Eric The Blue

Reading the Times

Today's New York Times story concerning another Supreme Court leak is in some ways quite an odd linguistic performance. The story is here. It begins:

As the Supreme Court investigates the extraordinary leak this spring of a draft opinion of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights. 

In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with the New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.

It's the passive voice in the first sentence of the second paragraph that seems awkward and unusual. The passive voice is what linguists call a construction that uses a form of the verb "to be" in order to leave out the sentence subject or agent—you might say, for example, that "the ball was hit" instead of "John hit the ball." In this case, the second paragraph informs us only that Schenck "was told" of the outcome. Maybe in his interviews with the Times Schenck didn't say who told him?

No, that's not it, but it seems like it's really hard for the Times to get to the point. Here's the fourth paragraph:

Mr. Schenck's allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistle-blower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Mr. Schenck's allegation.

I was at first confused by the phrase "a denial by a sitting justice," though if I'd stopped to consider I suppose I might have hit on the conclusion that Schenck must have told the Times that a sitting justice was the source of the leak. It would be odd, however, that the identity of a Supreme Court leaker was held back until after his denial had been clumsily mentioned. Anyway, I plunged unthinkingly ahead, and eventually got to the story's ninth and tenth paragraphs:

In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck's star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by the Times. "Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails," she wrote.

Mr. Schenck said Mrs. Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby, and that Justice Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that's exactly what happened. . . .

Why so much wheel spinning in the mud before divulging that Justice Alito goes out to dinner with Christian evangelical activists and lets them know that he's authored the opinion that will make them and their friends at Hobby Lobby happy? "You can get your PR releases ready because Sam Alito's come through again!" Seems like you shouldn't have to turn inside the paper from page 1 to receive this information. 

I'm coming toward the view that Alito is the likely source of the leak in the abortion case as well. If his lips were loose in 2014, there's no reason to think they'd be sealed in 2022. The probable motive in the abortion case would have been to lock in the decision before anyone squishy defected. Imagine the abuse that, say, Kavanaugh would suffer if it was known that his late change of heart or mind allowed Roe to stand. I'm tempted to think, too, that once you've admitted Alito as a young man must have done well on standardized tests measuring academic potential, you've exhausted his store of attractive human traits. 

Reading the story is like wallowing in stinky mire but there is one moment of unintended comic relief:

In the interview, Mrs. Wright said that while she did not have her calendars from those days, she believed the night in question involved a dinner at the Alitos' home during which she fell ill. She said that the justice drove her and her husband back to their hotel, and that this might have been the news she wanted to share with Mr. Schenck.

I'm trying to imagine Mr. Schenck's disappointment when, having been warned against email as a vehicle of communication for Mrs. Wright's portentous news, he placed a phone call and was told only that she'd left the party early feeling ill. She's a high-toned old Christian lady and also a liar. For a recent Times story that's sickening through and through, no comic relief, try this one.

 

More people have written about Escher sentences than I

What linguists call "Escher sentences" at first seem sensible even though, on inspection, their apparent soundness dissolves. A common example is:

More people have been to Berlin than I have.

Maybe the way to approach the weirdness of this sentence is to note that there is an implied ellipses at the end, and that the common way to clarify the intended meaning would be to understand:

More people have been to Berlin than I have [been to Berlin].

But this isn't helpful—in fact, it's easier to see that there's something wrong with the "clarification."  Two things are being compared but what are they? If more people have done X than Y, then you should indicate what X and Y are. In this case, though, there's only one thing mentioned—"been to Berlin." If "been to Berlin" is not what belongs in the placeholder at the end, then anything goes:

More people have been to Berlin than I have [knocked up].

If it can mean anything, then it means nothing, and no one will understand.

Yet no one on the receiving end of

More people have been to Berlin than I have

is apt to object or even experience confusion. Ordinary language rules may decree that the sentence has no meaning, but everyone thinks they understand, and they probably do—which is also pretty weird. The leading candidate is 

Some people have been to Berlin more often than I [have been to Berlin].

There are other candidates—for example:

I'm not the only person who's been to Berlin. 

The first interpretation makes the assumption that the comparison at issue is not quantity of people but rather quantity of trips. The second interpretation makes the assumption that the issue at hand does not pertain to any kind of quantitative comparison at all. The way you settle on one option or the other, or some option I haven't thought of, probably depends mostly upon context, which is the main reason linguists are interested in Escher sentences in the first place. It seems there’s a lot more to language comprehension than grasping language rules. Consider these two sentences:

(A) No head injury is too minor to be ignored.

(B) No head injury is too minor to be taken seriously.

These sentences must have opposite meanings, right? Which one means that a minor head injury should be taken seriously, not ignored? By ordinary language rules, there's a case to be made for (B), the import of which might be clarified and amplified:

Is the injury too minor to be taken seriously? Then it's not a head injury.

Since the sentences have opposite meanings, and (B) means that even minor head injuries should be taken seriously, it follows that (A) means that minor head injuries can be ignored. But doesn't everyone agree that (A) says the opposite of that? It seems that we might be able to agree that (A) and (B) mean the same thing, despite the fact that "ignored" is the opposite of "take seriously." I'd tell you what's going on here if I understood it myself. Do ordinary language rules require (A) to mean the opposite of what everyone "feels" it means? I don't think that's clearly the case, but I will note that if you try to clarify the meaning of (A) in the same way I clarified the meaning of (B)—

Is the injury too minor to be ignored? . . .

—you introduce a problem that didn't arise before, since the meaning of something "too minor to be ignored" is known only to Yogi Berra and a few other philosophers. 

Tolerable and its antonyms

 

I was out driving somewhere yesterday, radio tuned to an NPR news show, when the host said the current situation was "intolerable," whereupon the interviewee asserted it was worse than that: "The situation has been intolerable for the last 20 years," she said. I wonder for how long the intolerable can persist before it arrives at one of Jane Austen's favorite adjectives, "tolerable," as in:

The suitor had a tolerable income. 

Thirty years? Samuel Beckett, Jane's colleague on the Humanities syllabus, would probably say 70 or 80, to coincide with life expectancy.

ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.

VLADIMIR: That's what you think.

 

Yens, let's hit the beer barn

I enjoyed taking this survey, "How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk," from the New York Times' Upshot Blog. You answer 25 questions, mostly about what you call certain things and how you pronounce certain words, and it tells you where you're from. I think there's something to it. When I was done, it said the cities most closely matching my dialect are Grand Rapids, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis/St. Paul. (I've lived in the Twin Cities area my whole life.) Of my 25 answers, the ones that apparently go the farthest toward placing me in the upper Midwest are my word for something that is diagonally across two streets ("kitty-corner") and the word for a sugary, carbonated beverage ("pop"). I think I've noticed that, in the South, any pop is a Coke, in the same way that around here any tissue can be a kleenex, even if it's a Puffs. The places with the dialects most unlike mine are in the South: Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, and Birmingham, Alabama. The distinguishing traits here seem to be less what things are called and more how they're pronounced. The first syllable of lawyer I pronounce to rhyme with boy; the women who married my parents' brothers are my aunts, but, instead of pronouncing their title as it's spelled, I make them sound like social insects. You know what's weird? If talking, I'd certainly refer to my Aunt (pronounced ant) Karen. But if reading aloud, like at night to young children, I think I might very well say it like it's spelled, almost as if the way the word looks on the page persuades me I'm "wrong."

My relatives put me in mind of another of the 25 survey items—the difference between "dinner" and "supper." With me, it's not time of day: the meals go breakfast, lunch, supper, and there is no "dinner." If, however, a meal is large enough, and formal enough, like on a holiday, it attains the status of "dinner," no matter when it's served. But I know this is not how it was on the farm my mom grew up on in far south-central Minnesota. They ate all the time, because I think farming then was a lot of physical labor, and the meals went breakfast, lunch, dinner, lunch, supper. Dinner, around 1 in the afternoon, wasn't formal but it was big and hot—roasts, mashed potatoes, overcooked vegetables, all sorts of bizarre things done with jello. Supper was usually leftovers from dinner. Lunch, served in midmorning and again midafternoon, was sandwiches and some selection of bars, cookies, cake, and pie, always with a lot of coffee. The men worked outside all day and the women worked in the kitchen all day. The women got stout. 

I was captivated by this item from the survey: What do you call a drive-through liquor store? The options are:

brew thru
party barn
bootlegger
beer barn
beverage barn
we have these but no special word for them
I have never heard of such a thing

I've heard of such a thing but I guess for a Minnesotan the last choice is the most accurate. I love the poetic names, the rhyming "brew thru" and the alliterative "beer barn," which seems superior to the polysyllabic "beverage barn," though that's not bad either. Everything that's unfamiliar is attractive to me. I can't tell a Boston accent from a Brooklyn one but I know I love listening to both, and better yet would be a southern drawl if it weren't associated in my mind with the sounds made by, for example, Lindsey Graham. 

A woman I used to do business with grew up in the Appalachian part of Ohio, and from her I learned "yens," the southeastern Ohio equivalent of "you guys" or "y'all." I guess it's a contraction of "ye ones." She said when she first moved to Minnesota she thought everyone sounded like Bob Dylan. Another oddity was how, at the end of a transaction, the clerk would say to her, "There you go." Her view was that it was more passive aggressive fake niceness. I say "there you go." Now you make my words true. We're done, get out of here!

PSA

Friends! Give your social media posts more authority than they may deserve by correctly discriminating between "capital" and "capitol." The former refers to a city. The latter refers to a building in that city. So, for example: "The MAGA dude caught a flight to the capital in order to vandalize the Capitol."

I've also been, for around a half hour now, a self-professed expert on the twenty-fifth amendment. It sounds like getting rid of Trump under its section 4 provisions would require Pence to agree with at least half the cabinet heads that their boss is a menace. Call me cynical, but I think this might explain the resignations today of Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation (and Mitch McConnell's wife), and Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education. They had less than two weeks to go anyway, and by quitting now they remove the possibility of having to make a call about whether the risk of limping to January 20 with Trump as president is acceptably low. 

The strongest argument against this view is that it would require Chao and DeVos to have concluded that Pence might have the gumption to do what needs to be done. 

 

Sound smart in meetings

 

I'm not a devotee of The Simpsons, so it's probably not the finest moment in the show's history, but a 12-second clip of my favorite of the ones I know is above. It's a work meeting. The big bosses have been outlining their stupid proposal. A guy interrupts to say, mildly and without rancor, "Excuse me, but aren't 'paradigm' and 'proactive' just buzz words that dumb people use to sound important?" No one says anything for a second. Then he says, "I'm fired, aren't I?"

I had around 30,000 chances to be such a hero and turned them all down. A wasted career. I remember now that one of my many bosses was fond of forming adjectives by adding -ful to the most ordinary nouns. For example, instead of achieving proactivity with plans, she urged us to be planful. An idea too banal even to mention—we should have a plan!—was thus transfigured into something like a Zen state of being. 

Back when they went to school, my kids had lessons in "mindfulness" administered by, I believe, the staff mindfulness specialist. Maybe this is so that they don't feel the need to smoke pot? I asked the older one about it, because I figured the younger one would not have been sufficiently in the moment to remember anything about her mindfulness training, but she (the older one) just shrugged her shoulders. Not that that is an unusual response to my questions about school. I think educators understand what's "extra" because distance learning appears to be mainly math, science, reading, and social studies. Though a new term is about to start and one of my kids is registered for "choir." I'm a little curious about how that works over the internet, but most likely the teacher has been planful about the paradigm shift.

Maybe she—I know it's a she—should work in the Trump administration as it seems there was never a "testing plan" and, now that a vaccine is available, it seems there isn't a plan to get it injected into arms, either. I'm not the kind of smart ass who is against having a plan. 

 

Notes and comments

Twins won again last night, this time 3-2 against the Indians in Cleveland. We've had a lot of close, entertaining and generally low-scoring games against divisional rivals Cleveland and Kansas City. Maybe this shouldn't surprise inasmuch as Cleveland and Kansas City both pitch a lot better than they hit. Good news is we've been winning our share of the games. Last night, a solo bomb by Cruz and another with a man aboard by Sano was enough. Our bullpen has been great. Ditto for Kenta Maeda, last night's starter who allowed one run in five innings pitched. His ERA now stands at 2.21. In the American League this season, only the Indians (87) have allowed fewer runs than the Twins (102). 

