Language abuse....

I'm posting this excerpt, not because of the issues (interesting though they are) but as an interesting example of word use. In fact, as a deliberate assault on our language.

....But while the Democratic campaigns and women's organizations quibbled over which 100 percent pro-choice Senator, Obama or Hillary Clinton, would be the better president for reproductive health, many choice advocates missed what was percolating under the radar: The beginnings of a conservative smear campaign against Obama's very real history of support for reproductive freedom....

It's not a "smear campaign" if you are just telling the simple truth. If conservatives were exaggerating Obama's Pro-death record, if they were taking a few things out-of-context to make him look worse than he is, that would be a "smear campaign."

I recently wrote about Mr Obama's rather curious "spiritual advisor, and had a liberal complain that I was "demonizing" him, and why didn't I write about "substantive issues." I should have replied with Obama's voting record on the "Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act," (BAIPA), and seen how much he liked them substantive puppies. (I bet he would have called it a "smear campaign!" And then run away.)

In multiculturalist eyes, "understand" means "no criticism."....

William Katz:

When Urgent Agenda began - and that was only two and a half months ago - I promised to defend the English language. I've done too little in that regard, for which I offer apologies. However, let me now try a bit of redemption and discuss briefly the misuse of a word. The word is "understanding."

We're hearing that word every day. Barack Obama's campaign, we're told, is an attempt at "understanding" across racial lines. The intellectual elites tell us we must do more to foster international "understanding." The multicultural industry informs us that "understanding" other cultures is the key to going to Heaven.

But what do they actually mean when they say "understanding"?

What they often mean, without telling us, is "approval." The word "understanding" has been so abused and degraded that it often is a code word for appeasement. "Understanding" across ethnic lines is noble, but the word is often employed to shut down discussion. If we "understand," after all, we must not be "judgmental." Only those who don't "understand" are judgmental.

A true, honest multiculturalist will say that "we must understand other cultures, and they must understand us." But when have you ever heard the second part of that expression? In multiculturalist eyes, "understand" means "no criticism."

So be on guard when you hear the word. The definition of "understanding" may not be the one you would use. A message is often being sent. It is sometimes a dishonest message.

It's almost always a dishonest message. And it's extra-likely to be dishonest when the subject is race in America. The Civil Rights Movement was, like so many other revolutions and noble causes, two-faced. There were crowds of idealists moved by a noble cause, but the inner core was power-hungry leftists, who use movements and causes cynically.

And the Civil Rights Movement was always as much about destroying blacks as it was about freeing them. It is not surprising that we discover black leaders peddling racism and anti-Americanism. That was part of the "movement" from the very beginning.

If you teach someone—anyone—that they should have a sense of grievance and resentment and entitlement...you are trying to destroy them. You are destroying their character. You are killing their spirit. When Jeremiah Wright, and many other black leaders, tell their people that they are "owed," that they are "oppressed" and are entitled to feel resentment and sullenness, they are destroying souls.

Suppose I teach my children that the world is against them, that the world owes them a living, and that they are entitled to special favors to make up for all the blows that life offers to everyone......what would I be doing to them? Would I be helping them or hurting them? You know the answer. What if I taught them that they should not accept criticism?

The Civil Rights Movement (and many other movements) was always two-faced. And this can be seen from the beginning, in the implicit "bargain" offered whites (and blacks too), that we can be on the "right side," that we can be the good guys, as long as we don't criticize blacks.

This was, and is, a pernicious and destructive idea. We all need criticism. It is painful, but it is good for us. We need to get it, and to respond thoughtfully. (And that includes thoughtful rejection of criticism, if it is unwarranted.) The wise person says, "Hit me with your hardest shot. If my beliefs and actions are valid, then they will withstand the test. And if they are not, I should change." And we even need unfair criticism. It's good for us; teaches us to discriminate between valid and invalid.

But the subtext of the Civil Rights Movement was always that any criticism of black Americans was racist. That it was equivalent to those racist claims that "all blacks are shiftless and lazy." That was an evil idea. The leaders of the movement should have been requesting fair criticism.

Black (and other minority) Americans were hurt by this, but they were in fact just collateral damage. The real goal was to protect leftists from criticism, especially leaders.. To protect them from having to defend various quasi-socialist policies on the merits. They have been hiding behind this ever since. The subtext is always "Don't you dare criticize me, because I'm helping [fill in the grievance-group]. If you scrutinize me you are a [fill in the blank: racist/sexist/homophobe, etc.].

The prohibition on criticism of "oppressed" groups creates a penumbra that shields leftists in general. That's why two ludicrously under-qualified candidates are vying for the Democrat nomination right now. Neither of them would even be in the running if they were white males. But each offers the possibility of giving blanket protection to their supporters. Any criticism will be called sexism or racism. No defeat will have to be acknowledged on its merits; it was just evil white/male America destroying the good minority group, as usual. (The same thing would work for Al Gore, but the grievance-group would be Polar Bears.)

Guys like Obama are in the habit, when things get sticky, of trotting out the line about how America needs to have a "conversation about race." This is always a lie; what's envisioned is a monologue, where whites are supposed to shut up and be told how horrid they are, and how minorities need more loot to make up for racism. But If Obama is the nominee, then I can imagine a more honest conversation happening!

The odds are against it, to be sure. Americans have been subjected to decades of relentless propaganda to teach them that this is taboo. McCain won't do it; it would not be smart politics, and he's too moderate. But, the folly called "Campaign Finance Reform" has, thanks to Mr McCain, taken much of election campaigning out of the hands of parties and candidates!

