{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03951081843838194, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.570680628272251, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
In Defence of Language; If It Needs It

In the Penguin Modernism, that fat and intimidating exercise in apologetics, there is a passage that has stayed in my mind and gone on nagging at me. It occurs in the article 'The Crisis of Language,' and goes as follows: 'That which links thought with language, language with the external world, and man with man has disappeared. Like the mock tennis game at the end of Antonioni's Blow-up, all language games are felt to have become absurd because the ball, that which guarantees communication between subject and object, is lost.' The passage doesn't simply spring out of nowhere and bite you. As with some of the more scandalous pronouncements of Paul de Man, the writer is describing the attitudes of others, among them Kafka (of whom the statement is surely untrue) and the fictional Chandos of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Letter of Lord Chandos.' But that, in a way, makes it all the more disturbing. As Borges knew ('I remember,' observes his best-known fictional narrator, 'that Menard used to declare that censuri...