows. Her counting may have inspired more people than your blogging.
Consequentialism! But very possible indeed…
“when they could have been saving the snail darter.”
Funny story about the Snail Darter; in 1979, a Tennessee Valley Authority project, the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River was 95 % completed when that little bugger was found to be in the way.
The Tellico Dam wasn’t needed for power generation or for flood control. Turns out it was nothing more than a sop to cement contractors who needed pandering, which was cheerfully supplied by an up-n-coming politician.
The newly minted Endangered Species Act (ESA) was presented with its first challenge.
The gist of it was the “God Squad,” which was created to issue waivers based on a cost/benefit analysis of completing projects where ESA designees had the poor judgement of holing up; in the way of “progress,” as it were.
Whether “settled science” was invoked is unknown, but not really the point.
David Brower (who some call America’s greatest environmentalist) breathlessly intoned: ”This was the beginning of the end of the Endangered Species Act.”
Now; who was this Mother Gaia ravagin’/God’s Creatures murderin’/ESA ignorin’, Snail Darter destroyin’ up-n-comer?
The name Al Gore, Jr. ring a bell?
PWS
Also turned out that the “snail darter” wasn’t actually a separate species, anyway.
https://news.yale.edu/2025/01/03/fish-center-key-conservation-fight-not-distinct-species-after-all#:~:text=At%20the%20time%2C%20the%20construction,1967%20and%20was%20nearly%20finished.
“Also turned out that the ‘snail darter’ wasn’t actually a separate species, anyway.”
The (gasp!) science wasn’t settled…is it now?
PWS
My initial and final thought on this one is: Is it ethical to waste time trying to analyze the ethics of this?
Oh, sure! If I can save one person 70 days and national ridicule by convincing them this is a criminal waste of life, I will not have lived in vain. But is is it ethical to wast time commenting on the time I waste analyzing the ethics of such stunts?
I see your point, but I consider what she’s done to be objectively harmless. As opposed to, for example, collegiate football, which injures the players, inspires children to waste their lives in pursuit of a chance to injure themselves in public, attracts an audience to which it markets useless, dangerous, and wasteful products, distracts universities from their educational mission, and diverts resources that could be put to more practical uses.
Even with that: it entertains millions (which counting does not), puts money into economy, raises fund fr colleges, taeches team work and character, provides poor minorities with a degree (if not an education), creates jobs. Lots of pluses even if it may be a net negative. Counting out loud for 70 days? no positives at all.
Maybe I’m just trolling you, but there is one good thing resulting from 70 days of counting. When talking about money, especially government budgets, we’re usually talking about millions, billions, and now trillions of dollars per line-item. “How much is a million dollars?” I used to see illustrations like “if you made a stack of a million dollar bills, it would be about 200′ tall.” Now, we can say “If you had to count a million dollar bills, it would take you 70 days!” Or, if you had to count a billion dollars, in thousand-dollar bills, it would take 70 days.” Of course, we could use basic arithmetic to just calculate how long it would take, just like I calculated how tall the stack would be, but now we actually know, having seen it done.
If football weren’t providing some kind of benefits for somebody, it wouldn’t exist. But Ponzi schemes exist, too, as do political parties. But does it do so Ethically?
I view it as neither ethical… or unethical. It’s just rather strange.
No harm was done to anyone – which, to me, is important in deciding whether a given act was ethical or not. It’s true that her time could have been spent doing more productive things, but on the other hand, it was HER TIME and she could choose to do what she wanted with it – much like the bazillionaire could choose to spend the dough on a bigger yacht than that other bazillionaire.
Hey, consider this. At least she made the effort. Which is more than one could say about anyone who watched her do it.
Which was their choice, too.
I hesitate to condemn anyone’s personal enjoyment, with the argument that they could have done something better with that time. If this woman truly gains happiness by spending 70 days counting online, so be it. I see little difference between complaints of spending time and complaining about someone’s spending. There are egregious actions, but generally, I don’t like to call out much.