In 2004, the obvious fact that John Kerry's "war hero" status was a sham was taboo to mention, by press, parties and candidates. But the Swift Boat Veterans were not part of that apparatus. (Dems like to claim that they were a plot by Rove, but if they had been they would have been much better-funded!) The Swifties didn't care that they were going to be slammed for daring to break a taboo.

We could see some new variants on the Swifties this year. None of the elites really want to turn over rocks and shine harsh lights on the Jeremiah Wrights. But there are lots of ordinary Americans who might scratch their heads and think, "America has fixed at least 95% of what was wrong before the Civil Rights era, and yet the bellyaching never stops. Something is fishy here. In fact, I think this is a pile of BS."

Same thing about feminism, if Hillary wins the nomination. There's more than a few Americans who would like to turn that rock over and see the ugly bugs squirm in the sunshine. Probably won't happen, but the potential is there. Politics tends to unleash forces like nothing else. The elites are compromised, and won't go against the taboos, but elites matter less in the Information Age. They have less control of the agenda. Information routes around them.

Fighting crabgrass

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A "surge" of overused words and phrases formed a "perfect storm" of "post-9/11" cliches in 2007, according to a U.S. university's annual list of words and phrases that deserve to be banned.

Choosing from among 2,000 submissions, the public relations department at Michigan's Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie targeted 19 affronts to the English language in its well-known jab at the worlds of media, sports, advertising and politics.
The contributors gave first prize to the phrase "a perfect storm," saying it was numbingly applied to virtually any notable coincidence.

"Webinar" made the list as a tiresome non-word combining Web and seminar that a contributor said "belongs in the same school of non-thought that brought us e-anything and i-anything."

Similarly, the list-makers complained about the absurd comparisons commonly phrased "x is the new y," as in "(age) 70 is the new 50" or "chocolate is the new sex." "Fallacy is the new truth," commented one contributor.

Some words and phrases sagged under the weight of overuse, contributors said, citing the application of "organic" to everything from computer software to dog food.

In the same vein, decorators offering to add "pop" with a touch of color need new words, the list-makers said.

Such phrases as "post 9/11" and "surge" have also outlived their usefulness, they said. Surge emerged in reference to adding U.S. troops in Iraq but has come to explain the expansion of anything.

Other contributors took umbrage at the phrase to "give back" as applied to charitable gestures, usually by celebrities.

"The notion has arisen that as one's life progresses, one accumulates a sort of deficit balance with society which must be neutralized by charitable works or financial outlays," one said....

Any other suggestions?

Bad language fosters bad thinking...

From a post by Maclin Horton, on the misuse of the word "Inappropriate"....

...This is one of those small but significant ways in which bad language both reflects and fosters bad thinking. It's been some years now since I began to notice myself reacting to it with what first seemed to be an unreasonable irritation. I finally realized that it annoyed me because people were using it as a substitute for "wrong." In a time when the existence of objective moral standards is doubted and denied, and when no one wants to be accused of being judgmental, it's very bad form to say that anything short of mass murder is just plain wrong; mass murder, and perhaps racism.

But yet: order must be maintained. People in authority (or those who just wish they were) still need and desire to tell other people what to do. How can they justify it, if they can't appeal to some standard which is eventually rooted in the concept of right and wrong? "Inappropriate" became the solution...

It is very interesting to think of the very small number of things it is still "politically correct" to say are wrong. Slavery is wrong, as long as it was done by Dead White Men. The fact that Muslims are enslaving black Africans right now is never called "wrong."

Sexual harassment is wrong unless it was done by Bill Clinton.

It is wrong to be a fascist dictator in the 1940's, and it was right for democracies to overthrow them with massive military force and at a cost of millions of deaths. It is not wrong to be a fascist dictator in the 2000's, and overthrowing one at a cost of thousands of deaths is.....wrong.

Words mean something...

From City Journal, on the term "neocon."

...The term "neoconservatism" has undergone a number of shifts in meaning. It was coined in 1973 by the socialist intellectual Michael Harrington to deride liberal thinkers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who had begun to criticize the welfare state's excesses. By the 1980s, its meaning expanded to include a small group of former liberal intellectuals who hewed to a strong anti-Soviet line and had defected from the Democratic Party to support Ronald Reagan. They were motivated in part by an increased awareness of, and distinctive moral clarity about, human rights in international affairs, a worthy tradition whose liberal incarnation found embodiment in figures such as Senator Scoop Jackson, labor leaders George Meaney, Lane Kirkland, and Al Shanker, and intellectuals Bayard Rustin and Michael Walzer. None of these people held traditionally "movement conservative" views on economics or social issues—far from it; some of them were outright socialists. Neoconservatives had not been content with the detente policies of Richard Nixon, because they wanted not to coexist with communism, but to end it—a more ambitious goal that Reagan shared.

After September 11, the "neocon" label, which had fallen into disuse, came back into vogue as a way to categorize the intellectual godfathers behind the Bush Doctrine, which of course has advocated both military responses to terrorist threats and promoting liberty around the world via "regime change" (not all necessarily through military means). According to the leftist narrative, the neocons got us into the Iraq war—never mind the widespread assumption among intelligence services around the world that Saddam Hussein did have WMDs, or that large segments of the Democratic Party and liberal opinion leaders supported the invasion of Iraq, etc., etc.

By now, "neocon" has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just those who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyone who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to national security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran, Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of terrorist groups around the world....

I'm not a neocon, but if people want to call me one I'll not get angry.

This sort of weasellyness just fascinates me...

Politico, on the way Dem candidates would rather use the "N-word" than the "L-word."

Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked this summer if she would describe herself as a "liberal."

The Democratic front-runner shied away, saying the "word" — noticeably not using the word — has taken on a connotation that "describes big government.

