Parvum Opus 280 ~ Speak Softly and Carry a Big Axe Stick

PARVUM OPUS

Number 280

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Nature Trip

Drawing lessons, similes, metaphors, and analogies from nature seems to be a built-in brain function, leading to poetry if you have the talent, and prosy musings if you haven’t. After only a 5-minute turn in the yard, I came up with three prosy musings.

||| The experimental hanging upside-down tomato plant had all its leaves nipped off, probably by deer. But new leaves are growing, which leads me to muse on the doggedness of life.

||| Dead is conspicuously different, as in the dry snap of the dead grapevine. The vines die in interesting shapes, and those shapes are fixed. I’m thinking of this as a metaphor for our mental and maybe even emotional lives, not our bodies.

||| Masses of Virginia creeper came up wild after Fred built an enclosed deck. The creeper covers the screens every year, and would cover the door if we didn’t clip it almost daily, but this year it’s spread further and higher. One patch is mixed with the (live) grapevine, honeysuckle, and an aspiring oak. The Virginia creeper likes to attach itself to surfaces, but in this spot the vines away from the wall have nothing to touch, so some long tendrils are reaching out horizontally over the grass. I don’t know how long they can reach before drooping toward the ground. The oak probably won’t mature, at least not easily, being crowded like that (besides which, Fred is going to prune it back). I’ve never seen these grapevines produce edible fruit before and they won’t now because they get little sun. The Virginia creeper could have the entire wall to itself without the others. Honeysuckle grows wild everywhere around here and is also very strong. The Virginia creeper and the honeysuckle met coming from two different directions, and it’s a toss-up as to which will prevail. I think if plants have any sense of life, they’re enjoying being tangled up in this sunny spot, even if none will be as big as it would be alone.

Soon to appear in our yard will be a plague of 17-year cicadas (cicadas doesn’t sound as ominous as locusts). I thought the big one was in 2004, but those were what they call a different brood. The local cicada sage and College of Mount St. Joseph biology professor, Gene Kritsky, predicted a May 13 emergence using a computer model, but they’re barely getting started. I haven’t seen one yet. Kritsky said,

But then, we had the two cool weeks in April. That slowed things down. Otherwise, owing to global warming, they would have emerged two weeks earlier than the historical average.

(I guess he didn’t get the memo about “climate change”.) The cicadas are later than usual because it’s still cold for May, but they would have been earlier than usual because of global warming. His computer model is obviously updated for global warming, not for actual weather.

Disappeared

Disappear is an intransitive, not a transitive, verb. This means that the action does not affect an object: He threw the ball out of the park; he did not disappear the ball. I first heard the transitive usage during Chile’s Pinochet regime, when people “were disappeared”. This transitive usage also seemed always to be passive, not active: the disappeared people, he was disappeared, but not the government disappeared them.

I heard it recently from one of my Chinese students, who told me that if he was caught e-mailing something the government didn’t like, or bringing the wrong media into the country, he could be disappeared (not, he could disappear).

Obviously volition makes the difference, and perhaps that specific coinage was needed.

Recent editorials about the Bodies Exhibition, which has been in a Cincinnati museum for months, reminded me of my student. Some of those bodies might have been disappeared people. They don’t look like they died of old age, and a 20/20 program says the source of the bodies is suspect. (See youtube.com part 1 and part 2.) Locally, a man named Harry Wu spoke out against the exhibition.

I don’t want to see the show. I know too many Chinese people. What if it were someone you knew and loved, skin removed, organs and muscles plasticized, skeletons playing baseball?

Briefs

||| In her entertaining Boston crime novel, The Big Dig, Linda Barnes had her private investigator say, “I’d tucked [a gun] secretively in my boot.” It should have been secretly. Secretive describes a tendency of a personality; to do something secretively is to do it in a secret manner, whether or not someone else sees. Secret means hidden; to do something secretly means the action is concealed.

||| Not sure where I found this: Swarmy sense of self-satisfaction. Should have been “smarmy” although “swarmy” has a similarly creepy sound.

||| In a Found shopping list: big axe stick. What is it? Hardware? An axe handle? Anyway, I think “big axe” could be a genteel substitution for the common “big a*s” anything.