During the inning breaks, I looked in on the Republicans. Yes, I enjoy picking scabs when there is nothing else to do. I happened to see the segment in which Trump, sitting in the Oval Office with some Americans he said he freed from captivity, told a pastor who'd been held in  Erdogan's Turkey: "To me, President Erdogan was very good." The minister had just described the conditions under which he'd been held for 21 months and he shifted slightly in his seat. I'm used to Trump loving on dictators and tyrants but it's a little weird that, as this conversation occurred a couple years ago, it was edited to present to the world at the RNC—and the praise for Erdogan made the cut. Reminds me how, according to legend, at the Mets first spring training manager Casey Stengel was heard complaining, to no one in particular, "Doesn't anyone here know how to play baseball?" No, because most of them are named Trump, unless their name is Kushner and they're married to a Trump, so it's not as if they're the ones signing off on the video because they performed so well in the minor leagues. 

The Falwells sure sound like a fun couple! Count me among those men who fail to understand the pleasures associated with watching as another man screws your wife, but whatevs! As the Woody Allen character says in one of his movies, when it comes to human sexuality "normal" is not a useful concept. Real journalists don't have to take advice from me but I think they should investigate contacts between Falwell and the Trump campaign in 2016. Notwithstanding Trump's Christian lifestyle, many evangelicals were suspicious of him, and it helped his cause when Falwell endorsed him after visiting with Michael Cohen. This may sound wild but what if the force of Cohen's presentation was augmented by "evidence" that some secular humanists might describe as "racy"?

Oh, they're already on it!

The McCloskeys sound nice, too. They're the St. Louis power couple—personal injury lawyers, not evangelical leaders—who earlier this summer pointed guns at BLM protestors outside their mansion. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiles them here. More than one reason not to buy in these gated communities. The covenants and restrictions! The association dues! The pricks next door! Of course the McCloskeys were recruited to tell their tale of woe at the RNC last night, but alack and alas, I missed their segment. 

Why are the police in Kenosha so tight-lipped about the "officer involved shooting" in their city on Sunday? One theory might be that they are busy developing a story that is in line with what's already known and won't be refuted by anything the public might subsequently find out. It's referred to as "an officer involved shooting" because the officer, from a distance of about one foot, aims his gun into the back of a black guy and pulls the trigger around a half dozen times. So, in that limited sense, yes, the "officer" was "involved." 

D- for social studies, F in math

 

A few days ago, I saw this headline—"Police officers killed surge 28% this year"—on the social media feed of someone I know to be in the MAGA cult. They love this kind of stuff. To me, it seems like a hard sell for their beloved incumbent. "Things are spiraling out of control on my watch, re-elect me!" As Julia Louis-Dreyfus pointed out at the DNC this evening, everyone thought that when Trump, in his inaugural address, kept talking about "American carnage," he was putting forward a criticism of the recent past, not making a promise about the future.

Anyway, I clicked on the link and read the article, which is from ABC News. Here is the third paragraph:

Shoop became the 32nd U.S. law enforcement officer shot to death this year on July 13, marking a 28% jump in felonious officer deaths over the same period in 2019, according to data from the FBI.

Quick math question: 32 is 28% more than what number? I think the answer is 25. So I'm thinking that last year at this time, 25 officers had been killed, and this year it's up to 32. Is it fair to call this a "surge" and an excuse to commence performing sociology? To me, it seems more plausibly another data point in a random walk. In the article, the phrase "data from the FBI" is a hyperlink. When you click on it, you're taken here, and it turns out that the actual figure from last year was not 25 but 27. Here again is the headline: "Police officers killed surge 28% this year." Not great, because (a) 27 to 32 is hardly a "surge" and (b) even if you must hyperventilate about a "surge," there's no way it's a 28% surge. 

Bifurcated

Want to know a word assigned to every work shift, with the result that it logs more hours per week than should be permitted by federal law? Iconic. Its chief rival is perhaps ironic. Is there something about the sound these words make that is irresistible to any journalist within halloing-distance of the original meanings? It seems the former has lost its connection to worship and veneration and is now just notable after having exerted itself sufficiently to induce labored breathing. The latter is deployed in any circumstance giving off a whiff of the paradoxical / coincidental / counterintuitive / contradictory. Also, since I'm fault-finding, it apparently is a federal law that any favorable review of a book or movie must be unilluminated by luminous.   

Unrelatedly (obviously) (but I'll say so anyway), it's odd that so far as I know none of the women body shamed or otherwise insulted by our president has ever observed that, though supposedly rich, he seems to own just one golf shirt—a white one purchased before he ate his most recent 250 Big Macs. Maybe they're just thankful he never wears shorts.

More on Lamar Alexander

I know that Lamar Alexander is Lamar Alexander, not James Joyce, and it's likely a fool's errand to parse too closely the statement he issued announcing he'd vote against more evidence in the Senate impeachment conference, but I've read the statement again and, dammit, I can't help myself. Here is the paragraph I quoted yesterday: 

It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation. When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations, it undermines the principle of equal justice under the law. But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year's ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.

First thing I noticed was that "inappropriate" seems like a somewhat pale adjective to affix to what Alexander, elsewhere in his statement, acknowledges the president did. Second thing I noticed is that there is a large volume of incoherence packed into the brief paragraph. What is the senator talking about in the second of the three sentences? It seems that "such investigations" could only refer to the investigation that he says, in the first sentence, the US sought to "encourage." But there never was such an investigation, nor was one ever contemplated: the whole point was to damage Biden just by announcing there would be an investigation. The object was to create an ethical cloud over Biden that Trump could then never cease talking about, in the event Biden became the nominee. But Alexander makes it sound as if Trump's sin was to interfere (inappropriately of course) with a Ukrainian investigation that was never launched and was never even intended to launch. The only question was whether there would be a phony announcement of an investigation. It isn't possible to interfere with a nonexistent investigation. Am I missing something, or is Alexander just on sabbatical from reality?

Actually, the Constitution does give the Senate power to remove the president from office and "ban him from this year's ballot." There isn't anything in the Constitution forbidding impeachment in years divisible by 4. I guess it is Alexander's point that the Senate shouldn't exercise this particular constitutional remedy for acts that are merely "inappropriate." But now we are back to "inappropriate" being an inappropriate description of the behavior. It's worth stating what exactly happened. Congress, exercising its authority under the Constitution, appropriated $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Trump secretly withheld release of the aid—an act that, according to the GAO, was itself against the law. He then worked with his team to extort from Ukraine, which desperately needed the aid, a televised announcement of a sham investigation intended to damage his political opponent. To get the aid, they make the announcement, on CNN. Alexander's conclusion is that this was "inappropriate" but that the remedy is an election, not impeachment. The election he puts forward as the remedy is the very election Trump was attempting to subvert by exercising his presidential authority to execute a corrupt scheme. 

There's a few other things about the statement that are pretty weird—for example, the way Alexander keeps putting scare quotes around "mountain of evidence," as if to taunt the house managers for characterizing their case in this overblown fashion, even though his statement acknowledges that the house managers are right, they proved their case, Trump did just what they say he did, and the evidence is so convincing that there is no sense calling for more. Then there is this:

The framers believed there should never, ever be a partisan impeachment. That is why the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate for conviction. Yet not one House Republican voted for these articles. If this shallow, hurried and wholly partisan impeachment were to succeed, it would rip the country apart, pouring gasoline on the fire of cultural divisions that already exist.

Um, the reason it's "partisan" is that the Republican party is now just a MAGA cult. You cross the leader, you're out. Justin Amash is out, and John Bolton will be too if he ever tells the truth. Under these circumstances, any opposition will necessarily be "partisan." There really is no argument here, unless you count Alexander's fear of what the cultists might do. But twice two wouldn't be five if the innumerate threatened to riot. I think it's interesting that Alexander doesn't seem worried that people like me will take to the streets with gas cans and matches after the Senate puts the finishing touches on its cover up.

"Jesus, what's the world's second greatest deliberative body?" I wonder, standing in line to order my latte.  

Impeachment notes

1. Here is one of the paragraphs from Sen. Alexander's statement announcing that he will vote No on witnesses and documents:

It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation. When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations, it undermines the principle of equal justice under the law. But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year's ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.

My possibly idiosyncratic point is that forms of the word "inappropriate" deserve here time-and-a-half wages. I think I've noticed that the word has gained an inflated currency in the second half of my adult life. Does it date from President Clinton having deployed it to describe his extra-curriculars with Monica? No, probably he was making use of an existing trend. In the realm of child behavior, what my parents called "bad" is now "inappropriate." When you hear the word, immediately consider the possibility that the speaker is trying to skip past something ugly. In honest language, the word should be reserved for misdeeds on the level of, say, a social gaffe. It would be inappropriate to say "shit" while sipping tea with the queen, but that's not what Trump was impeached for.

2. To persist with the language theme, and to appear plausibly bipartisan, I should say that it annoys the shit out of me when Mayor Pete burnishes his credentials by noting that he's from the "heartland." Where is that? Apparently it includes northwestern Indiana but what exactly are the boundaries? Quite possibly Amy Klobuchar is guilty too but Buttigieg is profligate. What I hate is the implicit assumption that some Americans are more American than other Americans, and that it depends on geography. To spell it out, there's no question about someone living in a small town in Kansas. The Bronx, Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Brentwood—not so much.

3. Though, to be fair, our representative democracy is itself organized in such a way as to elevate some Americans over others. Now that it's apparent that the vote in the impeachment "trial" for more evidence—documents and witnesses—is going to fail in the Senate by 49-51, I did some back of the envelope number grinding, and it turns out that the 49 senators on the losing side of the vote represent, by population, 53% of the country. With regard to the final question, acquittal or conviction, a two-thirds majority of senators is required to give Trump the boot. This means 34 senators have the power to acquit him. The 18 Trumpiest states, as measured by his margin of victory in the 2016 election, have 34 Republican senators, but only 18% of the country's population. 

4. The above is not sufficient to account for a 49-51 vote where, according to polls, more than two-thirds of the public sides with the 49. But it's not as if the Republican senators in the 51 are exhibiting courage by supporting a principle over and against public opinion. The 25-30% of always-Trumpers in the population make up considerably more than half the electorate in a Republican primary. Moreover, in a general election against a Democrat, even someone like Cory Gardner, from the bluish purple state of Colorado, has no chance at all without boffo support from always-Trumpers. So the Senate vote on impeachment is completely explicable in terms of political calculation. The merits of the case have nothing to do with it. 

5. I was yesterday overstating the case against what's now being called The Dershowitz Rule in the example relating to a bribe offered to an elector in the electoral college. Dershowitz would say this is impeachable, since bribery is a crime, one that's explicitly mentioned in the Constitution's somewhat sketchy enumeration of impeachable offenses—"treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors." But suppose the president, persuaded that his reelection is in the national interest, exercised his authority to raise barriers to voting among demographic groups known to favor his opponent. So long as his methods were sufficiently artful to stay clear of the criminal law, he could not be impeached.

Or suppose that he withheld foreign aid appropriated by the Congress and conditioned its release on the recipient announcing a sham investigation into his political opponent. So long as he thinks his reelection is in the national interest, this is not corrupt, not impeachable. The remedy is to throw him out in an election. It seems an irrelevant detail that a fair election is what he's seeking to overthrow.

6. The vote against witnesses is a windfall for John Bolton.

The prince and the gargoyles

 

I watched yesterday's press conference featuring Pompeo and Mnuchin. If she'd lived till now, Diane Arbus would want to photograph these guys, and she could force on you their resemblance to gargoyles. But she wouldn't have to persuade me. 

There was some verbal sparring about the meaning of "imminent," a reporter indicating in her question that such a characterization was false, since the Administration could identify neither a time nor a place for the "imminent" attack. She was right about that but also wasting her time: Pompeo simply denied that there was a contradiction, even though anyone can see there is a contradiction.