"I prefer the word 'progressive,'" she said. It has a "real American meaning."
Then she expanded the term to "modern progressive," and, finally, clarified that she was a "modern American progressive."

These are heady days for Democrats. The party is favored by almost all measures in the coming presidential contest.

But while Democrats are emboldened, they remain wary of the term "liberal."

Republicans, by contrast, are as unpopular in the polls as they have been for at least 15 years.

Nonetheless, the label "conservative" remains in vogue...

I just bet you that pretty soon "modern American progressive" will seem too too......too, umm, something or other, and will be modified. Hillary will start to call herself a "Patriotic God-Respecting Crime-opposing Modern American Progressive." Or maybe a whole new word will be discovered.

That's the problem when you start to tell lies. You get all tangled up. The lie started, as you probably already know, when various New Dealers were asked if they were Socialists. They didn't want to admit that (though it was true, and a bunch of them were Communists, foul secret agents of Stalin) so they dubbed themselves "Liberals." Thereby giving the word a new meaning that was very different from the classical meaning of Liberal.

Of course the word Liberal soon came to mean "Quasi-socialist." So now our current crop of quasi-socialists label themselves "Progressive." So cute. And now, now we see Hillary squirming away from that word!! If you tell one lie, you have to tell more lies to cover up the first one.

How I hate liars!

England is dying, but the Anglosphere is now "England"

The rise of Indian English - Telegraph :

It has taken decades of struggle, but more than half a century after the British departed from India, standard English has finally followed.

Young and educated Indians regard the desire to speak English as it is spoken in England as a silly hang-up from a bygone era. Homegrown idiosyncrasies have worked their way into the mainstream to such an extent that only fanatical purists question their usage.

Now Penguin, the quintessentially British publishing house, has put the nearest thing to an official imprimatur on the result by producing a collection of some of the most colourful phrases in use - in effect a dictionary of what might be called "Indlish".

Its title, Entry From Backside Only, refers to a phrase commonly used on signposts to indicate the rear entrance of a building. Binoo John, the author, said young Indians had embraced the variant of the language as a charming offspring of the mingling of English and Hindi, rather than an embarrassing mongrel.

"Economic prosperity has changed attitudes towards Indian English," said Mr John. "Having jobs and incomes, and being noticed by the rest of the world, have made Indians confident - and the same confidence has attached itself to their English."...

Well, for sure. [I've had people hear me say "for sure" and say, "you must come from Southern California!"] Or maybe speaking English changes the brain and leads to attitudes of moderation and good sense, leading thence to prosperity.

"from those who had laid the foundation for all things to come"

We often refer to Orwell's Newspeak, which is the concept of destroying words or their meanings so that people will not be able to form certain concepts. He pictured it, in the book 1984, as the open policy of a tyranny, and we tend to imagine that it doesn't happen here and now. But in fact the destruction of language is commonly seen, and I just stumbled on an example in a very good book Charlene and I are reading.

The author is writing about the difference between authority and power. And I realized when I read it that the word authority, in its real meaning, has almost been obliterated from common discourse. (I myself, as a Catholic with a love of history, have something of a feel for the word, but would have been hard-pressed to use it as a sharp weapon. And if I do so now I will have to define it, or risk being misunderstood)

...St. Augustine long ago remarked, "If you ask me what time is, I can't tell you; if you don't ask me, then I know." Much the same thing turned out to be true regarding my own knowledge of authority. When I first took up this subject, I knew what authority was. Once, however, I started really working on it, I discovered I did not know. Furthermore, few who write on the subject bother to define the word. And, to make matters worse, many writers use "power" and "authority" interchangeably, as though they were synonymous or as though authority were a variant of power, i.e., legitimate power as opposed to illegitimate power.

Hannah Arendt is one of the few writers to raise and answer the question of what authority means. As she points out, while the Greeks had no specific word for or concept of authority, the Romans had a well-developed notion of it which was closely linked to their understanding of religion and tradition. In fact, religion, tradition and authority formed what Arendt calls the "Roman trinity".

The religious element in this trinity was the founding of Rome itself, understood not simply as a political but even more as a primordial religious event for which the gods were responsible. Authority, which is rooted in the Latin words auctoritas and augere meaning authorship and augmentation, was directly connected to and dependent upon this founding event. Since the gods had authored or instigated the creation of Rome, it was imperative that their wishes regarding its well-being be consulted at all times. Those invested with authority were thought to have the ability to augment or interpret the will of the Roman gods regarding all decisions having a bearing on the life of the city.

This authority was derivative or representational, since those in authority did not have that authority in their own right but only insofar as they represented the founding fathers who, because they had established the city in accordance with the will of the gods, were both eyewitnesses to and participants in that event and the first, therefore, to be invested by the gods with the authority to carry out their will. In the words of Arendt,

Those endowed with authority were the elders, the Senate or the patres, who had obtained it by descent and by transmission (tradition) from those who had laid the foundation for all things to come, the ancestors, whom the Romans therefore called the maiores. The authority of the living was always a derivative, depending upon the auctores imperii Romani conditoresque, as Pliny puts it, upon the authority of the founders who no longer were among the living.

The book is The Church and the Culture War, by Joyce A. Little. It is not about the actual battles of our current culture war, but about the theological and philosophical issues beneath it. (I'll have to add it to my list of great books I initially avoided because their titles mislead me. Such as Death Comes for the Archbishop or Bleak House!) I give the book five stars. Alas, it is out-of-print. It is Catholic, but would it be of interest to anyone who is trying to think clearly about the ongoing attacks on our civilization.