You mention marathons, as unethical, but marathon runners are usually pretty healthy and the ones I know are productive too. I have a cousin who runs ultra marathons, while holding a very high paying job and doing some pretty important work for national security. He neglects neither work or family. He enjoys all the running as well as doing these runs all over the world. While he never wins, he often scores high enough that he gains money from this. My husband also ran a marathon. Most of the hours he spent training were during his lunch hour at work, so there was no loss in terms of responsibility. He did get up early every Saturday morning to get his 20 mile runs in every weekend, but he got up early enough that the kids really didn’t see much of a difference in paternal presence. He’d be back right after breakfast, take a shower, and join us as a family for the rest of the weekend, aside from trying to get an afternoon nap in. As a long-distance runner, he finds that his mental health, physical health, focus, and work ethic benefit from being in peak physical condition. There are also people who enjoy watching marathons and ultra marathons. Where is that different from any other sport? People like lifting weights, playing ball games, running, skating, skiing, curling, martial arts, etc. They like watching them too. Excessive obsession and/or addiction with any of these is problematic, but in a balanced style?
Other past-times can be found to be worthless as well. Watching movies, TV, or plays spends time and money that could be spent on other items. Board games, video games, tabletop dice games and card games (all favorite pass times of mine) have little real-world application and are spending my time and money in rarely favorable ways for my growth or society’s benefit. Heck, these provide no health benefits like the sports, are more addictive to some than physical exertion, and depending on the game, can be neither useful for intellect or wisdom.
Let us also consider hobbies. I know people who get great happiness with flower gardens. They can’t eat anything and all they get out of it on a good year is a pretty house, but lots of time and money down the drain. My mom spent years embroidering on a beautiful tree skirt. She could have bought one just as nice for the same price and far less time wasted. I have easily spent a cumulative 70 days of my life working to play the instruments I can play. I’m not good enough to play for anything outside of my small town, but I still persist. I feel it hypocritical to complain about how this girl spends her time when there is so little benefit to how I spend mine. My mother-in-law knits all the time. I cannot imagine she is anywhere less than 700 days of her cumulative time. The stockings she has made for all family members, personalized with a tree and Santa, are certainly lovely, but again, she has spent more in time and money on them than a quick Amazon order would have provided. What about archery, woodworking, history reenactment, welding, stained glass, shooting sports, camping, scrap booking, glass blowing, carving, knife making, puzzle solving, hiking, escape rooms, reading (junk fiction, to be distinguished from literature or non-fiction), diamond painting, geotagging, etc? Heck, what about commenting on an internet post where one of our loved persons is in need of realistic correction of facts? There is always something to be done with our time and not all of it can or necessarily should be to our long-term advantage.
So, what about an adult who chooses to spend 70 days making a Guiness record? Well, first, counting is not exactly something that requires much in the way of brain power. I could certainly count in increments of one while playing many of my board games, writing this comment, driving to my volunteer gig, playing most music on my mastered list, cleaning house, doing laundry, grade any homework except math, cooking familiar recipes, and plenty more actions. If other work is done during this time, then the concern of wasting time is lessened. Second, while this seems to go against the idea that one should continue their education or get a job, if you are a person who gets their kicks from counting to over a million over 70 days, you probably aren’t exactly a brain trust who has much in the way of college prospects and while it seems utterly insane, when something like this is on YouTube, there are people who pay money for these things. If she is monetizing this, then she is not wasting her time. Frankly, someone who would do this and be able to stay in her house for 70 days makes me wonder if she is neurodivergent (I refuse to use the politically correct term “spicy”) in some way that means her family has to take care of her and a normal job is out of reach anyway.
Without a lot more details than is found here, I would say that while I would not say it is ethical that she did this, I would also not say it is UNethical either. This is an action that must be held to a different scale.
On the other hand, I think that it is unethical to have this as a category to have a world record. This requires no skill whatsoever. A tenacious seven-year-old could pull this off. There is more skill required to be the world record holder in the number of Peeps eaten in one sitting without vomiting. The number of matches used to create a fire design requires skill, planning, and even a certain amount of engineering, to have it burn in the correct manner. Tenacity alone should not be what is required to get prize (even a dumb prize) in a world record category.
1. There has to be some minimal responsibility of a human being to use the precious commodity of life for something besides selfish pursuit of empty fame and imaginary accomplishments.
2.Everything you mentioned in fact have some value. Movies and TV are culture, and improve the mind. Games teach character, patience, tolerance and strategy, as well as social skills.