Another contradiction, perhaps harder to swat away, concerns how the concept of imminence is incompatible with the Administration's story about why Soleimani was killed. The planning was done. The attack was imminent. And it was forestalled by killing one guy. This does not compute. Please explain more about how the imminent attack was foiled by this one targeted assassination. It seems the fully assembled plan is now disassembled—we're safe—but it's impossible to understand how the killing of Soleimani achieved the disassembling.  

On another topical topic, I think I've relieved myself of my opinion concerning that cliché of political talk, "words cannot express," but I find myself reaching for it anyway when chatter turns to Meghan and her Prince. Words probably can convey my endless indifference, but I cannot myself do better than "endless indifference"—maybe Shakespeare or Jonathan Swift or Marshall Mathers III, but not me, Eric. To get my attention the Prince, instead of marrying a hot young American girl, would have to convert to Roman Catholicism, take Holy Orders, and enter a Trappist monastery in Indonesia, something like that. 

 

In National Review

Copy editing test: describe the problem with this sentence, from an article by Rich Lowry, editor of National Review:

[Soleimani] was also a cold-blooded killer of Americans who deserved to die.

Were I a copy editor at National Review—what grammarians call a "condition way contrary to fact"—I think I'd advise my boss's boss's boss's boss that the referent of "who" is comically hazy. You have to understand something beyond grammar to understand that "who" refers to Soleimani. By grammar alone, it could apply to "Americans." Soleimani is a cold-blooded killer of Americans. Which Americans? The ones who deserve to be killed!

I'm a regular reader of NRO, National Review Online. The huffings and puffings of the dogmatic right-wingers are a source of amusement, and the posts by the more reasonable ones, when for example arguing for the impeachment and removal of Trump, gain force by the suspicion that they amount to statements against interest: the editorialist hates to say it, but the merits of the case insist. The occasional internecine dust-ups are highly entertaining and, sometimes, instructive. When, for example, New York's state legislature was in 2011 poised to pass a same-sex marriage bill, National Review writer Kathryn Jean Lopez quoted, approvingly, Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who said, "Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China or North Korea." This elicited from Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts, who four years hence would publish in National Review a 7000-word essay defending same-sex marriage, the following retort:

So it is your view, Kathryn, that the action of democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the citizens of the State of New York, is tyrannical in a way that justifies comparison to North Korea, a state in which an absolute ruler has burned people alive in a stadium. Okay. But now I want a new word for what "tyranny" used to mean.

I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim.

It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.

I doubt the reaction of a North Korean refugee could have been more on point. I've learned that most everything Steorts writes is . . . superior to the musings of archbishops. He doesn't seem to be a very active author, however. Maybe as "managing editor" he's more involved with managing stuff, or maybe he's too far off the reservation to be good for business. Most people don't surf over to NRO in order to read a closely argued piece opposing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Obama is a false prophet," on the other hand: click bait. 

Jay Nordlinger is another enjoyable NRO editor/writer, though his moderate, above-the-fray tone sometimes annoys me, as when for example he recently wrote, concerning the Electoral College:

Elizabeth Warren could not have been plainer, in this tweet: "My goal is to get elected—but I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College. I want my second term to be elected by direct vote." 

Democrats are not very happy about the Electoral College, and I can hardly blame them. These things are "situational." If the Senate filibuster, for example, works for you, you like it and defend it; if it doesn't, the opposite. 

Democrats were bitten by the Electoral College in 2000, when George W. Bush won, and bitten again—really hard—in 2016, when Donald Trump won. What if Trump had won the popular vote and Hillary Clinton had beaten him out in the Electoral College?

Here's what I think would have happened: Trump supporters would have said, "You know, it was a tough day, but our Framers were geniuses, and that's the way the cookie crumbles in this republic of ours. We wish the president-elect well—indeed, we are praying for her—and we will see her at the polls in 2020.

Democrats, in turn, would have said, "Glad to have won this year, but the Electoral College really has to go, because it frustrates the will of a majority or a plurality. And people—wherever they live—are paramount, you know."

You had a good laugh? There is no principle here at all—it's purely partisan, purely tribal.

Possibly I lack a sense of humor on this topic, but I'm put off by the undertone of self-congratulatory adulation for having comprehended the obvious. Notice, though, that his point is predicated on another condition way contrary to fact—Clinton did not win the election despite losing the popular vote, and there was virtually no likelihood of that happening, especially compared to the likelihood of what, in the event, actually did happen. What does Nordlinger think about what actually happened? Some say twice two is x, others say it's y, and if conditions changed, they'd switch sides and arguments, and apparently if you're smart enough to notice that much you are excused from looking into the question of what twice two actually equals. 

I liked the long first part of this Nordlinger column, however.

While watching tv

The Republican, Dan Bishop, won the Special Election for the seat from the 9th congressional district in North Carolina that I wrote about the other day, here. It was close, 51 to 49 percent, in a district Trump had carried by more than 11 points.

I get a kick out of the things cable news "analysts" say as the returns come in. When it looked like the Democrat might win, narrowly, there was talk about "alarm bells" and "hair on fire" at the White House. Then the Republican ekes it out and "a win is a win is a win." The idea is that the Special Election is an early test of Trump's strength in one-thirteenth of "the battleground state of North Carolina," and apparently a decline of 12 points warrants an F, whereas if the downturn is only 10—passing grade and nothing to fear! That Trump won North Carolina by only about three-and-a-half points seems like a relevant fact. Consequently, if you accept the premise that the Special Election result foreshadows the 2020 outcome in North Carolina, and your "hair is on fire" at -12, perhaps it should still be smoldering at -10.

Trump tweeted that his rally in North Carolina earlier in the week saved the day for Bishop. It's more likely, however, that he's a narcissistic dope.

Of course the same cable news "analysts" have opinions on the contest for the Democratic nomination. I was watching last night when one of them said the race hadn't changed for weeks: Biden still in first, Warren still surging. I wonder how long a candidate can "surge" and remain in second place? Considering that she's been "surging" for weeks, you'd think that by now Warren might have "surged into the lead." Maybe more modest verbs don't deliver as many eyeballs to the advertisements. 

And maybe I shouldn't channel skim between innings of the Twins' game. They beat the Nationals last night, 5-0, to remain five games ahead of Cleveland. Speaking of advertisements, Bob Eubanks, looking like a display in a wax museum, is on every channel. Do you owe Uncle Sam more than $10,000?  Call this number to convert it into a refund! We won't stop running this ad till we've heard from everyone who was ever enrolled at Trump University.

Twins. Grammar.

I knocked some sense into the Twins with that rant the other day. Since then, they've hit just one more home run while winning two games. Not that it's safe to conclude that a team is just fine because they won a couple of games against the Tigers (whose record stands at 40-95).

The Twins' only homer in the last two games came today, from Ehire Adrianza (pictured), whom I took a cheap shot at for his poor play in right field three games back. Gonzalez is injured, Buxton is injured, the manager inserts Adrianza in right field because he's a versatile player, and then, playing out of position, he kicks it around and of course some smart ass with a blog notices. Adrianza is an able, solid, hustling player, and I like him a lot. But I'm not going to apologize for what I said about Cron, even though I see his fielding percentage is .991, which sounds pretty good—less than one error every hundred chances! But first basemen have high fielding percentages because they get a lot of chances, most of them easy. They hardly ever have to throw the ball very far. The other infielders throw it to them, and they just catch it. If the throw is low, and they can't come up with it, the error belongs to the guy who bounced it to them. Pretty sure Polanco has more throwing errors than he would if, say, Hrbek or Mauer were the first baseman. Plus, Cron doesn't get to balls it seems to me he should get to. Today a foul pop over his head landed on the warning track—my daughter calls it "the worry trail"—at just about the same moment he looked down to see whether he was running out of room.

Well, he's got 20-some homers, so whatevs, I guess. I will apologize if he gets hot and finishes the season with 30 homers and 100 RBI, which would be a lot of production from a guy who only plays about three-fourths of the time and usually bats toward the bottom of the order.

Did you notice my use of whom above? Pretty sure it's right, though it sounds a little unnatural. This business of grammar and how things sound is somewhat mysterious to me. Got asked by someone at Lake Harriet recently if I would take a picture of "my friends and I." That's wrong, right? You should ask whether someone will take a picture of "my friends and me." You can tell what's right by taking out "my friends." You would never ask someone (if English is your first language), "Will you take a picture of I?" It's, "Will you take a picture of me?" So it's also, "Will you take a picture of my friends and me?" My question is: Why does the ear of a native speaker protect against error in the one case but not in the other? Why does one mistake sound ridiculous but not the other?

It's a holiday, so the second-stringers are on the cable news channels, and I obsessively notice their language tics, too. A meteorologist reported,

The storm is moving slowly toward Florida's Atlantic coast

and, a minute later, under cross examination from the anchor, repeated herself (nearly):

The storm is moving painfully slow toward Florida.

Is there any error here? If we're just talking about what sounds wrong and what sounds right, I'd say

The storm is moving slow toward Florida

sounds wrong. You should definitely say "slowly." But the following also sounds wrong (though more modestly):

The storm is moving painfully slowly toward Florida.

But where is the logic? If you only care about rate, it's "slowly," but, add an interest in the emotional response caused by the rate, and now "slow" is suddenly correct? How about this:

The storm is moving—painfully, slowly—toward Florida. 

Can the form of the word you choose be right or wrong depending on how fast you talk, the inflection you give it? I also would like to know which of the following is correct:

She's smarter than me

or

She's smarter than I.

(Don't say both are correct no matter who she is!) The former sounds better to me. But for sure you could also say, correctly, "She's smarter than I am." So it seems maybe you should say

She's smarter than I

(since you can't say)

She's smarter than me am.

Speaking regionally

So one good thing about the government shut down, at least for those of us who find regional speech variations "interesting" and even charming, and have worried that they'd be wiped out by a usurping dialect of National Media Monochrome, so that in time we'll all sound like cable news anchors:

Where I live (Minnesota) we "call in sick" to work, but I've noticed that the national media talkers, who live in the northeast, have been reporting on how TSA workers and other feds are now "calling off" or "calling out," and I see  by the above map compiled by Grammar Girl that the phrase you deploy indeed depends on where you live.  The shades of meaning, or emphasis, suggested by the different prepositions are for some of us language dweebs a fun source for speculation.  I think I like "call in" the least, possibly because to my Minnesota ear it's familiar and so the least arresting, but isn't the "in" for the place you call kind of general and dull?  Where else would you call?  The broad formulation must be responsible for "call in sick," since there are conceivably other reasons you'd place the call.  But if you "call out" or "call off," the preposition alone carries the meaning, or at least suggests it:  I'm off, out for the day, (sick).  To me it seems sort of stodgy to "call in sick," like you're embarrassed about it, feeling guilty, and therefore have to supply the reason, which is one that no one can argue with: sickness.  Whereas "calling out" and "calling off" elide the reason and simply announce that you won't be there.  It's comparatively casual, almost aggressive: I won't be there, none of your business why.  If we think of pretty widely held notions about regional differences in character types, it's fitting that it's here in the Midwest, Lake Wobegone Land, where people should feel the need to "call in sick."  

These little prepositions, many of them only a letter different from each other, and denoting all sorts of esoteric meanings, have got to be the despair of adult English-language learners.  Like "in" and "on"--a letter different, to indicate different locations, which is bad enough but you could deal with it.  However, I have been writing here "on" the subject of regional speech differences.  What is the logic requiring "on"?  I mean, why is it "on" instead of "in"?  I haven't a clue.  I suspect there is no logic to it and you just have to memorize the idiomatic expressions.  How the idioms attained their status is beyond me.

As a parent of kids who not long ago were making rapid advances in language acquisition, I've noticed that they obviously first learn rules and then eventually master the  exceptions.  For example, every little kid spends some time referring to their two foots before eventually figuring out that they have a right and left foot but two feet.  First the regular forms, then the irregular exceptions.  This business with the prepositions is like an infinite field of irregularity and it seems odd to me that I haven't noticed kids making errors with them before they start getting them right.  A local business, owned by recent immigrants, boasts on their truck of having "the best tacos on the Twin Cities."  I don't blame them!  Yet it's not a mistake I remember hearing one of my native-speaking 3-year-olds make.  Another mystery.