By the way, the word Newspeak itself is under attack by our contemporary creators of Newspeak. I once read an egregious left-wing propagandist who wrote that Newspeak is a characteristic of fascism, and gave as an example a Bush Administration statement something like, "the goal of the war is peace." This was supposedly like the Newspeak definition "war is peace." But of course it is not like that at all. The Bush statement is logically clear, and so if you don't like it you can argue against it. You can criticize it. It does not blur or confuse concepts.

Whereas using the term Newspeak in this way does blur the concept of Newspeak. In fact it tends to blur it towards meaning "any statement leftists don't like." This is similar to the way the word "hate-mongering" is used to mean "criticizing leftists." Rush Limbaugh is accused of hate-mongering not because he demands anyone be lynched or tarred-and-feathered, but because he uses argument and ridicule against his opponents....

Word Note: Proof o' the pudding

I think I blogged this once before, but it bears repeating.

The verb "to prove" used to mean "to test." (Actually, it still does, but people have become confused.) Hence, the famous Aberdeen Proving Grounds," a weapons-testing facility opened in WWI. (Where Charlene spent her early years. Her surgeon father was an Army colonel, and the book M.A.S.H. is about just what he did, in both WWII and Korea.)

The phrase "The exception that proves the rule" doesn't make any sense if you don't know this! Nor do statements like "science has proved such and such."

Update: On the question if finding Saddam's WMD's, it's interesting to note that thousands of chemical shells were buried at the Proving Grounds after WWI, and nobody's been able to find them since...

Pervert the language, then pervert the perverted language...

Our left-drooling press is always ready to twist English into pretzel-English, in order to minimize the faults of any enemy of The Great Satan. But the problem is, people get used to the neologisms, and they come to mean the thing you were trying to hide. An example is referring to terrorist monsters as "militants." After a while, people see "militant" and think "terrorist monster."

So if you are a shill for terrorist monsters, you have to pick a newer and blander term for terrorist monsters. Matthew Hoy found this, from the Agence France Presse:

Three Palestinian activists were killed early Sunday in an attack on an Israeli military post on the border between Israel and the south of the Gaza Strip, the group Committees of Popular Resistance announced.

Military sources in Jerusalem said several Israeli soldiers were also killed or wounded in the attack near the Sufa and Kerem Shalom crossing points.

Palestinian activists fired anti-tank rockets at an Israeli unit protecting the Kerem Shalom crossing point. An armoured vehicle was hit full-on, the military sources said without giving details. [emphasis added]

You watch. When "activist" comes to mean "terrorist monster," then they will switch to "dissident," or "protester," or some-such, to conceal their sympathy for terrorist monsters. When you are living a lie, you have to keep the little shells moving, so no one guesses which one has the pea under it.

The classic example is all those New Deal era socialists who labeled themselves "liberals." Result: "liberal" has come to mean socialist. So they've plundered our history for another word to spoil: "Progressive." Which is rapidly coming to mean.... "socialist." (More accurately, "fake socialist." Lenin or Marx would have spit on today's chip-on-the-shoulder crybabies.)

It's such a pleasure being among those who politically (and in other realms) don't have to hide who we are, and where we came from.

Argumentum ad Ruinam

I put a bit of dog Latin in this post, suggesting we should add to the list of logical fallacies "argumentum ad collapsium," to counter those people who claim that whatever we happen to be doing is fatally wrong, because all empires or great powers of the past have fallen.

I asked Dr Weevil to supply the right phrase, and he was kind enough to respond...

'Collapsium' is not good Latin. You want 'Argumentum ad Ruinam'. Latin 'ruina' is more specific than English 'ruin' and means basically 'collapse, falling down'. Hope this helps.

It is poignant...

Richard John Neuhaus must be a truly saintly guy, to be so forbearing in the face of this sort of ignorance...

...With notable exceptions, reporters are people of good will working hard to write a story that will please their editors. It is true that they are not always the sharpest knives in the drawer. These days most of them have gone to journalism school, or j-school, as it is called. In intellectual rankings at universities, journalism is just a notch above education, which is, unfortunately, at the bottom.

An eager young thing with a national paper was interviewing me about yet another instance of political corruption. “Is this something new?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it’s been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden.” There was a long pause and then she asked, “What garden was that?” It was touching.

What prompts me to mention this today is that I’m just off the phone with a reporter from the same national paper. He’s doing a story on Pope Benedict’s new encyclical. In the course of discussing the pontificate, I referred to the pope as the bishop of Rome. “That raises an interesting point,” he said. “Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?” He obviously thought he was on to a new angle. Once again, I tried to be gentle. Toward the end of our talk, he said with manifest sincerity, “My job is not only to get the story right but to explain what it means.” Ah yes, he is just the fellow to explain what this pontificate and the encyclical really mean. It is poignant...

Reminds me of an employee I had, back when I owned a bookstore. A customer asked if we had a copy of Moby Dick, and he said, "who wrote it?"

As a Word Note, it used to be common among Protestants to refer to the Pope merely as "the Bishop of Rome," implying that the papacy was just a "popish" fraud. The Book of Common Prayer once included the charming prayer: From the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, good Lord deliver us. (Cranmer's Liturgy 1544, removed from BCP 1599)

Important Word Note for the Christmas season...

Charlene has a book of Advent meditations, and she read me this:

The English word "merry" did not originally convey "jolly, mirthful." It was more along the lines of "blessed, peaceful"—a deep down inner joy rather than revelry.

One gets a sense of its original meaning in the well-known carol "God rest ye merry, gentlemen." As can be seen from the comma, the word is not used to describe jolly gentlemen, but rather it is a blessing from God invoked upon them—"God rest ye peacefully, gentlemen."

Thus, Merry Christmas," when spoken to one another, is a blessing...