3. You know, extreme running is not healthy. This has been shown many times. it harms the body over time.
4. Counting for 70 days isn’t educational. It isn’t fun. It isn’t social. It helps nobody. Now, if there was some compensation involved, that would mean the time was not exactly well-spent, but not wasted.
5. Think of all the invalids, the sufferers of terminal diseases and crippling injuries who would give anything for 70 days of a rich and active life. And this woman tosses it all away for a ludicrous record.
6. No, the comparison with someone spending their own money is not on point. Spending money means someone gets the money, and benefits. The money is then put into the economy. Even if what is bought is a commodity with limited utility, it gives pleasure to the buyer, and the buyer, whose money it was, earned the access to that pleasure
7. Do you agree that doing nothing but counting for 7 days is a waste of one’s limited time to live? Is wasting life not wrong?
I have been contemplating the subject of your comment 3 for months. Extreme running is harmful (marathon running is not considered to be extreme running under the stuff I’ve read, but you know how studies go, and how I can find as many studies for a given activity as against it). Football is harmful. However, can we really condemn these when we do not condemn so much more? Where is the line we need to draw? The short answer I have is that that line is less clear than I’d like. This is probably more rambling than well reasoned, but this subject keeps plaguing me.
Ballet is known to cause permanent damage to people’s feet and legs. It’s practically a modern form of foot binding. Yet we pay lots of money to see people harm themselves beautifully onstage, and for some people, this is an excellent, high paid career. Gay sex is known for spread of horrible diseases, and even if the men participating in it avoid that fate, old gay men suffer from extremely high rates of colon cancer, anal prolapse, and the lifelong need for ostomy bags. But our society today condemns us for even considering saying no to people who choose to engage in this activity. Riding motorcycles and ATVs do not have any guaranteed long term damage, but the chances of getting into a wreck to cause that damage are very high. However, ATVs can also be a necessary part of life. Most ranchers find them essential to herding cows. NASCAR is extremely dangerous as a single mistake at those speeds is often fatal. But we see everyday how just driving a car at normal speeds is crippling or fatal. We agree to the utility of driving a car (it’s a life skill here in the booneys), but there are plenty of people who like driving to just drive and will go for hundred plus mile trips for the fun of it. Even though they increase their risks of being harmed or killed. Certain vocal techniques cause damage to the throat and lead to a loss of voice, or even just a loss of a singing voice. Bonnie Tyler made millions over the wreckage of her voice. Scouting and 4H, activities that we probably all agree build character, have a lot of risks of permanent bodily harm involved. One of my cousins lost an eye to a sheep at fair. Another cousin was hospitalized from an infection from tripping and falling on a stick at a campsite. Where do we draw the line on the good fun or work verses harmful points of the activity?
We condemn football, with good reason, but again, where can we draw the line? Football players make millions to wreck their bodies for the amusement of the masses. Deep sea divers who work on undersea cable make hundreds of thousands of dollars to risk their lives to keep us watching cat videos, buying Temu, and maybe some real benefits by shared human knowledge, but really, who does that? It is certainly considered more dangerous to be a deep sea cable guy than to be a football player. My husband’s refinery is one of the best in the nation for lack of dead bodies, with the last death on the job in the 1970s. That should concern us, that not killing someone for 50 years is really good. People make money, risking their lives and health for it, as they have throughout the centuries.
Even baseball is known for damage to the body. Tommy John surgery, Little League shoulder, and more are terms designed to cover the typical damage that is done to the body from baseball. The damage done in the Tommy John surgery is not magically mended. Instead, another tendon is injured for this, holes are drilled into the bones, and now the player has restored function. We need to remember that injuries to the body tend to be cumulative. Even a broken bone that is set and healed still bears marks and often weakness throughout the rest of life. Is the fact that function can be restored under surgery, should one decide to do so enough? What about the risks of surgery and willingly submitting yourself to them just for the ability to play longer? Plenty of people have life threatening and life ending surgical complications. Head injuries are also problematic with baseball. A kid was just killed last week by an amateur throw by another kid in her school causing a brain bleed, according to my news app. I’m sure not going to condemn the sport because of that, but again, where should that line be?