Insults

David R. sent some classic insults, which must be passed on for posterity. It would be a honor to be insulted so skillfully. I’ll feed them to you a little at a time.

||| "He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." ~ Samuel Johnson

||| "He had delusions of adequacy." ~ Walter Kerr

Deserve Victory

Dave DaBee posted an interesting reflection on Memorial Day on his blog, and I replied referring to a World War II poster of Winston Churchill pointing his finger to us like the famous Uncle Sam picture, and ordering us to "Deserve Victory!" We can and ought to prevail, as long as we try, not to live down our worst moments eternally, but to live up to our highest ideals. This is Dave’s medical blog, so note the photo of the old family burial plot and how young everyone was at death. We are fortunate to have expectations of longer life today.

My son Jude and virtual daughter-in-law Kate posted a fine Memorial Day tribute; Kate filmed, Jude introduced the story.

Finally, I want to remember Tony Zollo, who was on the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier (my father’s ship) in WWII in the South Pacific. On board, Tony Zollo was in a position to save all the ship’s communiques and logs, though he wasn’t supposed to, and he used to publish them in a newsletter, “The Mighty I”. He also wrote a book on the Intrepid for its 50th anniversary, which you can find in the New York harbor museum shop. Mr. Zollo died this year.

The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name and Yours Too

You probably know that the U.S. government and other entities sometimes would not acknowledge Indians’ names, personal or tribal. Sometimes it was merely because Europeans had difficulties pronouncing the foreign names, and we still use their invented names, such as Nez Perce. In the case of individuals, particularly children forced into boarding schools, the intent was to eradicate Indian culture and autonomy, so names, religion, and language were discarded. A Cherokee by any other name may smell as sweet, but he may not be completely a Cherokee anymore.

If you understand the significance of that, then you understand the California ruling legalizing gay marriage, and why civil unions, which provided the same legal rights to couples, didn’t satisfy the activists, including the judges of California who overrode the majority vote in the state and forced instant cultural change on the population. It’s important to control the language if you want to control people, or demolish tradition.

Beatification by Photoshop

I’m not the only one who’s noticed the magazine covers showing Obama with a halo. Some of them are collected on the obamamessiah blog. Why the messiafication? To give him the power to forgive. He’s peddling the hope, if you have faith in him, and charity is part of the economic package.

Safire

You can get an RSS feed to your home page from William Safire’s column in the New York Times Magazine, “On Language”. Some old ones are online; “Blargon” (2006) is a good one. The newest one is “Emoticons”. Go to the bottom of the page to find the RSS link.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning ~ Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video and music clips of great blues man Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at http://www.sonnyrobertson.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

PEACE MISSION INDIA blogs the progress of Pastor Roy Jacob’s mission to build churches in India. Now 79, Pastor Roy (who is an Indian) has built 10 churches, and has a girls’ school to rescue girls from the mountains and jungles who otherwise might be married off as children or perhaps sold.

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2; "Get wisdom! Even if it costs you everything, get understanding!" Proverbs 4:7:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus 279 ~ The Ivory Factory

PARVUM OPUS

Number 279

______________________________________________

Midwestahn Girl Arrives

From my son Jude’s blog:

At 1:30 PM on Sunday, 5/18/08 Kate became a "townie."

She admitted that while shuffling about the house, under her breath and to herself she uttered, "Where's my slippahs?"

The town, of course, is Bahston.

Acronymy

Peter Bronson of the Cincinnati Enquirer collected some acronyms from a web site, and I’m skimming from his work.