Update: This post seems to be in error. The definition does not appear in the OED. See comments.

appalling but true...

John Derbyshire:

...Thy neighbor's ass. Regardless of what you think of religion in general, or Christianity in particular, all those past centuries of widespread Bible reading were wonderfully enriching to our language. Now that is all slipping away, and our language is correspondingly poorer. I noticed this a few years ago, when I complained to my Wall Street boss, a lady with a degree from a good university and a six-digit salary, that in giving me a project to complete without the proper means to complete it, she was asking me to make bricks without straw. She stared at me uncomprehendingly. "Bricks? Straw? What on earth are you talking about, John?"

It happened again the other day. In conversation with some intelligent and well-educated Americans, I used the word "covet." Blank looks. Then, nervously (I am not a stranger to these people): "Er, John, do you mean... cover?" No, I said, I meant "covet," as in the Tenth Commandment. You know: Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's ox, nor his ass... Now they were looking at each other as if I had lapsed into Klingon. Where is Roy Moore when you need him?...

It's also a matter of just not reading the good stuff. Good books are enriched with biblical terminology, and anyone well-read would probably "get" bricks without straw, even if they had never touched the Bible. (Mud bricks, what we call here "adobe," include straw with the mud, so the bricks will dry evenly, instead of just on the outside first. The Israelites, when they were held captive in Egypt, were once forced to make bricks without straw, that is, to undertake a task doomed to failure for lack of a critical material.)

And it's also a matter of lack of curiosity, something which just bewilders me. Why wasn't the "Wall Street Boss" interested? Why are most people not interested in an odd new metaphor? I guess they get rich in money, and I get rich in words...

Catchphrase du Jour...

I sure get bored with the way journalists have to reduce every "type" of story to a formula.

At the moment I'm peeved at the many Avian Flu stories that use the "is it time to panic?" phrase. Like this one: As the deadly bird flu makes its appearance in Europe, should we stay calm or start panicking?

I suppose they are just being cute, but obviously panicking is stupid, whatever the danger...

Word note...

It's a minor matter, but I just don't see it. Taranto today criticizes Matthew Scully's defense of Miers, specifically this:

...If four years observing the woman is any guide, the answer is she was probably doing something useful...

Taranto writes:

...First of all, there's something odd and disrespectful about Scully's references to Miers, who is a serious professional even if she doesn't belong on the Supreme Court, as "the woman." It's not quite as bad as "that woman," but it rankles nonetheless...

I think it's crazy. If I wrote something like: "If four years observing the man is any guide, he's honest," would that be disrespectful? I don't see how. So why can't one mention a woman that way?

I think Taranto's also wrong in his cronyism point; it looks to me like Scully is not saying that Bolton's nomination was cronyism, but that Bill Kristol was exhibiting a kind of "cronyism" when he wanted his personal friend Bolton defended to the utmost, but now sneers at the President for nominating a friend.

WORD NOTE: "arhabi"

There's been some confusion (by people who seem to want to be confused) about the designation 'fully capable" as applied to Iraqi units. "Fully capable" is in fact a very rigorous US standard. Major K explains more in this post...[Thanks to Greyhawk)

...As I write this, two sectors of Baghdad are controlled by Iraqi Army Brigades (4000-5000) assisted by a platoon-sized (30-40) MiTT [US Military Transition Team]. The number of Iraqi Battalions operating with only a small MiTT adviser group as I described is in the dozens, and that is only here in the Baghdad area. I assume it is the same or better in other, quieter areas of the country.

Are they fully capable by US standards? Perhaps not. The military forces of most of the rest of the world do not meet that standard. Are they operational and hunting down arhabi every day? - You Betcha!

My question was, what are "arhabi??" A quick Google found that Major K had already provided a definition:

It is pronounced: ahr-HAH-bee. It is the Iraqi arabic word for terrorist. 2LT C. does not like it because "it just doesn't sing. I learned this word from our interpreters and use it often. I never use mujahedin or jihadi, because they imply a measure of respect due an actual warrior. After all, both of those terms mean "holy warrior." This distinction is also very important to the Iraqis. They have told me repeatedly that these guys are cowards who will not even stand and fight. They kill innocent people, and bomb indiscriminately. They have been their own worst enemy in the public relations department. Even though 2LT C. likes to refer to them using the A-word, (describing a posterior extremity) he would like to find something more catchy. I am content to use arhabi. It lets the locals know exactly who we are after, and what this really is about - not oil, not religion, but security and the hope for a better future.

Sounds like a good word to add to our vocabulary...

Enough of politics, let's get to what's important...

Charlene and I had a good invigorating tussle last night with Dave, Andrew, Scott and Allison, about grammar. (A subject about which we all care, except Scotty probably thought we were crazy) In particular, the question of whether, when you put a quote at the end of a sentence, the final punctuation goes inside or outside of the last quote marks.

Andrew, postmodernist-destroyer-of-all-things-ancient-and-beautiful, argued for outside. Allie, Charlene and I clearly are hard-wired as insiders, and were deaf to his notions. Sensible Dave pointed out the logical awkwardness you have where the quote and the sentence have different punctuation. Quote: "Victory or death!" Sentence: Why did he say "Victory or death?"

Thinking about it, I agree with Allie; you have to re-write the sentence...

Names matter...

I was writing recently about the importance of names, (here, and here) and how Verizon ought to lock-in a cool name for EV-DO before some competitor does it. (How awkward it would be if the name were "Sprinter!") John Gruber has a detailed post on how Apple has moved very nimbly to add podcasting capabilities to their iPod/iTunes/ITMS constellation. They did not invent the name "podcasting," but it's perfect for them, and they've moved with surprising speed to lock-in the advantage...