Trump: "This is what I've been saying"

It happens that yesterday, while I was typing up my opus on Trump's bogus claims of voter fraud, the president was himself sitting for an oval office interview with The Daily Caller.  One of the questions related to the ongoing vote count in Broward County, Florida.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States:

Look, you know, the bottom line--it's, she's [Broward County election commissioner Brenda Snipes] a disaster.  You look at her past, she's a disaster.  Even with me.  I won Florida and, you remember?  That area, Broward, didn't come in.  It didn't come in.  I think Palm Beach was like--they wouldn't call Florida, I won.  Then it got to a point where I won by enough that all the votes of the people that lived there would, you know, in other words--you can only put in so many votes, although she may change that system.  

You can only put in a number of people that are registered voters or live there.  Now they're, I guess they were trying to take illegal voters but these are--I've been saying, this is a problem all over the country, by the way.  This is what I've been saying.

This is a problem in California that's so bad of illegals voting.  This is a California problem and if you notice, almost every race--I was watching today--out of like 11 races that are in question they're gonna win all of them.

The Republicans don't win and that's because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I've been saying for a long time.  I have no doubt about it.  And I've seen it, I've had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles.  Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.  Nobody takes anything.  It's really a disgrace what's going on.

The disgrace is that, voter ID.  If you buy, you know, a box of cereal, if you do anything, you have a voter ID.

Well, over here, the only thing you don't is if you're a voter of the United States.  A voter in the United States of America.  I think it's a disgrace what's going on.   Really a disgrace.  And they try to shame everybody by calling them racist or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID.  But voter ID is a very important thing.

If you look at what happened in New Hampshire, where thousands of people came up and voted from a very liberal part of Massachusetts and they came up in buses and they voted.  I said, 'what's going on over here,' my people said, 'you won New Hampshire easily except they have tremendous numbers of buses coming up.'  They're pouring up by the hundreds, buses of people getting out, voting.  Then they're supposed to go back within 90 days.  And of the people that are supposed to go back, almost none of them do.  In other words, they go back after the vote is over.  They go back--and I think it's like three percent--I mean, almost nobody goes back to show that, you know, that they were allowed to vote.  And so what do you do?  Recall the election.  I mean, there, you should be able to recall the election.

Whew.  I think I got that right.  The full transcript is here, if anyone wants to check my work.  It's sort of hard to transcribe, toggling back and forth between screens.  Usually you can read a sentence on one screen and memorize it long enough to type it into another screen, because the sentence is a sentence and makes sense, but that is not an advantage bestowed upon stenographers of our president's speech acts.

A question of style

 

Olivia Nuzzi is the Washington correspondent for New York magazine.  Her profile ticked upward last week when, leaving the White House, she noticed she had missed a call from a number she didn't recognize, and the digits turned out to be those of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Was Nuzzi still at the White House?  Because the president wanted to talk to her.  It developed that Trump had evidently got wind of Nuzzi interviewing people on the question: How is it that Chief of Staff John Kelly, who is widely reported to be regarded by Trump with disdain, still has a job?  And what exactly is he doing these days?  Turns out Trump wanted to steer her reporting in a certain direction, and the upshot is her startling--at least, it would be startling, if we weren't by now getting accustomed to the current president's buffoonery--article, "My Private Oval Office Press Conference With Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Mike Pompeo."  It's not much more than a transcript of the conversation.  I won't try to describe it, except to say it's not Lincolnesque.  Follow the link if you want to eavesdrop on the leader of the free world interacting with some of his top lieutenants and a reporter.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.  I wanted to weigh in on a question that Nuzzi raised the other day on her Twitter feed.  The context is an interview she did with Stormy Daniels.  Here's something Daniels told her:

I actually have Trump supporters come out and get pictures and autographs and be like, 'I just want to meet the lady that he picked to have sex with him.'  I'm like, 'What's wrong with you?'

Assuming her question is not rhetorical, I think the answer relates to the self-selection principle and the observation someone once made concerning the percentage of people seen smoking cigarettes while pumping gas who voted for Trump (100).  But that's not the  question I wanted to weigh in on, either.  

Another thing Daniels told Nuzzi is that, while working, she meets a lot of women who come out to tell her how much she means to them, that they've been used by powerful men, too, blah, blah, blah, and they get all emotional about it, and Daniels's response was: "Jesus Christ.  There's no crying in tittie bars!"  Nuzzi called this the single best quote she'd ever gotten out of anyone.  (One wag replied that only someone who'd never used an ATM in a tittie bar could possibly believe the greatest quote of all time was true.)  Anyway, Nuzzi soon discovered that she was the second journalist to have been fed this line by Daniels.  The first was Amy Chozick, of Vanity Fair, whose article containing the quote referred to "titty bars," whereas the style sheet for Nuzzi's employer, New York magazine, requires "tittie bars."  Nuzzi wondered: which is correct?  This is the question I'd like to weigh in on.

In junior high, I resolved these kinds of questions in my writing assignments by avoiding them altogether.  Just pick a different word that you know how to spell, such as "topless."  But obviously this solution won't work for a professional journalist.  Daniels said "tittie" (or "titty"), and you're quoting her words, so you'd be misquoting her if you deployed "topless."  Besides, not to get all artsy about it, but Daniels is a character in this story, and you'd be giving readers a false view of her self if you took away her slangy, carefree, half vulgar expressions.  (Think of the way people at City Hall might feel about competing neon street signs, one "Topless Revue" and the other "Tittie Bar"; it's noteworthy that the mayor would prefer the one that Daniels abjures.)

Well, is it "tittie" (analogous to "cookie") or titty (analogous to "fairy")?  I can tell you that neither one is recognized by the word processing program underlying this blogging platform's dictionary--both spellings get the squiggly red line that calls into question either your typing or your vocabulary.  I have to say that I think Nuzzi is wrong inasmuch as she suggests there is a right answer.  It's a question of style and preference.  That is, "tittie" versus "titty" is analogous to "Topless Revue" versus "Tittie Bar" (or "Titty Bar").  I prefer "tittie," I think because it's longer, and if there's something you aren't used to seeing in print I feel there should just be more of it for the eye to take in.  Also, "titty" seems too clipped and buttoned-up for what we're talking about here.

Alas, mine is a minority view.  Nuzzi sponsored an online poll in which people could voice their opinion and, of 5083 respondents, 78% preferred "Titty Bar."

In other news today, the President of the United States, after a judge dismissed Stormy Daniels's defamation lawsuit against him, composed a celebratory tweet in which he referred to her as "Horseface."  I suppose he's not the only fellow susceptible to forming a new opinion about a woman he once ... esteemed.

More language notes from cable tv

Listening to cable news talkers--lawyers, journalists, people trained in the use of language--I've concluded that to "beg the question" now means either "raise the question" (94%) or "evade the question" (6%).  That a large adult son, age 37, lives in his parents' basement begs the question whether he will die of old age down there, and, when asked about it, he begs the question by mumbling something about being out of resume paper. 

The former, exclusive meaning of the phrase, however, had to do with a logical fallacy in argumentation--namely, restating the conclusion one seeks to reach in the reasons advanced for adopting that conclusion.  Let me try that again.  If the reasons advanced for Conclusion A themselves assume Conclusion A to be true, rather than support Conclusion A, then the question of the truth of Conclusion A is being begged.  The most straightforward examples--"abortion is wrong, since it's immoral to kill fetuses"--are not very interesting, though perhaps useful in illustrating the flaw. The Wikipedia article on the subject puts forward the following specimen, which I think shows how seductive begging the question can be:

To allow every man an unbounded freedom of speech must always be, on the whole, advantageous to the State, for it is highly conducive to the interests of the community that each individual should enjoy a liberty perfectly unlimited of expressing his sentiments.

Possibly since it was smart-seeming people who accused others of begging the question, the phrase attained a certain cachet, and in time increased currency dragged it across a grammarian's border, and in even more time the original meaning was routed.  If someone today uses "beg the question" to describe a circular argument, they probably also observe the difference between who and whom, which is almost sort of showoffy.

I also hear distinguished talkers, for example US senators, make a mistake that I think is still unambiguously a mistake--for example:

The allegation was not relayed to my staff and I until the day before yesterday. 

The senator should say:

The allegation wasn't relayed to my staff and me until the day before yesterday. 

I'd like to know why the ear of a native speaker protects against mistakes of this kind only when the pronoun is unaccompanied.  No one would ever say,

The allegation was not relayed to I. 

But, for some reason,

The allegation was not relayed to my staff and I

doesn't sound so bad.                

Scott Pruitt writes to Don

 

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's resignation letter to Trump:

Mr. President, it has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA.  Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration.  Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends.

That is why it is hard for me to advise you I am stepping down as Administrator of the EPA effective as of July 6.  It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring.  However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people.  I believe you are serving as President today because of God's providence.  I believe that same providence brought me into your service.  I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people.  Thank you again Mr. President for the honor of serving you and Godspeed in all that you put your hand to.

Your Faithful Friend,

Scott Pruitt

Gag me!  Commentators have been scurrying to merriam-webster.com in search of synonyms for "smarmy" and "obsequious,"an exercise that, judging by the wooden repetitions of forms of "bless" and "serve," Pruitt is not himself inclined to perform. 

"My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people"--this doesn't even mean anything, it's just a mash of words functioning as a verbal hand job.  Truly, I wonder whether some of the American people will wonder whether the last phrase--"all that you put your hand to"--may be explained as the author's unconscious recognition of what Trump is apt to use this letter for now that his handlers are keeping him away from playmates and porn stars.

Jeff Sessions: the hat, the hermeneutics

 

In "200 journalism clichés--and counting" the Washington Post takes up a topic of interest to me.  I'm glad it's not just a list, for the explanations and side snark are more than half the fun.

Needless to say (then don't say it)

Suffice it to say (if it suffices, then just say it) 

Opens/offers a rare window (unless it is a real window that is in fact unusual)

Outside the box (describes creative thinking--with a cliché)

Many (196) more.  I see that "thoughtful people"--which is, or used to be, a favorite of someone responsible for editorial writing at the Minneapolis Star Tribune--doesn't make the list.  I think it's what you say when you don't have an argument with which to support your policy preference.  Just attribute the preference to an imagined deep thinker who probably dresses in tweeds and smokes a pipe.  

But maybe it's time to devote some attention to the clichés, not of journalists, but of journalism consumers.  I'd like to nominate, "This is not who we are," often spoken as: "This is NOT who WE are."  It's got some miles on it but has been used a lot, really a lot, in the past couple of weeks, in connection with the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at our southern border.  Since it is what we are in fact doing, I guess it is who we are.  Why does that not count as an unanswerable rebuttal?  I suppose the cliché is an emotional version of, "The policy goes against our principles"--but, in that case, aren't we just extending to ourselves a benefit that we deny to everyone else?  The English and the French and the governments of "shithole countries" we judge by their actions, but when we're judged by ours--well, "it's not who we are."  It seems that the answer to the question of who we are is: people who ignore the principles we love to lecture on.  

Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, isn't shy about owning the appalling policy.  He saw fit today to remind some of his kindhearted evangelical friends of Romans, chapter 13.  I'm guessing the part he likes best goes:

For rulers are not a terror to good contact, but to bad.  Would you have no fear of him who is in authority?  Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good.  But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.  

But from St. Paul esteeming the Roman authorities it does not necessarily follow that we must all similarly esteem all things Trump.  By such logic, the American colonists should have knuckled under to British rule, slavery should not have been abolished, and Martin Luther King should have obeyed Jim Crow laws.

Also, I've never said it before, so in case I have the big one in my sleep tonight I want to put it out there now:  though the competition is formidable, no one has ever looked dumber in one of those MAGA baseball caps than Jeff Sessions.  Even though he fills every hole in that band at the back, only his ears stop the cap from from falling to his shoulders, and his ears are far enough down the side so that the brim teeters over his eyes.  Compared to Sessions in a MAGA cap, Michael Dukakis wearing the helmet while peering out of the tank turret looked as good as George Bush in full flight gear pontificating beneath the Mission Accomplished sign, and even white Republican men got a sexual thrill from that.