I look at my mother-in-law, who knits obsessively. Her knitting (an activity that requires little mental capacity and costs a lot of money in supplies) along with a part time job she got stocking shelves at a store that sold novelty decor caused carpal tunnel. She refused any therapy and went for the surgery. She knitted until the surgery. She didn’t do her PT after the surgery. She still knits hours every day and has lost the ability to lift most things of moderate weight. My grandmother was much the same. Does the probability of losing arm/wrist/hand function mean that we should condemn the sewing crafts? I don’t want to. I like knitting/crocheting/embroidery/cross stitch as activities that engage the hands while leaving the brain mostly unengaged, so I can watch a movie or sports or my kids activities.
If you spend time in geriatric care, there are a lot of life choices that are shown to have effects. My best friend is a geriatric nurse and she brings home the horror stories. Her favorite stories include her reasons for circumcising her sons, because of all the things that can go wrong with an intact foreskin after the age of 70/80. However, any body part and lifestyle choice is under scrutiny at that time, and she’ll tell me about so many different choices and effects. We can see the effects of poor posture in crumpled forms that will never stand straight again and have immense pain in moving. We can see the effects of a job that required a great deal of writing of typing in hands that cannot open, often to the degree that the fingernails actually cut into the palm of the hand tighter and tighter over time. We can see the effects of a job with little brain engagement in increased dementia rates. My parents generation is starting to hit those old folks homes and they had so many more choices than previous generations. The come into the homes with so many more exciting stories and so many more exciting conditions to go along with them.
I am not saying that we should go full relativist here. There are obviously many actions that cause harm and should be condemned, but the standards are hard to quantify for me. At some point, we must trust that people will use their freedoms more than abuse them into license. Defining the exact point of abuse is hard though. Yes, I would regret 70 days spent doing nothing but counting, if I did nothing except counting, at the end of my life. I will also probably regret the time I spent on the graduate work that came to nothing rather than growing up, having my family earlier and enjoying more time with my kids and grandchildren. I have plenty of regrets from choices I made, ranging from turning down an opportunity to be voted on for homecoming queen because I didn’t want to wear a dress to not taking part in digging for archeological relics in China because I was afraid to break them since I was on the trip due to a paperwork error. Perhaps for this woman, she will not regret this time because her name in a little book was a major goal in this life.
Again, my condemnation is not for the woman, but for Guinness, who has such a silly skill in its book.
I believe Sarah is correct. No one can determine the level of satisfaction someone else accrues in a given activity. It is of no consequence if that time she spends does not yield value to anyone else. For each of us, time is a finite commodity like money and how someone spends it is their business provided it has no direct impact on others.
The idea that if she did not do this and she should engage in more valuable pursuits is the kind of consequentialism that could occur if she runs over and kills a child in the process of driving to the hospital to donate a kidney for someone who will ultimately cure Cancer instead of counting on YouTube
This is of course the perspective of someone whose career was devoted to teaching and practicing basic economics. I don’t recall Jeremy Bentham requiring people to never engage in frivolous activities so that they could create greater utility for the person or the group. He would of course frowned on frivolous group activities that prevented the crops from being harvested
Since the life we have been given here is a “schoolroom” and some day or other we will contemplate what we did here and how we used our time, a thousand pursuits that people fill the time with could be criticized. But to hold to a view that there are higher, worthwhile pursuits, and in contrast lower pursuits that should be assessed as “time wasted”, requires a metaphysical doctrine and outlook. If a person does not have that, and if life is understood to be devoid of purpose (defined teleologically) then people are nothing more than beings with nothing better to do except to fill in the time until they disappear.
Mindless pursuits, in our present, is really what is on offer, isn’t it? Because life is understood (more and more and by many) to be a) meaningless, and therefore as b) horizontal. In order to see the “vertical” possibility or calling in life there has to exist a metaphysical stimulant. Something that strives to be realized in you, and something that you strive to respond to and realize.
The reason this woman’s pursuit could be described as ridiculous is because it could very well illustrate how far removed many people are from pursuits of metaphysical commitment.
First off, no, I did not hear about this. In fact, I feel just a tiny bit dumber for having been told about it.
Second, is doing a stupid, futile but otherwise harmless act unethical? I can’t see how.
Verdict: Not unethical. I would not say it is ethical either, just an ethical nullity.
A stupid waste of life, but it was her life to waste. The verdict would change if this stupidity negatively impacted her family or friends.