...But names do matter. And what makes this so delicious for Apple is that the more popular “podcasting” becomes as the name for publishing audio via RSS, the less likely it will be that a new name will ever take hold. Which leaves Apple’s competitors — including Microsoft, Sony, and the various other gadget-makers producing Windows Media-based players — in the extremely uncomfortable position of choosing from the following courses of action:

1. Embracing the word “podcasting”, even though it contains the name of the competitor they’re chasing, and which name subtly implies that podcasting is meant for use with iPods, which implication sort of further implies that every other digital music player is just an iPod knock-off. I mean, can you imagine Apple using a term like “walkmancasting”, “dellcasting”, or “wincasting”? It’s embarrassing.

2. Devising and using a new term for “podcasting” that doesn’t use “pod”. Good luck with that, considering that everyone — everyone — who is publishing podcasts is already calling them “podcasts”.

[Update: According to this story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Microsoft employees are pushing “blogcasting” as a “pod”-free alternative.]

3. Ignoring the whole podcasting phenomenon.

There are no other options. The best-case scenario for Apple’s competitors is for this whole podcasting thing to turn out to be nothing more than a fad. That makes #3 a reasonable course of action. But if it isn’t a fad, they’ve got to choose between #1 and #2, both of which are marketing nightmares. And these guys are all already in a deep hole, marketing-wise, versus Apple and iPod...

"implies that every other digital music player is just an iPod knock-off..." Exactly. And once a name "sticks," you pretty much can't change it.

Word Note...

Lee Harris has a good article in TechCentralStation on the word "hegemony," and how its meaning has been deliberately distorted for political purposes...

...For Grote, the fact that the Delian League worked, and worked so well for so long, was a point that needed to be brought emphatically to his reader's attention. Hence, his insistence on reviving the concept of hegemony. There had to be some simple way of referring to mutually beneficial confederacies led by strong, but not overbearing leaders -- leaders who, while leading, continue to respect the autonomy of their partners -- and what better word to serve this purpose than the Greek word that had originally been intended to refer to precisely such a confederacy?

By a sublime irony, this once useful linguistic distinction has been completely lost in the intellectual discourse of contemporary politics, and lost due to the fact that the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, has perversely chosen to conflate the two words as if they were merely synonyms for the same underlying concept. Thus, Grote's precise and accurate revival of the original Greek concept has been skunked forever by Chomsky's substitution of the word hegemony for the word empire, so that nowadays the two are used interchangeably, except for the fact, already noticed, that hegemony sounds so much more sophisticated than empire. Why use a word that ordinary people can understand, when there is a word, meaning exactly the same thing, that only the initiated can comprehend?...

Chomsky's being an America-hating, dictator-loving socialist slimeball is very very bad. But his deliberately degrading the English language is pure evil.

Sign of the times...

Reader Denis Hiller sent a link to a horrifying story of a young Christian girl driven to suicide by harassment on campus...

...Instead of being nurtured, this young Christian was savagely attacked, instead of being educated, she was harassed and ridiculed and made to feel less than human because she dared to identify against the evils she saw in the society in which she lived. She spoke out against abortion, declaring it murder; she was asked if she ate meat, when she replied yes, she was verbally assaulted and called a murderer. When she returned to her dorm, she found a dead mouse, a string around its neck, pinned to her door.

She was sexually harassed as well. When she declared that she was a virgin and was proud of it, she found used condoms had been thrown all over her dorm room, the dried semen sticking to her clothing in her closet, all over her dresser and mirror. Someone had written a message across her mirror in red paint that she needed to get her “cherry popped.” She called home; her parents called the school and they were assured the matter would be looked into and the students that were responsible would be punished. Not only was no one held accountable, but her academic advisor told her she needed to “grow up.” Several of her professors openly mocked her in class for her pro-life, pro-Christian stance...

When you hear about the "culture of death," here it is. That girl was hated. Because she was Christian. And we see this every day; right now there is a lawsuit to try to forbid a prayer at the Inauguration. It's hated of Christianity, though the usual lying formula is that one is worried about America "becoming a theocracy." Which is rubbish; even when 95% of Americans were Christian we never became anything like a theocracy. Or one is protecting the sacred "separation of church and state." But that's more lying rubbish, what the Constitution forbade is a state church; it didn't call for an atheist government. The very Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights began by hiring a chaplain to open its sessions with prayer.

My theory is that the roots of this hatred lie in the fact that God loves the plumber just as much as He loves the professor or the politician; and He loves the burglar just as much as he loves the bishop. And this grates agonizingly on "leftish" or "progressive" or "reality-based" types, whose schemes invariably include superior people telling the inferior people what to do (for their own good, of course.)

WORD NOTE: The phrase "establishment of religion," by the way, meant very precisely a state church, it is still used in Britain, where people discuss "disestablishing" the Church of England. The C of E is what our founders didn't want, and many of them, such as the Virginians, had painful memories of being forced to pay tithes to support it, even if they belonged to another denomination which they supported with voluntary offerings.

UPDATE: Andrea is sceptical. (See comment.) Her points are pretty powerful, perhaps we should put this in the "unproved" file. Though the inaction of the administration would not be at all unusual. I remember what happened a couple of years ago at nearby SFSU—when some Palestinian students attacked some Jewish students, they were "punished" by having an Islamic Studies Department created...

Word Note: "MSM"

Andrea writes:

The swollen corpse of the ProNewsMedia (just for contrarian purposes I refuse to use the cute term “MSM,” for “Mainstream Media,” that everyone else has been using) is still twitching as its proteins break down and its nerves fire off random electrical charges – or whatever it is that makes corpses twitch....

She's right, MSM has become a cliché, and at Internet speed.

