No longer matters b/c another post is up already, but just for Internet posterity: Lynx, it seems to me that my Star Trek essay mightily pissed you off for some reason (it was much more a personal essay than a review, except maybe a pro-forma review of the "Best of" DVD) and you disagree with an offhand, not-especially-controversial opinion I dropped about Hitchcock, and maybe with my opinion about "The Odd Couple" too. (You seem, in fact, to have partly misread what I wrote about Hitchcock.) Maybe you don't much care for my writing or my opinions! Fine, it's a big planet with room for all, etc.

But you can't divine my attitudes about culture from those examples. You just don't have enough evidence to argue that I draw some arbitrary distinction between "independent" and mainstream culture, and refuse to take the latter seriously. Maybe what you're perceiving is an artifact of this column, whose mission is to cover material that sometimes gets ignored by the entertainment media, and almost by definition is addressing a niche audience. (I used to review mainstream movies for Salon a lot; now I only do it when Stephanie is on vacation.)

Accusing a critic of being an elitist who despises pop culture is a funny thing. It defies any kind of reply. In general, it tells you more about the speaker than about the person being described. I mean, I guess I could get defensive and start listing things I like that might meet with your approval, but that starts to sound like "Some of my best friends are ..." and immediately it's bad comedy. It's a no-win proposition.

I've been writing about all kinds of movies and culture for more than 20 years, and like anybody I have my likes and dislikes, some conventional and some idiosyncratic. That division really doesn't describe any movie buff I've ever known. I feel like you're channeling that famous Pauline Kael essay, "Trash, Art and the Movies," and casting me as one of the snooty, masochistic Eurosnobs who just wanted to watch depressing Bergman films and congratulate themselves on their superior taste, while ignoring Sam Peckinpah. We could have an interesting discussion about how that essay is or is not relevant these days, but that's for another time. Kael herself said late in life that she wouldn't have been such an avid defender of trash culture if she had known it was going to become the only culture.

Yes, that's a good catch on modern Hebrew. Okrent does include a little about Ben-Eliezer and the (re)invention of Hebrew, and does indeed note that he was a contemporary of Zamenhof, and from a nearly identical religious-ethnic background. Not sure she makes that much of it, other than essentially what you said: Interesting coincidence, or concordance.

And, cranky-pants posters, you're right; "open-source" is not the right term. Not a successful witticism. Basically Zamenhof was an anarcho-socialist, but it simply would never have occurred to him that his language could or should be his exclusive property.

Esperanto absolutely was created with the aim of being a universal language, as is obvious from even a cursory look at Zamenhof's intentions. That doesn't mean it works as a universal language, and I didn't say it did. Interestingly, there are a fair number of Esperantists from outside the Indo-European language family. (It's popular in Japan, further proof that Japan is a weird place.) But it's perfectly clear in the article, and Okrent's book, that Esperanto is a Eurocentric creation.

In my earlier post I called Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the founder/instigator of modern Hebrew, "Ben-Eliezer." Yeesh. Late-night posting.

There's been a certain amount of interesting philological-linguistic-cultural work on the roughly contemporaneous attempts to revive Hebrew and to re-establish Irish Gaelic as the primary spoken language in Ireland. (Both the products of a specific variety of 19th-c cultural nationalism, I would say.)

One was highly successful; the other much less so. While census figures claim that today almost a third of Irish people can speak Irish, that requires a pretty notional level of language fluency. A fair number of the Irish can speak some Irish, or fake it, but the number who actually do speak it is down around 1 or 2 percent. (My own father was a fluent speaker, and a couple of my cousins live in Irish-speaking communities.) Whereas almost everybody in Israel speaks Hebrew, except maybe the newest immigrants, some of the Arab minority, and the Filipina service workers.

The main reasons for this are obvious: Israel was built from a heterogeneous population of Jews from all over the world, speaking any number of languages -- Yiddish, Russian, German, Polish, English, French, Arabic, you name it -- and they had to find some kind of common ground quickly. Plus, they weren't sitting right next to an enormous cultural-political hegemon with a dominant national language, one they all spoke already. If the Jewish state had been set up in, say, Russia (as Stalin proposed) I don't think it becomes a Hebrew-speaking nation.

These days, most cultural-nationalist attempts to revive a language, e.g., Hawaiian or the Australian indigenous languages, face similar problems. You've really gotta hand it to the Welsh, who have kept their language going despite being way more in the English shadow than Ireland is, and without anywhere near the same level of nationalist bloodshed. There are soap operas and heavy-metal music in Welsh, which is as good an indicator of linguistic vitality as you could ask for.