If you assume she has any family and friends, doesn’t it automatically have an impact on them? She isn’t available to them if they are in need, for comfort, empathy, human contact, or to be picked up at the hospital after a colonoscopy.
True, and if her stupid obsession interfered with her obligations, then I agree it would be unethical.
That does not seem clear with the facts in evidence though, so in the absence of facts to the contrary, I will assume she did not do so.
let’s do an investigation into her academic performance in school.
perhaps she has autism, is superduper smart, is burned out from the supposed worth of bloggy productivity like EA.
perhaps the mental focus required to count so high so long resulted in a navy seal level of mental sturdiness.
while i agree with the initial criticism of this achievements substance and society’s value for such triviality, criticizing it is like criticising people for watching tv or reading a novel… Novel reading used be regarded as a waste of time and idleness.
statistically, she is probably dei level material, but what qualities does she have as exemplified by her feat that someone with vision could leverage?
Ethical .. 70 days of counting is akin to a lifestyle elimination diet. Resets dopamine.
But is clearly is NOT like reading a novel or watching TV, do you shouldn’t say it is “like” either, and criticizing such an empty activity is “like” criticizing either. It is “like” watching a dead TV screen, or reading a book with blank pages.
Sarah B. already made the points I was going to make regarding marathons, games, television, and other hobbies, and more comprehensively than I would have. Thanks, Sarah!
The constructive principle at work here is challenge. Counting to over a million does have a value: It tests will, resolve, patience, and commitment. It’s a significant time investment, but the benefit is proving to oneself that one can do something difficult that one sets out to do. I’m guessing it also clears clutter from the mind, similar to a meditation retreat. This accomplishment might be very good for Ogechi Ani’s mental health and self-confidence, depending on the state she started in and why she did it.
I don’t think it would be good for many otherwise productive people to start trying to break her record, and there are many options for challenging oneself that take less time. It is certainly more ethical to develop habits that actively make the world better, and I might suggest some of those options to people. They may find a more productive option preferable.
However, without more details on Ogechi Ani’s circumstances and options, I’m not going to rule out the possibility that it was a good option for her to take. As long as someone can afford to do so and it harms none, I’m not going to tell them not to put their mind to something that’s meaningful to them.
I do wonder if the previous record-holder will invite Ogechi Ani over to congratulate her.
My first thought about Ogechi Ani is that she might have some form of autism. One of the behavioral patterns recognized as autist are repetitive behavior, strong attachment to routines, and intense focus on specific objects or topics. Idiot savants who know the value of the number PU up to gazillion decimals are often autist. Autists are often life skill challenged, struggle with navigating social situations and communication.
If Ogechi Ani is on the spectrum then her behavior is not unethical.
Question: Who isn’t “on the spectrum” now?
I’ll take a different route than the commentariat before me. The subject here is not the Nigerian Countess, it’s Guiness World Records itself.
These GWRs are ill defined and not properly constrained to a competitive assessment, which makes them, at minimum, irrelevant.
Using our Nigerian Countess as an example, the official GWR site only stated what the achievement was but not the conditions and the rules that were enforced. Using Google, I’ll accept on face value that she had to do 7-hour livestreams, twice a day for 14 hours each day, with a break for lunch. Who decided that would be an interesting challenge? How does that encourage others to try and break it? It’s not endurance if you’re supported by time-outs. They say it was spoken “consecutively” but I see no evidence that she was mute during the time she wasn’t live-streaming. I see no attestation about the quality of her recitations: that she didn’t fumble a word, place an interjection, say sorry and make a correction…and you’re gonna give her sleep breaks? That’s not endurance, that’s a formula to set up success “in perpetuity”. If it’s sustainable, it’s not a challenge and it’s not a record. It’s like having a record for most RPMs by a car without rebuilding the engine. Sure you could look at the miles, but what about time spent idling?
So, she didn’t do this consecutively. She had breaks and she went to sleep and she ate food. So if she didn’t do it consecutively, nothing is stopping her from adding another 7 hour live stream and continuing it in the future. “Well, it’s not consecutive days” – well then what you’re telling me is that her record is the most consecutive 7-hour counting sessions with a minimum of 2 per 24-hour day….not how high she counted.
It’s all completely ridiculous and it’s because GWR doesn’t have a quality control to ensure all records meet the spirit of a challenge.