The former Walmart, now decorated with murals praising President Trump and used to warehouse kids taken from their parents, is an apt monument to our time. 

Grading Trump's letter

Above is an image of the letter President Trump sent Kim Jong Un earlier this week.  One of the Power Line bloggers has praised it, on the ground that Trump "strikes just the right tone and sends the correct message."  The late night comedians have a different view, one a lot closer to my own.  I thought I'd annotate the letter, sentence-by-sentence, in the manner of a conscientious freshman composition instructor, and then assign a grade.

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore.

Sounds a little like a stupid person's idea of how smart people talk, but whatever, fine, bureaucratic language for a diplomatic purpose.  And the "was scheduled" is a kind of foreshadowing!

We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant.

A lot goes wrong in this short sentence.  The truncated passive voice leaves out the agent, South Korea.  Since Kim Jong Un knows this anyway, what is the point of being awkwardly obscure?  The adjective "irrelevant" means "totally irrelevant"--the concept does not admit of degrees--so there is no need for the president to do his impression of a Valley Girl.  Like, totally, Kim.  And if this bit of information is "to us totally irrelevant," why is he mentioning it at all?  Did John Kelly tell him he had to fill a page?  The comedians all regard the letter as belonging to the "Dear John genre"--a breakup letter--and, in that respect, maybe there is a wee bit of psychological maneuvering beneath the surface.  You wanted to date me more than I wanted to date you!

I was very much looking forward to being there with you.

In that case, I can hardly wait to hear why you won't be there!

Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.

You mean the most recent statement in which Kim called our vice president "ignorant" and "stupid"?  I thought truth was a defense.  Anyway, this hardly comes up to the level of "fire and fury such as the world has never seen" and therefore raises the question of what the real reason is.  On this point, I think the comedians have a good theory of the case:  "I really wanted to date you, but now I see it's not going to work like I told my friends it would, so, to save face, I'm going to break up with you before you can break up with me."   The White House says the entire letter was dictated by Trump, which I assumed was a lie, since almost all their pronouncements are lies, but one recognizes in this sentence Trump's distinctive vocabulary.  Sadly!  Tremendous!

Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place.

It's good for us and good for you but bad for everyone else?  I get the part about the summit being off but the rest is a species of grandiloquent incoherence.

You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

Yep, this is definitely Trump speaking.  Logical connection weak, and one recognizes his theme of "my button is bigger than yours."

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters.

Don't know what this can possibly mean so will only point out that Trump often sounds a lot like what his supporters would call a snowflake.  Oh, the dialogue!

Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you.

Stilted but representative.  See the letter's third sentence, too.

In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families.

You mean the hostages he seized in order to have something to "give up" in the brutal negotiations to which you subjected him?  This is called "being played"--and liking it.

That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

Seems to have no inkling that the recipient oversees a system of gulags in which thousands of North Koreans are imprisoned without anything remotely resembling a legal process, and that the rest of the population is on a starvation diet.  How the Power Line blogger detected in the letter the "right tone" is a mystery to me.  It is characterized by a grab-bag of incompatible tones, none more repugnant than the ass-kissing one.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write.

More incoherence, since it's Trump, not Kim, who's calling it off.

The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth.

Similar to what he says to women who won't sleep with him.

This missed opportunity is truly a sad moment in history.

Yes, and recall that, from all we can tell from this letter, the "sad moment" was caused by Kim calling Mike Pence "stupid."  More snowflakery.

If Trump was 19 and enrolled in a community college composition course, I'd give him a C.  But he's the president, so: F.

 

"You thieving pile of albino warts."

One of the commonest and tiredest expressions of political speech is variations of the introductory clause, "Words cannot express," followed by a generalized expression of grief, dislike, favor, or some other purported emotion.  Words cannot express my sorrow, my affection, my contempt, &c.

Well, yes, actually they can, but you're a witless phony, which may account for your election to the US Congress.

The recent death of Tom Wolfe, practitioner of the "new journalism," has temporarily raised the profile of his fellow practitioner, friend, and occasional antagonist, Hunter Thompson, who, especially in the contempt category, was generally capable of finding words to convey his strong feeling.  The accompanying communication  was to his biographer, William McKeen.  A letter to Wolfe included the expression, "You thieving pile of albino warts," which provided the headline for a New York Times book review, by Christopher Buckley, that included a compendium of Thompson's lexical repertoire.  First, the adjectives of abuse:

vicious, rancid, savage, fiendish, filthy, rotten, demented, treacherous, heinous, scurvy, devious, grisly, hamwit, filthy, foetid, cheapjack, and hellish.  

Then "favorite gerunds and verb forms":

Festering, stinking, crazed, deranged, soul-ripping, drooling, rabbit-punching and knee-crawling, to say nothing of even more piquant expressions.

Why is it that for me the expression about the albino warts calls to mind the prim mug of Mitch McConnell?  Anyway, it's not that this is some new skill that humanity has acquired.  Here, in King Lear, is Kent meeting up again with the contemptible Oswald in Act II:

Oswald: Why dost thou use me thus?  I know thee not.

Kent: Fellow, I know thee.

Oswald: What dost thou know me for?

Kent: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition.

Oswald: Why, what a monstrous fellow art thou, thus to rail on one that is neither known of thee nor knows thee. 

Kent: What a brazen-faced varlet art thou to deny thou knowest me!  Is it two days ago since I tripped up thy heels and beat thee before the King? [Draws his sword.]  Draw, you rogue, for though it be night, yet the moon shines. I'll make a sop o' th' moonshine of you. You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!

Though an editor's gloss would sometimes help, you get the idea.  I personally like how Oswald's foppishness is a recurring theme in the indictment:  "glass-gazing" means always before a mirror, and "cullionly barbermonger" means he's the despicable sort who's continually off to the barbershop to get fixed up.  I can imagine Oswald serving in the House of Representatives, but not Kent, though it would boost the ratings of C-SPAN. 

Puffery

Listening to politicians, and the people who talk about them on tv, I am often either annoyed or amused by the way in which they inflate their expressions with words and phrases that seem to me meant for another occasion.  I've been collecting some examples.

I think massive should be reserved for nouns that can be weighed, at least theoretically: a desk, the edifice of a building, the whole building, a "mobile" phone in a 30-year-old movie.  It doesn't describe things that are concepts or mental constructs.  No to massive deportations, electoral victories (or defeats), voter defections, purported fraud, and heart attacks.

On cable news shows, you see again and again the same reporters holding court with the host, and one of their favorite ways of starting a sentence is, "According to my reporting . . . ."  First, they are on tv so much that it's hard to understand how they can fit in the "reporting" that they do.  Second, what they call "reporting": isn't it really just talking to people and then relaying what they said?  Just say, "Three dudes, all well-dressed and Ivy-educated, told me the same thing, which is X."

It seems that events in Washington, D.C., are of such weight and solemnity as to require a Latin pedigree:  they don't happen or occur, they transpire.

News flash: unique is not a synonym for unusual.  The former does not admit of degrees.  If you want to say that something is unique, and then in the interests of accuracy begin considering "fairly unique," just say "unusual" or, if you must, "highly unusual."  This is basically just another hyperventilation problem--reaching for the superlative when the item in question doesn't qualify.

Hang with me on this one, and then I'll be done for awhile.  What the hell is a parameter?  I resorted to looking it up, and here's what merriamwebster.com says:

1(a): an arbitrary constant whose value characterizes a member of a system (such as a family of curves); also: a quantity (such as a mean or a variance) that describes a statistical population
(b) an independent variable used to express the coordinates of a variable point and functions of them--compare parametric equation

2: any of a set of physical properties whose values determine the characteristics or behavior of something--parameters of the atmosphere such as temperature, pressure, and density

3: something represented by a parameter: a characteristic element; broadly: characteristic, element, factor--political dissent as a parameter of modern life
health care is a universal parameter, ... a ubiquitous concern across every age, occupation, and class line.--Wayne Biddle

4: limit; boundary--usually used in the plural--the parameters of science fiction--The investigation stayed within the parameters set by the court.

A possible theory of the case would be that politicians and pundits always have in mind meaning 4 and that the reason they say parameter instead of boundary or limit is that they're trying to borrow the aura of sophistication hovering over meanings 1(a), 1(b), 2, and 3.  A secondary theory would be that, strictly speaking, meaning 4 is incorrect, but there are so many tv talkers for whom boundary is too everyday that finally the dictionary people relented.   

Maybe more later when I've had another dose of cable news.

Trump: the beat goes on

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was out last night with Amanda and some of her cousins and their significant others on a brew pub crawl in northeast Minneapolis.  We walked from joint to joint, which probably had the happy effect of keeping me from over-serving myself.  It also put us out in the street with other revelers, where we could hear bits of drunken hilarity being shouted out in the night.  "Grab her by the pussy!" someone shouted near Central and Broadway, before the sun had even set.

Ah, that Trump!  Even if the modern Republican party survives 2016, the campaign is likely advancing other smaller but still worthy ends, such as sparing us for a few years from having to hear about how Hollywood and the Democrats are "coarsening the culture."

Like some other Democrats, such as Amanda, I'm a little puzzled by the bipartisan outcry.  It doesn't seem like what Trump said eleven years ago was any worse than a lot of things he's said in the past several months, while campaigning for the presidency.  For example, he said that a federal judge, born in Indiana, was on account of his Mexican heritage unqualified to hear the case against Trump "University." Paul Ryan, the Republican highest up our political food chain, said this opinion qualified as "the textbook definition of racism," but that apparently was not enough to cause him to withdraw his support of Trump.  Maybe that's a bad example, because Ryan still hasn't withdrawn his support of Trump, though he did "disinvite" him to a Republican "unity rally" in Wisconsin yesterday.

Wasn't it kind of weird the way in which Team Trump decided to address the crisis?--I mean, by having him record a video in which he apologized, sort of.  The likely explanation is that the people who know him best understand he can't be trusted even to read a prepared statement in real time.  They needed a chance to have several takes, and edits, in order to elide, to the degree possible, the candidate's scowls, sneers, and manifest insincerity of manner.  Maybe not, however.  If the goal was to seem sincere and decent, the words themselves, which of course were prepared beforehand, should have been different.  (To appear decent and sincere, there is no substitute for actually being decent and sincere.)  The marriage of incompetence and repugnance is probably the best explanation for everything emanating from the Trump campaign. 

Speaking of words: I haven't seen anyone mention Trump's somewhat odd locutions while talking dirty.  (Probably I am just spending too much time in bars to know that it's been the subject of acute analysis on cable tv.)  His first "apology" described the chit-chat as "locker-room banter," which is something I know about.  I've heard a lot of swaggery talk about things sexual but the phrase "grabbed her by the pussy" was not in the linguistic repertoire of any of my teammates.  I don't think it's even possible . . . unless . . . but I'm not going there.  And what of "moved on her like a bitch"? I at first thought that in this novel expression the phrase "like a bitch" served to convey the concept of intensity, so that the meaning is something like "I hit on her very aggressively." It's also possible, however, that "bitch" applies to the object of the advance: he hit on her in the manner that you hit on a bitch (because she is one), as opposed to the manner in which you hit on a non-bitch. 

I'm ignoring my own advice about how to account for Trump.  In the movie Fargo, the way in which the William Macy character doesn't even know how to swear--"What the Christ?" he says, when things go wrong--shows what a loser he is.  Ditto for Trump.

 

Punctuation pointer

It's tempting to give Chris Christie his due for tipping Marco Rubio upside down and shaking the nothing out of his empty suit, but if he really wanted to perform a public service, he should have stayed in the race and gotten to work on Trump and Cruz.  Maybe it was only that one night that Christie had special powers.  If so, he probably wishes he had helped himself instead of outed Rubio.  Apparently, Republican voters dislike mean boys even more than slow ones.  My favorite Republican, Kasich, had a good night, but let's face it: with the campaign headed south, he's doomed.  It's going to be Trump, unless it's Cruz, right?  The voting has started, two races run, Trump has a gold and a silver, Cruz a gold and a bronze, and the Republicans of Dixie are mostly crazy and therefore a good fit for both of them.