Bronson’s column starts out with a few from “the opinion business”:

DBI ~ Dull But Important (statistic such as the fact that the U.S. taxpayers spent “only” $338 billion last year on Medicaid, Medicare, and prescription drugs)

UBI ~ Useless But Interesting (e.g., the U. of Cincinnati gets fives times the amount of federal money as the Ohio National Guard)

From doctors and nurses:

AGA ~ Acute Gravity Attack (fell down)

From firefighters:

WUD ~ Woke Up Dead

From cops:

DWS ~ Driving While Stupid

From veterinarians:

DSTO ~ Dog Smarter Than Owner

Note that the phrases being acronymized are usually pretty amusing in themselves, but there’s something about an acronym that increases the humor exponentially, probably the sense of having something only insiders know. (Also, any “f” word is more amusing when merely alluded to.)

While surfing for funny professional acronyms, I veered off track when I found this, from a medical student:

I found two more comprehensive lists here and here, but they are a bit more on the profane/unprofessional side, as often seems to be any bored doctor’s want.

He meant “wont”, a word that (without apostrophe) isn’t used much anymore. It means custom or habit. Yourdictionary.com allows four pronunciations of the vowel, but the sound clip says “wunt”, thus the med student’s spelling mistake. (Follow his links to lists of entertaining medical acronyms and slang.)

If Found

Want a new hobby? Write on the back all the currency you catch and release: “If found, return to...” with your address. See what happens. Fred and I got the idea after reading someone else’s message on a $5 bill posted in http://www.found.com/, but because it was a non-PC joke that might offend people, I’d have to buy some comedy credits before I could pass it on to you.

Irony

There’s a merlot from Napa Valley called Irony. Isn’t that really an East Coast thing?

Naval Regret

Bill R. wrote:

The only regret I have about never having had command of a group of ships is that I never had the opportunity to make the flag hoist signal which loosely translates as “Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”

It’s not too late, Bill. Get your own pennants and get busy.

Incent

A woman on TV used the word incent as a transitive verb several times (e.g., “It will incent them to study”). Incent is not really a word, though I’ve heard it before. It’s a back formation from incentive, the Latin root of which is, surprisingly, incentivus, from incinere, to strike up or set the tune; pref. in- + canere to sing. See Enchant, Chant. There was no need to invent this clumsy word to replace the serviceable motivate (or encourage, foster, galvanize, impel, incite, induce, influence, inspire, instigate, mobilize, nudge, persuade, prompt, propel, push, stimulate, or urge).

When people get tired of incent and don’t feel it sounds trendy enough, do you think they’ll invent a verb moment (stress on the second syllable), from momentum? Forget I ever said that.

Who Did It?

Dave DaBee said the oil companies pushed the terminology switch from “global warming” to “climate change”. Iain Murray, author of The Really Inconvenient Truths, said in an interview that the switch came from the other side (at about minute 5:55 in this Boston radio interview). Still don’t have specific sources ~ who said it first, when and where? The interesting thing is that both political sides can claim some ulterior motive for this sleight of jargon. All I’ve got to say is that this continues to be an unusually cold May.

Good quote from Murray: “Nature abhors a religious vacuum.” Anecdotal support: My avowedly atheistic French student is strongly though vaguely drawn to religions of ancient cultures. For instance, he visited a prehistoric Indian mound and said it was very spiritual. I asked if he made that remark from his own experience there, or from what he’d learned about the mounds, and he said of course he didn’t believe in any of that, it was just an idea. But he quite naturally desires meaning which so far has been unsatisfied. He’s fascinated by American Indians in general, and their totems and so on, though he thinks current religions are “old” thinking.

Roots of Wright

I know we’re done with this, but the Irrev. Jeremiah Wright dredged up a memory of San Francisco in the summer after the summer of love. I met lots of fun hippies that summer. One was a young black guy who used to go on about healthy food, particularly whole grains, and he’d come up with a theory that the government intentionally supplied white rice for schoolchildren’s lunches because it was less nutritious than brown rice, in order to weaken the kids, specifically black kids. It seems that I remember having white rice for lunch at schools in the South where there were no black students; must have been a mistake.