I've long tried to avoid all the cutesy abbreviations, like IMHO and BTW and SWMBO...MSM now goes on the list.

Word Note: Democrat talking points...

When you criticize Kerry's war service, (or Max Cleland's vote against Homeland Security) that's "attacking his patriotism."

Now there's a new trope. If you criticize Kerry's senate record, that's "Hatred."

Here's an example in an editorial in the Manchester Union Leader:

...After Cheney and Miller criticized Sen. Kerry’s voting record, which the Massachusetts senator found so embarrassing that he barely referenced it during his own convention speech, his running-mate, Sen. John Edwards, said in response: “There was a lot of hate coming from that podium tonight.”...

What there actually was was scorn and harsh criticism. You might even go so far as to say the critics "hated" Kerry's mushy record on defense and anti-communism. But Edwards is trying to leave the impression that this is personal hatred of the sort which should lead us to ignore the criticisms, to dismiss them as the products of blind enmity, not logic.

What's missing is any Dem saying: "The critics are wrong, because of reasons A, B, and C." All they can do is claim "hatred." This is particularly noticeable in the case of Zell Miller, because when Miller gave Clinton's keynote , the same sort of people thought he was their fair-haired boy! A "Southern statesman!" Amazin' how much a guy's personality can change in four years.

Now Ken Layne writes:

I grew up in the South, surrounded by sons of bitches like Zell Miller -- bitter old nigger-haters who couldn't possibly understand why they weren't right about anything -- and this dixiecrat piece of shit is probably the best advertisement for the Bush Administration's Compassionate Conservatism we've ever seen...

I predict this will be useful as a perfect example of a circular argument. Miller helps those racist Republicans, so he's obviously a "nigger-hater." And how do we know the Republicans are racists? It's obvious--they are embracing "nigger-haters" like Miller.

But seriously folks, what Ken is saying is hate speech. (And I'm not endorsing the idea that there should be special laws against hate speech.) But that's what it is. Miller's the guy who removed the Confederate Battle Flag from the Georgia State flag! Until this week nobody seriously considered him to be a racist. He is known for one racist-sounding remark, but that was in a bitter political contest, 40 years ago. For which he has expressed his regret.

For the Dems to use this tactic is a sign of their bankruptacy...in about five different ways.

good take on the speech...

I recommend this post, by Alan Sullivan. The full text of Bush's speech, with Alan's interlinear comments. As often, his ideas are similar to mine, but different enough to be very stimulating.

WORD NOTES: I think "fisking" is the wrong word. A fisking is an utter trampling and destruction, not mild disagreement.

"Moms" should not be used in formal speech. YES! Nor "kids." Bush should have said mothers.

"Smarmy." Some writers I've liked have used it to mean an extreme oily over-friendliness, truly sick-making. Lately I've seen it used to just mean something a bit tacky or flowery. It doesn't seem to be in my dictionary. I'm not sure.

Word Note, (Leftlunacy Dept.)

Kathy Kinsley writes:

I don’t usually comment much on moonbats (from the right or the left). But Atrios’ latest bout of insanity (scroll down to ‘Celebrate Diversity’) is just plain weird. He seems to have decided that a t-shirt, which is endorsed by Instapundit, Frank J, and John Hawkins, with pictures of a bunch of guns on the front and the text ‘Celebrate Diversity’ is racist. I suppose because ‘diversity’ is shorthand, in his world, for ‘blacks’ or something? And Instapundit’s wearing of the t-shirt indicates he’s a racist. Right. Check the comments to Atrios’ post as well.

The reason that this particular phrase is a tender spot for leftizoids dates back to the famous, and muddled, Bakke decision. Mr Bakke was denied entrance to a University of California Medical School, despite having higher grades and scores than minority students who were admitted. He sued. The Supreme Court ruled that numerical quotas for affirmative action were not permissable. But it did not ban affirmative action altogether, and in particular, Justice Powell's decision opined that it might be permissible to consider a need for diversity, along with merit.

SO, GUESS WHAT! The entire left side of the universe instantly discovered that they had always known that "diversity" was almost more important than breathing. And that schools and universities (which had just dropped those banned racial quotas) would be consumed by the flesh-eating virus unless they ramped-up diversity to the maximum.

And what kind of diversity did they need? Religious diversity? Political diversity? Philosophical diversity? No no no no.....they needed racial diversity! and how did they get it? With diversity quotas.

So "diversity" is a code-word for affirmative action. Therefore laughing at it is "racist." But it's more than that. It's become a code word for the whole kit 'n kaboodle, for everything "progressive," especially for every attempt to eliminate some horrid piece of stuffy capitalist slave-owning dead-white-guy Western Civilization, and replace it with multicultural brain-leeches.

And since, in common parlance, a "racist" is anyone who's winning an argument with a liberal, even with this larger definition of "diversity," it's still racist to laugh at "diversity." Atrios is right.

Judge him by his record...

Tom Bowler comments on Kerry's speech...

..."I ask you to judge me by my record", he said, but any mention of the Senator's record brings howls that his patriotism is being questioned. He made almost no mention of his Senate record, but he mentioned his patriotism being questioned.

And tonight, we have an important message for those who question the patriotism of Americans who offer a better direction for our country. Before wrapping themselves in the flag and shutting their eyes and ears to the truth, they should remember what America is really all about. They should remember the great idea of freedom for which so many have given their lives. Our purpose now is to reclaim democracy itself. We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism.

This is a stunning accusation in its dishonesty. I feel he is speaking to me, and accusing me of questioning his patriotism. I don't think he has a direction for our country but for me to say that is to question his patriotism. His purpose he says is to "reclaim democracy itself". Is there anyone but the angry left who feel that democracy has been lost? He is recycling the propaganda of the left and I hope he will be called on it as the campaign progresses...