Are you more interested in grammar than presidential politics?  I am a strong supporter of the serial comma, sometimes called the Oxford comma.  It's the one placed right before "and" in a sentence containing a list.  Minneapolis's Star Tribune newspaper abjures the Oxford comma, but I think it is always acceptable and sometimes necessary.  Consider these sentences:

I invited to my birthday party two strippers, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz.

I invited to my birthday party two strippers, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

In the first sentence, there are four invitees: two who are strippers plus two buffoons.  In the second, only two people are coming--a couple of strippers who are also buffoons. 

Jeb Bush and "hypotheticals"

The phrase "sense of entitlement" is often heard when conservative politicians are discussing the moral failings of the poor.  But it might apply more aptly to the politicians themselves, who, as Jeb Bush recently demonstrated, sometimes seem to be under the impression that their desire to become president should not oblige them to answer "hypothetical" questions, like whether knowing what is now known he still thinks it was a good idea to invade Iraq.  I put the adjective "hypothetical" in quotes because it's Bush's word.  I think other choices might have been more accurate: "predictable," "lollipop."  Yet Bush didn't have a ready answer--on the first, second, third, or fourth try. 

Sometimes, I look back on my days as a teenager, and am alarmed to recall the high regard in which I held some people--certain teachers in school, for example--who now appear to me to have been manifest dolts.  But at least they were only schoolteachers, not top-tier candidates for the Presidency. 

And one more thing about "hypothetical": it's one of those words, like "rhetoric," that has for some reason gotten a bad reputation.  I guess maybe their meanings have changed without anyone having given me notice?  It seems a person practicing the art of rhetoric is now necessarily a pomaded liar, and a hypothetical question is necessarily an unfair one.  If, however, I am behind the curve on the shifting meanings of words, it still seems that, hypothetically, Bush is going to be president, and that voters might therefore wonder what that hypothetically would be like, causing them to ask some hypotheticals and, hypothetically, coming to the proper conclusion when he flubs them badly.

Language notes

Here is the first graf of the current New Yorker's opening "Comment," by Amy Davidson, called "Game Change":

By the time the contenders for Super Bowl XLVIII were set, two weekends ago, a hero and a villain had been chosen, too. The Denver Broncos’ quarterback, the aging, lovable Peyton Manning, had outplayed the Patriots to win the A.F.C. title. Meanwhile, in the N.F.C. championship game, Richard Sherman, a cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, became the designated bad guy. With thirty-one seconds left to play, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, had the ball on Seattle’s eighteen-yard line—the 49ers were losing by six points and needed a touchdown. He spotted Michael Crabtree, a wide receiver, and sent him the pass. Sherman twisted up in the air until he seemed almost in synch with the ball’s spiralling, then tipped the ball into the hands of another defender for an interception, and won the game.

The New Yorker is famous for its fastidious editing and fact-checking, but I'm beginning to think it is conducted mainly by "literary types" who care less than their countrymen about who wins football games.  For isn't a lot of this just a little bit off?  It's too quarterback-centric, for instance.  Peyton Manning may have outplayed Tom Brady but he didn't outplay the Patriots.  The 49ers, not their quarterback, had the ball on the Seattle 18-yard line before the play everyone's talking about.  (Given the New Yorker's devotion to its somewhat idiosyncratic style sheet, I'm a little surprised it doesn't call the San Francisco team the Forty-Niners.)  I don't think any football fan would ever say that the quarterback "sent" a pass toward a certain receiver.  The last sentence makes it sound like Richard Sherman deliberately tipped the ball to a teammate.  I'm pretty sure he was just happy to tip it and happier still that it turned out his teammate was right there to cradle it. 

The rest of the article is interesting mainly for its discussion of another language point.  After earning the epithet "thug" for his adrenalin-aided post-game rant to a sideline reporter, Sherman has expressed the opinion that "thug" is just a stand-in for the disgraced n-word.  Davidson seems sympathetic, and I am, too.  At the very least, "thug" is used in place of "criminal" when there is no evidence, other than personal appearance, of criminality.  And what color are people who look like criminals even when not committing crimes?

I'm a little depressed by the evolution of "thug," for back in the day it was a perfectly good word--a near synonym for "henchman," but more poetic, because its heavy monosyllable has a whiff of the onomatopoeic.  There's a lot of words like this.  They used to have a specific meaning but now it seems they mean something more, or different, and are thus less sharp.  I give you "ironic," which now often  means nothing more than "coincidental," and "iconic," as in "Pete Seeger was an iconic sight at protests."  Is the sound these rhyming words make so fun that people just started using them promiscuously? 

Career advice from Radiolab, with a punctuation lesson appended

I found this Radiolab story, concerning the evident utility of self-deception,  really interesting.  It tends to corroborate the great theme of the American playwright Eugene O'Neill, who held that, while a life of illusion is unpardonable, a life without it is unbearable. 

Lying to ourselves: it's another way to describe the "self-talk" that "life coaches" recommend.  But don't knock it.  Being deluded about your own capacities will help you get ahead.  Hell, look at the U.S. Congress. 

***

I almost wrote, "But don't knock it, because it works."  You have to be careful, however, about making the meaining so dependent on punctuation marks.  Whether or not "it" should be "knocked" in the above sentence hangs on a comma.  It's the same principle as in:

(I)  I didn't marry Jim because I wanted a comfortable life; and

(II) I didn't marry Jim, because I wanted a comfortable life.

The words are all the same, and in the same order, too.  But on the important question of whether or not the speaker decided to marry Jim, (I) says she did, and (II) says she did not. 

 

 

Local controversy

My wife Amanda and I have a possible disagreement about the following two sentences.  I say that they mean the same thing; she says they don't.  I say it's a "possible" disagreement because it's possible she thinks I'm right but just gets sick of dorky me, the language cop of the household, making fun of things she says.  Anyway, the sentences.

I. That knife is a tomato knife.

II.  That knife is literally a tomato knife.

I'm going to try, in the manner of a scientist, to make the strongest case possible for the view with which I disagree.  It has to do with the intention of the knife's manufacturer.  The second sentence has a different meaning because it emphasizes that the knife is meant to be used on tomatoes.  A different emphasis means there is a shade of different meaning.

But is there more than one way to be a tomato knife?  One literal, the other unspecified?

I should admit that my objection to the second sentence is mainly esthetic.  It has an extra word that I think adds no value and that the first sentence therefore is a superior expression.  Write with nouns and verbs, someone has advised, and in general I think it's a good idea to regard with suspicion adverbial modifiers.  For example, I hate it when, already suffering from the Sunday night blues, some pretty face on the ten o'clock news reports to me and the world that there was a fire and the building "completely destroyed."  Or, similarly, when the commentating gasbags are pontificating earlier on Sunday, you might hear one of them say, "Obama is fairly unique in that, blah, blah, blah." 

Some things do not admit of degrees.  Uniqueness.  Destruction. Tomato knives.

Stop that cliche!

I enjoyed this, by Teju Cole, on the way that cliches function as substitutes for thought.  It's fun to try to add on to his Dictionary.  Here's a couple of candidates:

LUMINOUS: apply it to any book or movie you like (or think you ought to like).

PARADIGM SHIFT: because by now even regular people know about "thinking outside the box."

Elmore Leonard and hooptedoodle

I've been at The New Yorker blog reading the many reminiscences of Elmore Leonard, who died earlier this week.  One, by Joan Acocella, includes a link to a Times piece Leonard once wrote on his ten rules for writing.  I'm not going to copy them down but the Times's headline caught the essence: "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle."  One way to define "hooptedoodle" might be "the parts you, the author, are most proud of."  I suspect the readers of freshman themes would be deprived of some snarky pleasures if their students listened to Leonard on hooptedoodle.  When you have a draft, read it over, and get rid of the parts you think are the very best.  Leonard's version is, "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Leonard is preaching from the same Scripture as George Orwell, who in "Politics and the English Language" set out six rules for writers that I will copy.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.  (Possibly the last word in this rule should have been cut?)

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 

Have you ever noticed the degree to which you are inundated with writing that offends against all these rules, except possibly the last?  At work, for example, it seems that anyone who has attained a certain altitude on the organizational chart, and therefore writes things that others have to read, is forbidden the utility of words of one syllable.  Thus where I work we do not plan, we are "planful," and the plans we lay are "strategic," presumably to distinguish them from some other kind.

Michael Gerson's long words: a short interpretation

In a column published in the Star Tribune last Tuesday, Michael Gerson describes the controversy regarding the Affordable Care Act and "religious freedom" in the following terms:

At issue is whether Obamacare's broad mandate of insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacients should apply to institutions with moral objections.  For more than a year, the administration has struggled to clarify a set of regulations, while provoking 44 legal challenges.

Well, it must be a pretty bad policy if it has provoked 44 legal challenges, right?  But what if there are 44 crazy fanatics who can afford lawyers and the court filing fees? 

Then there are "abortifacients" and "sterilization" to consider.  These may be known to you as the morning after pill and vasectomies, respectively.  But calling things by their familiar names will not advance the cause.  People may then notice that what you call "moral objections" is more like nostalgia for the days when the church was preeminent and human life was more plausibly described as nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.

Mitt Romney's retroactive retirement

It seems like a million years ago that Mitt Romney, being pursued in one of those awful Republican presidential debates on his view of illegal immigrants, and attempting to face up to the fact that there are too damn many of them even to begin a comprehensive round-up, indicated that they should all "self deport."  Maybe you could attribute that laughable moment to a failure to think on his feet, but now he is being pursued on the question of when, exactly, he ceased being Large-and-in-Charge at Bain Capital, and the deliberate, considered response of his campaign introduces Americans to the concept of "retroactive retirement." 

Were I personally to retire sometime in the future, retroactive to 2011, would that mean that the 8-to-5s I am currently pulling would just be an unpleasant dream?

Oh, but I am being unfair.  The rules are different at Bain Capital than in the gray zones of the economy wherein people separate from their employers with a kind of unambiguous immediacy.  Maybe that would be why Romney isn't releasing more of his tax returns.  They'd show the laws he obeys aren't the ones that apply to algebra teachers and mid-level managers.  It's possible to overplay that I-play-by-different-rules schtick. 

Nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs

This interview, of Mary Norris, a copy editor at The New Yorker, is funny, smart, a little offbeat, and a joy to read.  In maybe my favorite part, she comments:

I have been on both sides of the process, as a writer and as a query proofreader. Being edited sometimes felt like having my bones reset on a torture rack. I don’t ever want to do that to a writer, but I probably have from time to time. “What is this, the adverb police?” a writer who shall remain nameless once said in my earshot. “You betcha,” I wanted to say. I don’t remove every word ending in “ly,” but I like economy and concision.

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," advised E.B. White, in The Elements of Style.  "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."  Choosing a not-quite-right word, and then attempting to rescue it with modifiers--how much diffuse, dissolute, logorrheic sprawl is thus explained?  I would go farther.  A style that leans upon modifiers is frequently the calling card of a moral reprobate.  Here is a passage from a famous story by Hemingway called "Hills Like White Elephants."  A man is trying to persuade his pregnant travelling companion to have an abortion.

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time.  They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural." 

Try reading it again, only leaving out all the -ly words, and see if your sense of a wheedler isn't displaced by something else.  The adverbs disguise the falsity.  Liars habitually fall back on them.

 

 

Same-sex marriage: Kersten climbs back into the saddle, rides in place

Katherine Kersten's latest argument--I use the term loosely--against same-sex marriage begins with the announcement that it is but a short step from Adam and Steve to Adam and Steve and Eloise.  The middle of her case is less amusing and almost wholly incoherent.  The following is representative:

What will happen if we buy the civil-rights analogy and redefine marriage as a "unisex" institution on grounds that "equality" requires it?

First, we will weaken the institution's ability to support men and women in forming permanent, sexually exclusive unions.  Norms of fidelity and permanence are central to heterosexual marriage, where sex acts can produce children.  But they don't have the same logical necessity in unisex relationships, which are more like friendships in this respect.