The Ivory Factory

“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” (The Atlantic, June 2008; you can read it online) is by Professor X, an English teacher “at a private college and at a community college in the northeastern United States”. He writes anonymously because his thesis is that many of the students he teaches, especially in the evening classes, oughtn’t to be in college. They are forced to by economic pressures, and many fail. They want better jobs, or their jobs require coursework or a degree. But it is painfully obvious to Professor X ~ as it was to me a few years ago when I taught English composition at a local two-year college, about 20 years after my last job teaching college English ~ that few students should be there. They are not academic, not intellectually curious, and not, as Professor X suggests, willing to put in the years of hard work it takes to become a really educated person: a lifetime, really. They may or may not be intelligent. They may be able to learn such facts as can be recalled for a multiple-choice or short-answer test. And many people educate themselves outside the classroom. But some of his students can’t write, no matter how carefully and thoroughly they are taught how to organize a paragraph or even a sentence. One of his students didn’t even have basic computer skills to do research, although on the Web it’s vastly easier than the library research I did.

If they can’t write, they can’t think well enough to succeed in college, and indeed Professor X is firmer about flunking students than I was. When students used to ask me how to improve their writing ~ when neither details of grammar nor examples of logic gave them a hint ~ I always told them to read a lot, at which they groaned. If you don’t like to read widely, it’s pointless to aim for anything more abstract than technical knowledge, but unfortunately, tragically even, the notion of vocational education has become outmoded in the U.S. You can find a few specialized English classes called Business Writing or English for Engineers, and everyone agrees that the ability to “communicate” ~ that is, to make sense when you speak and write ~ is important. But if someone hasn’t learned to make sense verbally by the time she finishes high school, it’s probably too late.

Professor X feels that even the police officer in class or the bank teller ought to have at least a practical interest in certain literature that makes a social statement, but I think there he neglects the beauty and universality of great literature that lift it beyond practical matters. Schools now are mostly about the practical politics of qualifying for a better job, better than whatever it is you’re doing now. That’s trade school, which is a good thing, but how many students care to learn about great ideas?

I foresee a day when a college education will be considered not only a right for everyone but possibly even a requirement, continuing the postponement of adulthood at enormous and increasing expense. If the reading comprehension of high school grads matched the highest level of the old McGuffey’s Readers, college wouldn’t be necessary for most people.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning ~ Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

Or click on underlined book links.

T-SHIRTS AND OTHER STUFF AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop:

"Flash in the Pants"

"If you're so smart why aren't you me?"

"If you build it they won't come"

Rage Boy/Bat Boy: Can you spot the difference?

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

"I am here" T-shirt

"Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"

"I eat dead things" doggy shirt and BBQ apron

Plus kids’ things, mouse pad, teddy bear, coffee mugs, beer stein, and more!

PLUS Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

ELSEWHERE

Parvum Opus now appears at http://cafelit.blogspot.com/. It is also carried by the Hur Herald, a web newspaper from Calhoun County, West Virginia. See Editor Bob Weaver's interview with me (February 10, 2007 entry), and the PO every week in Columns.

WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video and music clips of great blues man Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at http://www.sonnyrobertson.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

PEACE MISSION INDIA blogs the progress of Pastor Roy Jacob’s mission to build churches in India. Now 79, Pastor Roy (who is an Indian) has built 10 churches, and has a girls’ school to rescue girls from the mountains and jungles who otherwise might be married off as children or perhaps sold.

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2; "Get wisdom! Even if it costs you everything, get understanding!" Proverbs 4:7:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus 278 ~ Veritas Vincit et Snafut

PARVUM OPUS

Number 278

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More Snafus

Bill R. sent additional ways to snafu (or maybe what to snafu):

Could f*** up an iron bar.

Couldn’t organize two men in a lifeboat if one was dead. (Or, Couldn’t organize a two-man rush on a one-man outhouse.)

He has twelve degrees of left rudder on at all times.

Screwed up as a soup sandwich.

I love these. Fred thinks it’s harder to screw up a steel ball than an iron bar, notwithstanding the fact that a certain steel ball of recent memory, not waiting for help, went ahead and found a way to f*** up its own self. An unsealed ball bearing in our furnace, as I understand it, began growling because one of the steel balls, ceasing to rotate adequately, ground itself flat on the inner race. Fred is replacing the motor.