Terminology Update: "You're questioning my patriotism" and "You're wrapping yourself in the flag" are the automatic Democrat responses to substantive criticism. (Any criticisms Democrats make are "the heart and soul of patriotism.") These phrases have corollaries in the automatic Dem responses to Republicans saying anything positive:

For instance, if we point to our accomplishments, that's triumphalism, a horrid thing. If we win elections, then "democracy needs to be reclaimed," and "the voters are morons." And if we are so lost to normal decency as to suggest that our country should try to DO anything, that's hubris!

Word Note

I've probably mentioned this before, but I hate it when people use the phrase "grew like Topsy" to mean "grew very fast." It doesn't.

Topsy was the little girl in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who, when asked when she was born, said, "I wasn't born. I just growed." (So the phrase might be applicable to "emergent phenomena.")

Equally annoying are facile explanations for the decline of the Roman Empire. I wrote this because I just heard some guy on the radio saying that "the welfare rolls of Rome grew like Topsy after the time of Julius Caesar."

Word Note from the Dog Pack

David Schuler, an interesting blogger with a lot of critters, writes:

Starting a little after 10:00am until around 3:00pm is quiet time in the dog pack. Everyone sleeps.

Human beings are diurnal. We feel most energetic during the day. Cats are nocturnal. They are most active at night. Dogs along with deer and rabbits are crepuscular (from Latin creper, dark). They are most active at dawn and dusk....

Crepuscular is a word I've encountered many times, but I never knew what it meant. I just inferred a meaning from the context!

WORD NOTE

Brian Tiemann points out a common error:

The word crescendo does not mean "climax". ..

...Crescendo means, literally, growing. (I discovered this in 2nd-year Spanish class, where we learned the verb crecer, to grow, and its progressive form creciendo. Spanish and Italian follow many of the same rules.) It is used in music to signify a gradual increase in volume. It does not mean the fever pitch to which the volume finally grows. You don't "reach" a crescendo; you undergo a crescendo....

A rose by any other name would be an AROmaZaPo960-D ...

For my my birthday Charlene bought me a Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 scanner. So far I'm quite pleased—it seems to pack a lot of value for a trifling price. Also, it's very slim and the only cord is the USB cable, which also powers it. So you can easily stash it away, and just grab it and plug it in when needed.

But I have to say that it's incredibly stupid marketing to give a product a name that people won't know how to pronounce! There goes the word-of-mouth advertising. And what kind of word is "LiDE" anyway? Something that made sense in Japanese, but didn't translate? Something that made sense to the engineers? Words are important, and products need good names. A null-word like LiDE makes it hard to think about the product, hard to talk about it, hard to remember it, hard to spell it if you are trying to Google...

The worst name-morass is with digital cameras. If you read a favorable review of something called an SBZ-601-Zoom, how likely is it that you will remember that name? And how likely is it that you can keep from confusing it with the SBZ-401-Zoom or the SBZ-901-Zoom? Blehhh. It probably means that the engineers are running the company. And while I yield to no one in my admiration for engineers, there are certain teeensy-weensy little slivers of life where their skill-sets are not optimal, and where they would be advised to hire someone who loves words...(My consultant fees are very reasonable high—that proves that I'm valuable.)

WORD NOTE

Thinking about the previous post, I remember that there was a lot of carping about the word Homeland. It was alien to our usage, and brought to mind Continental locutions like Das Vaterland. But I think the complainers missed the real story. If the 800-lb gorilla calls his turf the Homeland, then "Homeland" becomes gorilla-talk, and all the smaller critters just have to lump it. The word is ours now, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear "Homeland" turn up in a Country Music song or a Wal-Mart ad.

For the best quote ever on the way English plunders other languages, go here.

"Pumpkin Positive"

Via Iain Murray, an article on what doctors are really writing down...

...However, Dr Adam Fox, who works at St Mary's Hospital in London as a specialist registrar in its child allergy unit, says that far fewer doctors now annotate notes with acronyms designed to spell out the unsayable truth about their patients.

The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will be asked in court to explain the exact meaning of NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt).

Dr Fox recounts the tale of one doctor who had scribbled TTFO - an expletive expression roughly translated as "Told To Go Away" - on a patient's notes.

He told BBC News Online: "This guy was asked by the judge what the acronym meant, and luckily for him he had the presence of mind to say: 'To take fluids orally'."...

Top medical acronyms
CTD - Circling the Drain (A patient expected to die soon)
GLM - Good looking Mum
GPO - Good for Parts Only
TEETH - Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy
UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury

I think if you are in medicine you have to laugh or go crazy. Charlene's from a medical family, so this sort of grim humor is not unfamiliar to me. Her dad was an Army surgeon in WWII and ran a MASH in Korea.

Also, should you wish to immerse yourself in this subject, I highly recommend the extremely (and painfully) funny book House of God: The Classic Novel of Life and Death in an American Hospital , by Samuel Shem, MD.

No reparations due ...

Dr Weevil discusses Arnold's name...

Update: (8/7, 11:55 AM)

For those too lazy to read the comments:

It appears I have fallen into an error common among medieval scribes: misdivision. Terry Oglesby of Possumblog gives a link showing that the name is not Schwarze-Negger, with a mysterious extra G, but Schwarzen-Egger, "black plowman". That makes a lot of sense, and in that case 'black' presumably means either dark-haired or relatively dark-complected, with no reference to African ancestry.

I know that in English usage, if you go back to, say, the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a "black man" or "black woman" normally means black-haired...confusing if you don't know what's going on.