It is not a good sign that the referent of "in this respect" is anyone's guess.  In what respect?  And to what does "they" refer at the beginning of the sentence?  The "fidelity" and "permanence" that are a logical necessity of heterosexual relationships?  But that only calls attention to the fact that fidelity and permanence do not necessarily characterize heterosexual relationships.  The whole thing is just a muddle.  No evidence is adduced; she thinks it so because she thinks it so.  Yes, Katherine, the sex acts of married men and women "can produce children."  What is the logical connection between the two parts of the sentence in which this phrase occurs?  Is it her point that if we agree with her about how babies are made, then we must agree with her about every crazy damn thing she says?  I have a feeling that if she had any powers of clear expression we'd see that her position is that same-sex marriage, if permitted, will be the cause of things that have already occurred.  She might also have to explain why heterosexual septuagenarians who meet at mixers in the community room of housing complexes in Sun City West should not be barred from marrying. 

When Judge Vaughn Walker heard the case of Perry v Brown, the challenge to the successful ballot initiative ("Proposition 8") denying same-sex couples the right to marry in California, he repeatedly begged defenders of the proposition to show evidence, advance an argument, make a case.  They just wouldn't, or couldn't, do it.  They were channeling Katherine Kersten. 

John McIntyre: You don't say

John McIntyre, proprietor of the You Don't Say blog, reports that his readers, unless their appetites can be satisfied by fifteen free page views per month, will soon need to purchase an electronic subscription to the Baltimore Sun. The details persuade me that judicious, spaced visits will make it possible to read all his posts without a subscription.  That's good, because I'd hate to do without such vigorous, sensible posts as this one, on the Occupy Wall Street protests.  Of course, McIntyre's bailiwick is language--he's the Sun's chief copy guy--and he's a fount of good sense on that subject, too: see, for just one for instance, his take down of those whose rules do not allow for sentences beginning with conjunctions.  It's a bit of nonsense that would require a lot of editing symbols in the margins of the King James version of the Bible.

Which reminds me of a story about Churchill.  He took pains with his prose, and once, when an editor had recast one of his sentences so as to avoid ending it with a preposition, is supposed to have fumed: "That's the kind of English up with which I will not put!" 

I'm against it

Sometimes--frequently--I get so annoyed by stuff I hear or read that I can hardly think of anything else till I've expressed my annoyance, thereby achieving a sort of exorcism.  Thus a blog.  It doesn't even matter if anyone reads it.  I doubt the therapeutic effect could be any greater if my posts were published on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Yesterday the Star Tribune newspaper printed on its editorial page a long, pompous editorial by Mitch Pearlstein, the director of a local conservative think tank.  He really annoys me.  Yesterday's piece was about family breakdown.  Oh woe! woe! woe!  Nobody wants to acknowledge that family breakdown is a leading cause of the gap between "haves" and "have nots."  But he will trod where only big thinkers dare go.  Oh woe! woe! woe!  The sociologists all concur it's terrible!  Oh woe! woe! woe!  We must permit vouchers for private school education.  And so on.

Here's a typical Pearlstein gambit.  Having appealed to reasonable people by fussily charging "liberals" and "conservatives" of different sins on the issue of wealth inequality, he writes:

Might I respectfully add here that it is impossible for me to imagine how liberal friends could not be at least as concerned as I am from the conservative side of the aisle about the thinning of marriage and its straight line to social class rupture.

Emphasis in original.  He is so concerned.  He can't imagine why his "liberal friends" aren't.  Permit him to respectfully point out that he's better than they are.  His actual meaning would be clearer if the italics came two words later. 

You might think that the need for private school education does not necessarily follow from data about wealth inequality and family disintegration.  But Pearlstein has decided that vouchers would be a good thing and consequently every possible social observation attests to the necessity of adopting his view.  Here he is performing the pivot:

I asked [the] principal of a Catholic elementary school in the Twin Cities what her institution's mission was.  "To manifest God's love in every child," she said, or words close to that.  As educational mission statements go, this was one of the briefiest yet meatiest ever drafted.

No, it's tied with a million others for the most meaningless.  "To manifest God's love in every child" is just the empty cant of a dull nun.  It doesn't mean anything.  I hate the way we are all expected to bow down and pay obeisance soon as anyone suggests that their view is supported by religion.  I guess if you disagree with Mitch Pearlstein, then you must be against making God's love manifest in children.

Well, count me among that small group.  No tax dollars should support religious schools.  No God's love manifest in young children.  No taking time out from math and reading for lessons concerning the Virgin Mary.  I'm against it, and I'm feeling better.

Trades

My Twins, who have scored one run in five consecutive games, and who were shut out in the game before that, have traded slugger Jim Thome to the Indians for a player to be named later: maybe they think they can score a run per game without him.  Meanwhile, on my Blog Roll I've traded Majikthise for John McIntyre's You Don't Say.  You got redirected when trying to link to Majikthise, and anyway I am the kind of dweeb who takes an interest in the questions that occupy copy editors like McIntyre.  Plus he is another Johnsonian.  About one post in ten makes mention of the man whom James Wolcott has called, in a post that introduced me to McIntyre, a "poet, critic, journalist, lexicographer, biographer, extemporaneous genius, befriender of the ragged and accomplished, and sputtering misshapen force of nature."  Not to mention: "one of the greatest men to grace mankind."  (McIntyre would probably say that Wolcott probably should have written "one of the greatest men to have graced mankind.)  According to Wolcott, McIntyre is the "Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing." Quite the epigram maker, he.

I know, I know, language and copy editing: what could be duller?  Who cares where or whether you place a comma?  However:

I. I didn't marry Bob because I wanted a settled family life.

II. I didn't marry Bob, because I wanted a settled family life.

The words are the same, but you will perceive that, while the speakers are in agreement about the potential for enjoying a settled family life with Bob, (I.) married him and (II.) did not. If this is not the kind of subject matter that swells your corpuscles, there is a lot of plain good sense and a video joke of the week that's usually so bad it'll make you laugh.

Language woes

I made fun the other day of an absurdly bloated lead-in to a year-end retrospective on the editorial page of the Star Tribune newspaper:

As we travel through life, buffeted by internal and external forces, sometimes we reach a fork in the road, and new thinking emerges. . . .

Yech.  The whole buffeting business is overwrought.  And the fork in the road--one wishes the buffeting wind could have blown away such a stale metaphor but I guess not.  There is nothing for your local community college composition teacher to like here. 

Saturday, a Star Tribune editorial called forth by the end of Pawlenty's time as governor included this observation:

But more than any of his recent predecessors, this governor seemed disinterested in forging bipartisan compromise. . . .

If you know the difference between "disinterested" (a synonym for "impartial") and "uninterested" (which means something close to "bored"), then you are ahead of the team of writers and editors responsible for one insipid editorial after another.  This particular one on Pawlenty appears to have been written by someone who hates him and then edited by someone who doesn't.  That will never work. 

Pompous, dumb

Speaking of dopey year-end journalistic retrospectives, check out this one, courtesy of the Star Tribune.  The one beneath the headline "The Election," by Chairman of the Board Mike Sweeney, is particularly dumb.  This notion that divided government is a good thing and that voters know it and choose it--what is the evidence for the claim?  There isn't any.  I'd like to see Mr Sweeney take up the question of why voters deserve praise for an outcome that hardly any of them, as individuals, sought. 

How many voted for a Republican for state legislature and for Mark Dayton for governor?  A hundred and ten town drunks.  Attributing the outcome to the "remarkable" and "fundamental" "wisdom" of the voters is a vacant piety.  Actually, Democrats voted for Democrats, Republicans for Republicans, and this, together with the complications added by a lot of moving parts, including especially Tom Horner's presence in the statewide governor's race, resulted in Republicans winning the legislature while Dayton prevailed (very narrowly) in the gubernatorial election.

Hendrik Hertzberg has more on what the real evidence shows. 

I also want to call attention to the laughably awful, bloated lead-in to the piece: "As we travel through life, buffeted by external and internal forces, sometimes we reach a fork in the road"--and feel the need to say something pompous and dumb.

Erik Paulsen puts his best foot forward; Eric the Blue notices the bunions

Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., is not worth two posts in a row from any but the lowliest of bloggers, so here comes #2 on the whimpering weasel.  He went to the same college as I and it's sort of embarrassing.  Here he is putting his best foot forward on his website:

Erik Paulsen represents Minnesota's Third District in the US House of Representatives; a district made up of the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Paulsen is serving his first term in the House of Representatives with a heavy focus on job creation, fiscal discipline, veterans’ issues and constituents service.

Paulsen is a member of the House Financial Services Committee where he has been a champion of fiscal responsibility with a focus on greater transparency and accountability of taxpayer dollars. During his first months in office he successfully passed legislation to create broad authority for a Special Inspector General to oversee bailout spending through the Troubled Asset Relief Program as well as a bill he authored to strengthen small businesses hampered by the recession.  He is also co-sponsoring legislation that will provide reform for taxpayers and small business while creating a strong economic climate for job growth.

Alas, the first two grafs of his autobiography are representative of the whole.  Perhaps while in college the lessons of freshman composition were not a heavy focus of his.  I like how referring to himself in the third person gives the piece a fake journalistic feel, as if it's the straight dope instead of just him trying to brag about airy nothing.  Have you ever noticed, when reading a piece of really terrible writing, how often the bloviations tend to obscure the bullshit?  Take the phrase "he successfully passed legislation."  First time through, he earns the taunt:  "As opposed to unsuccessfully passed legislation, you blockhead?"  But second time through you notice that "unsuccessfully" does serve a subliterate rhetorical function.  If you take it out, the sentence is pared down, with the result that the reader, instead of gliding along mindlessly on puffy cumulus, is called back to the ground, where it will likely occur to him that Paulsen, an obscure back-bencher of the minority party in a congress of 435, could not himself have passed anything.  For small blessings we should all be thankful.

On the one hand, the facts of the case; and, for balance, bullshit

The local daily yesterday printed, under the headline "Summit displayed deep philosophical gulf on health care," an article, labeled "Analysis," by Dan Balz of the Washington Post.  We learn in the first sentence that, regarding the debate on health care reform, "it's clear that both sides are certain they are right on substance" and that there is "a genuine difference" between the Dems and the R's.  The two sides agree that the health care system is "ailing" but disagree about the remedy:

Democrats think more government is the answer; Republicans say the opposite, that market competition is the best antidote to the ailing system.

Let's begin our analysis of Mr. Balz's analysis with a language note.  An antidote is something taken for poison.  In the above sentence, "the ailing system" stands for the person who, on account of having swallowed poison, is in mortal danger.  The antidote is not to the ailing thing; it's to the poison; and, consequently, the sentence should have been edited--or, if it was edited, unedited.

What is the evidence that Republicans agree that the health care system is in need of repair?  George Bush was president from 2001 through 2008.  For most of that time, Republicans were in the majority in Congress.  Where were their proposals then, when they could have enacted them?  I think, on the evidence, that the Republicans do not regard the failing health care system as a problem.  They constantly repeat the line about our health care system being the best in the world, and wonder aloud, their jowly faces contorted by crooked grins, where Canadiens will get their health care if we "reform" our system.  I take them at their word.

Since the article is allegedly "analysis," you might expect some evaluation of the opposing claims.  What you get instead is the Republican party's talking point about the Dems' solution--"more government"--and a complete failure to address the absurd whopper at the heart of the Republicans' call for market solutions.  What do they think we have now?  It's the market system that has failed.  It doesn't work.  When companies try to profit by selling health insurance, they do things like deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.  In tough times, when healthy people decide to do without insurance, they raise rates on their increasingly unhealthy (and desperate) pool of customers, thereby driving out the remaining healthy ones, so that rates must be raised again, and so on.  The result is run-away costs and millions of uninsured.  That's what the vaunted market has wrought. 

If one side were to say that the square root of sixteen is four, and the other were to insist that, no, it's five, Dan Balz would probably write an article praising the "intelligent" and "civil" dialogue of the antagonists before concluding that, since this is a democracy and the different views cannot be reconciled, the voters will decide what is the square root of sixteen.  How wonderful!

