The fact that you appeal only to your own authority and demand that we buy your book before questioning your claims is a little disappointing.In my experience accusing an academic of "appealing only to their own authority" is pretty much throwing down the gauntlet before them & inviting them to pick it up. You are rightly being called out for it, since it was completely unjustified.
Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the 1st century AD. Then, it was forgotten until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets left by these speakers. Sumerian is a language isolate.[1]
Quick background. Hoards of demons menace mankind. They tend to accumulate in the white-bread suburb of Sunnydale, California, mainly because the Hellmouth, a kind of font of bad mystic energy, is located directly beneath Sunnydale High. In Sunnydale, mysterious deaths and disappearances are an almost daily occurrence.
Arrives one Buffy Summers, recently expelled from school in L.A. for burning down the gym. In an ordinary world, Buffy would have probably ended up a slightly less affluent version of Alicia Silverstone's mall habitué in Clueless; as it happens, she is the Slayer, reluctant hero chosen by mysterious powers to lead humanity's war against the vampires. To her aid comes Giles, her Watcher, who has just transferred from the British Museum to become Sunnydale High's librarian, filling its shelves (in a kind of fundamentalist's worst nightmare) with vast leather-bound tomes on demonology. A band of misfits accumulates around them: class clown Xander Harris, timid computer hacker Willow Rosenberg, spoiled Valley Girl Cordelia and mellow lead guitarist (cum werewolf) Oz--not to mention Angel, whom Buffy fondly calls her "cradle-robbing, creature of the night boyfriend"--a vampire of once legendary cruelty, who has spent the last couple centuries feeling guilty after a Gypsy curse restored his soul. They are united in shifting webs of mutual love, trust, jealousy, desire and annoyance--conspiring to save the world on a regular basis as Buffy desperately tries to maintain a C average and head off efforts to kick her out of school.
There are a lot of obvious things you can say about Buffy. In the show's first season, a student becomes invisible because no one notices her; in the end, she's whisked away by the FBI for training as a government assassin. In the second, rich frat boys turn out to owe their wealth to an evil snake god, to whom they sacrifice virgins in the frathouse basement (Xander: "I guess the rich really are different"). Slaying the snake sets off a wave of corporate bankruptcies across America. And sometimes the supernatural element is a simply obvious mirror for real life: As when Buffy, having run away from home, gets a job as a waitress and seems headed for a life of drudgery--until she discovers a band of demons who have been enslaving teenage runaways to labor in dark satanic mills beneath the earth, spewing them out, broken and useless, at about the age of 65. Yet in one way it is decidedly unlike real life: Demon bosses, after all, can be beheaded (though having Buffy lead the rebellion with a hammer in one hand and sickle in the other was perhaps a tad much). Real ones can't.
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If nothing else, Buffy reminds us how much '60-style youth rebellion was premised on an assumption of security and prosperity: Why put up with all this stodginess when life could be so good? Today's rebellious youth, rather, are reduced to struggling desperately to keep hell from entirely engulfing the earth. Such, I suppose, is the fate of a generation that has been robbed of its fundamental right to dream of a better world. The very notion of being able to take part in a relatively democratically organized group of comrades, engaged in a struggle to save humanity from its authoritarian monsters, is now itself a wild utopian fantasy--not just a means to one. But cynics take note: If the mushrooming success of Buffy means anything, it's that this is one fantasy which surprising numbers of the Slacker Generation do have.
posted by John Cohen at 11:02 AM on August 29, 2011