….of course, I suppose not all records are a challenge. Like, who has survived the most number of confirmed lightning strikes? It’s just an odd fact and bar trivia – which is what Guiness Records started as….Guiness Beer would publish odd facts for their patrons to ponder in the bar and discuss.
I’m with Sarah on this one. To me, it is ethically benign even though I agree that it is a monumental waste of time to count to 1,070,000 in 70 days. Imagine the amount of Rush songs you could listen to in that time frame instead of counting 15,000 numbers – 15,285.72, actullay – per day. The ethics breach is having a world record to beat in the first place.
jvb
Imagine the amount of Rush songs you could listen to in that time frame
You owe me a keyboard…
I was leaning towards your take on this issue, jack, but JB has convinced me that there are worse things.
How can you argue with Rush?
Rush was a cold war era societal “deep plant” created by the Russians to discredit and bring shame upon the rightful American and British keepers of rock music. The gullible Canadians, having little to occupy themselves during their nine month winters, eagerly took to nearly anything to break the monotony of their failing 8-track recordings of Inuit chants, and were easily duped into accepting “Rush” as a supposedly home-grown alternative to actual entertainment. Those few who resisted were bought off with barrels of Russian seal fat marked as “cheese curds”, as were their political leaders. It’s no coincidence that the first Trudeau was installed in 1968.
There’s more, but I’ve probably already said too much.
Heh! But that Cheese Curd reference crossed the line…get thee to a WESconsin Cheese Factory!
PWS
Well, THAT is an interesting take. Sheesh. A pox on you and your house to the seventh generation. We, the Rushinati, are a dedicate lot and we simply do not abide such slights against the Canadian Triumvirate. No, we do not.
jvb
I apologize…for the grammatical ambiguity. The Canadian political leaders were bribed, NOT marked as “cheese curds” (That occurred some years later, only in Quebec, and in an entirely unrelated situation involving Nickelback.)
Nicely done.
jvb
What a fabulous discussion! There are so many good insights in this discussion thread.
A quote from the great 19th century historian Jakob Burckhardt popped into my head while reading the initial post and comments.
Burckhardt as quoted below was basically in avuncular mode, giving advice to those seeking to educate themselves. Rather than summarize, here is the man:
It’s in a selection of his works that has been published in English under the title _Reflections on History_. Somewhere I have in my collection a reprint by Liberty Press.
Here is the excerpt:
“The merest text-book on a single period or a single branch of historical knowledge opens up a vista into an infinity of established facts. A desperate prospect at the beginning of the study of history!
“We need not, however, trouble about the student whose purpose it is to devote his whole life to that study, or even to the writing of history. Our aim is not to train historians, let alone universal historians. Our standard will be the capacity which any academically trained mind should develop up to a certain point.
“It has already been said that our theme is not so much the study of history as the study of the historical.
“Any specialised knowledge of facts possesses, in addition to its value as knowledge or thought in a particular field, a universal or historical value, in that it illuminates one phase of the changeful spirit of man, yet, placed in the right connection, it testifies at the same time to the continuity and immortality of that spirit.
“Beside the direct exploitation of knowledge for one’s own special subject, there is another, which must be referred to here.
“An essential condition of scholarship is a definite branch of study: theology, jurisprudence, or whatever it may be, must be taken up and carried through to its academic conclusion, and that not only for private, professional reasons, but in order to acquire the habit of steady work, to learn respect for all branches of a particular subject, to fortify the seriousness necessary to learning.
“Side by side with it, however, we must continue those preliminary studies which give access to all that comes later, in particular the various world literatures, i.e. the two classical languages and, if possible, two modern ones. We can never know too many languages. And however much or little we may have known of them, we should never quite let them lapse. All honour to good translations, but none can replace the original expression, and the original language, in word and phrase, is historical evidence of the first rank.
“Further, we should avoid anything which exists simply as a pastime , for time should be welcomed and turned to account, and secondly we should maintain an attitude of reserve towards the present-day devastation of the mind by newspapers and novels.”
found at the following link
https://archive.org/stream/in.gov.ignca.10941/10941_djvu.txt
what I have posted is most of the text from page 26.
originally
_Reflections on History_
Translated from the German original _Weltgeschichlliche Btlrachlungen_
thanks for letting me share
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Can I spark a controversy or what?