Language notes

This morning, on NPR, I heard the on-air personality refer to Lou Cannon as "Ronald Reagan's former biographer."  Are you only the author of a book while you are working on it?  "Philip Roth, former author of American Pastoral, is the current author of a work whose title is still unknown."  No, no, no, no.

At the store, express check-out lanes are reserved for those with "less than 10 items."  That sounds wrong, doesn't it?  To get in that line you should have in your basket fewer than ten items.  If you're talking about things you can count, fewer.  A smaller volume of something calls for less.  I think that's the rule.  Less water.  Fewer molecules.

On a graver note, Amy Davidson takes on "unprosecutable," as in, from the Washington Post, fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay

are too dangerous to release but are unprosecutable and should be held under the laws of war, according to recommendations by a Justice Department-led review of all detainee cases.

It seems clear that what the Post, by way of the Justice Department, means by "unprosecutable" is "unconvictable."  For these prisoners could be prosecuted.  But that isn't going to happen, because if it did, they would likely be acquitted.  How is it that "unprosecutable" applies to these circumstances?  It doesn't. But it makes it easier for the mind to glide over some rough spots.

 

Write like Palin

There's a show on NPR over the weekend--"Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me"?--in which contestants are read three "news" stories and have to identify the one that's real.  Since Sarah Palin has published Going Rogue, and Slate has challenged its readers to submit a single sentence in a "Write Like Palin" contest, I thought I might challenge my hordes of readers to distinguish entries in the contest from sentences in the book.  So here goes!  Of the following four sentences, two are quoted from Going Rogue, and the other two are entrants in the "Write Like Palin" contest.

1. As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.

2. The minute I was on that stage in Florida with all those lights in my eyes and the smell of Alaska still on my fingertips and my family, too, all around out there, I was where I dreamed of all those years on the basketball court and in Alaskas's God given beauty which we must cherish and use as God gave it us to use and in honor of the troops, also.

3. Reaching the peak of Igikpak, that majestic mount, feeling the smooth Alaskan wind rustle against my cheeks, watching over this vast yet tender land that epitomized so much of America's resplendent pulchritude, and slowly squeezing the trigger on the wolf cub I'd been tracking through my crosshairs, I suddenly felt in my heart something I had always known to be true: the capital-gains tax must be eliminated.

4. I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.

Spoiler alert: the solution is in the last paragraph. 

This is all a lot of fun but we should remember that Sarah Palin, a manifest dope, is a leading figure in the Republican party and could become president if Obama fails, which he might.  It's hard to overstate the irresponsibility exhibited by John McCain in selecting her.  On the other hand, given the composition of the modern Republican party, the odds were against the selection of a serious person.  Had McCain picked at random a Republican member of Congress there would have been a high likelihood of a real crackpot--though, I have to admit, a relative few are in Palin's class.

Sentences (2) and (3) are entrants in the contest.  The first and fourth are from Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin.  Via Andrew Sullivan.  Here is the winner in the contest: "One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd’s eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn’t seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic."  (You have to love "blue as the stripes on Old Glory.")

Sarah Palin on Facebook

She's back!--and her Facebook page is being subjected to close textual analysis by those hoping to find a clue to her unsteady behavior.  Let's have a look ourselves at what she has to say.

On this Independence Day, I am so very proud of all those who have chosen to serve our great nation and I honor their selflessness and the sacrifices of their families, too.

If I may, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the last 24 hours and share my thoughts with you.

Not as intersting as a cliche or a platitude, but on to her "thoughts."

First, I want to thank you for your support and hard work on the values we share. Those values led me to the decision my family and I made. Yesterday, my family and I announced a decision that is in Alaska’s best interest and it always feels good to do what is right. We have accomplished more during this one term than most governors do in two – and I am proud of the great team that helped to build these wonderful successes. Energy independence and national security, fiscal restraint, smaller government, and local control have been my priorities and will remain my priorities.

You shouldn't say "first" unless there is a "second."  Is it her goal to say "family" as many times as possible?  She made the decision, not her family.  She made the announcement, not her family.  The logical connection between sentences is weak: was it her "values," or her "family," or doing right by Alaska that caused her to quit with more than a year left in her term?  The fatuous claim that "national security" has been a high priority of the governor of Alaska reminds us of one of her "greatest hits" from the campaign--namely, that from where she sits, you can see Russia.  I like how she says she's accomplished more in one term than most governors do in two.  It would be more accurate, but not more truthful, to claim that she had accomplished more in two-thirds of one term than most governors do in one.  She continues:

For months now, I have consulted with friends and family, and with the Lieutenant Governor, about what is best for our wonderful state. I even made a few administrative changes over that course in time in preparation for yesterday. We have accomplished so much and there’s much more to do, but my family and I determined after prayerful consideration that sacrificing my title helps Alaska most. And once I decided not to run for re-election, my decision was that much easier – I’ve never been one to waste time or resources. Those who know me know this is the right decision and obvious decision at that, including Senator John McCain. I thank him for his kind, insightful comments.

Her family is now joined by friends and the lieutenant governor in her elevated ruminations.  We don't know which family members or friends she has been consulting with for lo these many months.  The lieutenant governor, however, is Sean Parnell, and in news reports he is said to be "among the people stunned by her move," which he learned about 48 hours before the official announcement.  Maybe the amount of "prayerful consideration" she gave to the decision is exaggerated, too.  Are we to be impressed by unspecified "administrative changes"?  And doesn't she mean to say these changes were  to prepare not for "yesterday" but for the transition period ahead?  Notice the phrase "sacrificing my title," quite a lofty way to pronounce "quit."  Some might even suggest that the word, "sacrifice," should not be applied both to the burdens borne by military families and to this heavy one she has imposed upon herself by quitting her job.  The penultimate sentence seems to be missing at least one word but who really cares?  When she says exactly what she means, it doesn't make sense anyway.  McCain has made no statement asserting that her resignation is a good or obvious move.  She hurdles ahead:

The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the “politics of personal destruction”. How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it’s right for all, including your family.

"Mainstream" is one word but, alack, this is not a mistake spell check can catch.  The puffed-up "it's about country" recalls the theme of the McCain campaign, which his choice of her for running mate proved a lie.  I think these "others" she refers to are "countless" not because there are so many of them but  because there is not a single one.  It's a Republican trope that all the whining claimers of victim status should shut up and get to work, so why not her?  Whose complaints have ever had less merit?  Katie Couric does her homework but the dog always eats Palin's.  Regarding the last sentence: it occurred to her that she hadn't mentioned her family for awhile.  The ringing conclusion:

I shared with you yesterday my heartfelt and candid reasons for this change; I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America. I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!

No, if it had been "candid" everyone would have an idea what it meant, what motivated her, and what her intentions might be.  If she's going to say I needed, then she should say my name, not one's name.  And what is this business about a "title" again?  It's almost as prevalent as "family."  Did you notice how she said applies for instead of applies to?  Now she says and when (I think) she means to:  the smallest words confuse her. 

I know, I know, these criticisms are "elitist."  You can't judge Republicans by standards that apply in Freshman Composition.  But does anyone seriously believe that the person behind this Facebook communication is a candidate for leading a nation to greatness?  She can't lead herself to mediocrity.

 

Letter to the editor

The editors of the Star Tribune seem to regard Mitch Pearlstein, head thinker at the Center of the American Experiment think tank, as one of the bright lights among local conservatives.  So what does he have to say?  Judging by his latest headlining contribution to the editorial page, mainly portentous questions beginning "What will it take"--as in, for example, "What will it take to reinstitutionalize marriage in many parts of this country?"

The swollen "reinstitutionalize" at the load-bearing part of the sentence is one of Mitch's calling cards.   He's taken a five syllable adjective and added an engine and a caboose to make a seven syllable verb that doesn't mean anything.  It's the same technique employed by the authors of college themes trying to disguise the fact that they have nothing to say.  And neither does Mitch.

Nevertheless, he drones on: "Whatever one thinks about Bush administration policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the remarkable--some might argue, miraculous--fact is the American homeland has been safe for more than seven years, ever since 9/11."  One attack like that in the history of the world and it's a "miracle" there weren't a half dozen during Bush's time in office!  No wonder he attributes his own views to unnamed phantoms.  And why won't he say what he thinks about Bush administration policy in Iraq?

The mincing syntax, the preening diction--you can't ignore them, because it's all there is.

What will it take for the Star Tribune to flick a switch and turn off this dim bulb?  Even I, an inveterate bleeding heart, have to believe there's a wingnut in town who could make a case.

Orwell

I have been following the advice of George Packer, who in the closing days of the campaign recommended the essays of George Orwell as an antidote for all the lazy empty (but inflated) journalistic chatter that goes by the name Political Discourse.  Packer, however, may have a vested interest in the therapy he prescribes, as he is the editor of what look like two handsome new volumes of Orwell's collected essays.  Wish I had the time for all that.  I've been taking his advice in miniature, meaning I have pulled from the shelf Eight Modern Essayists, edited by William Smart, and read the Orwell section, which is made of "Shooting an Elephant," "Marrakech," "The Art of Donald McGill," "Politics and the English Language" (of course), and "Why I Write."

The best known of these, "Politics and the English Language," includes near its conclusion six rules for writers.  It is impossible therefore to read Orwell's essays without trying to make his sentences conform more perfectly to his own rules.  In "Shooting an Elephant," for example, one reads: "As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him."  In honor of Orwell's third rule--"If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out"--I propose the following: "As soon as I saw the elephant, I knew that I ought not to shoot him."  On the same principle writers should avoid such expressions as "fairly unique" and "completely destroyed."

As long as we're talking about it maybe the third rule should have been, "If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out."

I know you are wondering about the identities of the seven other "modern essayists."  They are Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, Lewis Thomas, James Baldwin, Edward Hoagland, Joan Didion, and Alice Walker.  The book is clearly intended to be used in a college composition course, and one consequence is that Smart has included, where possible, essays in which the author takes up his or her own thoughts on writing.  Thus we have two essays with the same title, the one I like better, by Joan Didion, commencing:

Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell.  One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words:  Why I Write.  There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: 

I

I

I

Orwell's most memorable essay, of the ones I know, is here.

Massive category

I'm introducing a new category called "loose language" in which I will complain about careless usage and assorted other instances of mind-numbing abuses of our native tongue that I come across while prosecuting the daily routine.  I was inspired by the current cloying ubiquity, in Minnesota journalism, of the adjective "massive," usually in connection with the recount of ballots in our US Senate race.  The effort is massive.

While I was typing that paragraph, I heard someone being interviewed on NPR say that the United States is a "massive borrowing nation."

Now, "massive" is connected to "mass," so I think it is suspect when applied to incorporeal concepts such as the effort required to hand count 2,900,000 ballots.  But, even when applied to things with mass, the word seems to have become nothing more than a hyperventilating synonym for "big" or "lots."  The United States is a big country that borrows lots of money.

Edmund Wilson, in The Bit Between My Teeth, devotes three essays--"Words of Ill Omen," "A Postscript to Fowler: Current Cliches and Solecisms," and "More Notes on Current Cliches"--to my new category.  He discusses "massive" in all three, and speculates on the role that the doctrine of "massive retaliation" enunciated by John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, may have played in the teeming frequency of this word--which, he further notes, occurs four times in David Copperfield and three times (twice in one paragraph) in a contemporaneous short essay by Lionel Trilling.  (The Bit Between My Teeth is a "literary chronicle" of the period 1950-1965.)  Well, the beat goes on, and, whatever the original cause, I attribute the massive overuse of "massive" to the tendency toward puffery--the desire to be noticed and the accompanying need to exaggerate.  It's the same instinct that leads local news anchors and others to resort, for example, to "totally destroyed."  Formerly, "destroyed" meant "destroyed," but now apparently it means "partially destroyed," thereby requiring "totally destroyed" when the thing is, like, really totally wrecked. 

Words through loose use lose their edge.  When the trend turns massive, meaning is altogether lost.

By the way, George Packer has a nice compilation of some words that worked overtime during the past campaign season.  And speaking of Packer, check out this exercise in expert vituperation.  The subject is deserving.