I didn’t get “twelve degrees of left rudder on at all times” and Bill explained, “Can’t steer a straight course ~ will end up going in circles. Drifty.” I had sort of guessed at the meaning but the language was unfamiliar to me, and I wondered if the exact number 12 was significant. I overthought it.

Google Alerts

News you can sort of use: Google Alerts allows you to enter a name or topic (including your own name) in order to alert you regularly to news or blog mentions of said entry. Useful for, they suggest: monitoring a developing news story, keeping current on a competitor or industry, getting the latest on a celebrity or event, keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams. I use it to track writers I can’t get an RSS feed for, and that’s useful, but when I tried tracking my own name, all I got were daily reports of a book that came out a couple of years ago to which I contributed one chapter, but no reports of my weekly posts of PO to a couple of blogs (or anything else). So the performance of Google Alerts is sketchy.

Use Latin and Make the Big Bucks (Uti Latina Ac Merere Magni Bucks)

Wouldn’t it be fun to translate stuff to Latin and use it for birthday cards, talks at work, advertising, etc. The translator linked isn’t really accurate, and Fred reworked it according to his high-school Latin. I couldn’t find a decent automated translator online. But even the really bad Latin from the automatic translator (Utor Latin quod Planto Magnus Bucks) will provide big fun, if not big bucks. I just make up my own Latin sometimes.

MLA Style

If you write to Mal.Kline@academia.org, he’ll send you a free copy of The Real MLA Stylebook, published by Accuracy in Academia. OK, maybe you don’t care for the politics, but many of you have used the MLA Stylebook while cranking out those college research papers so you knew how to cite sources and place footnotes. As a former English major, I’ve never attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association, but I used the PMLA for research. They used to cover things like “Finnegan’s Wake: Who? What? Where? When? Why?”, “Weeding the Shakespeare Garden”, and “The English Major’s Syllabus: Toward a Synthesis of All Western Thought.” The current issue features articles about Turkey, which I don’t believe uses English as its official language. Literary translations used to be part of language classes or history classes, etc.

Mal Kline attended the 2005 MLA Convention, and along with Julia A. Seymour wrote summaries of as many of the major meetings as they were able to attend, and published them in this 56-page book. It seems that the curricula and the professors of English are now almost totally about gender/race/class politics, because the current idea is that literature is only about that and has always been only about that, if you know how to read it. A few of the meetings Kline and Seymour did not cover were:

||| The AntiSocial Thesis in Queer Theory

||| What’s the Matter With Whiteness: On seeing the interface

||| Marxism and Globalization

||| Heterosexuality: Queer Perspectives on Visual Culture

||| Queering Faulkner

||| Worldly Women: Imagining Cosmopolitan Feminisms

||| Sex and Music

||| Dykes to Watch Out For (which perhaps was about the cartoon strip of the same name)

Questions: Why do they still call them English (or English Literature) departments? And when did “queer” as a verb change its meaning to “viewing from a queer perspective”? I’m assuming the old meaning (something like snafu: “queering my pitch”) is now unacceptable in some quarters.

Kline noted that the MLA conference is the best place to look for academic jobs, and wrote (pp. 24-25):

The newly-minted Ph.D.s quickly discover that the way to gain that faculty chair is not through a mastery of the masters but by the invention of a new field of study, one for which there is usually little demand outside of the Ivory Tower.... Twenty-three people attended the MLA’s panel on Black Disability Issues.... Of the three panelists, only one was black. The two who were not both agreed that “we need to find an intersection of queer studies, disability studies, gender studies and black studies.”... “Disability is best understood as a social phenomenon, not a biological given,” [said Eden Koren Osucha, who warned against] “the false separating of race and disability”. [Anna] Mollow makes the point that marginalized people feel disabled, adding, ‘Who can be more marginalized than people attending the MLA?” Let’s hope that every English professor in the country does not apply for benefits under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Hmm, what would Barack Obama say about “the false separating of race and disability” (emphasis added)? I’m reminded of Sharyn McCrumb’s amusing mystery novel, If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him, in which a woman English professor gets tenure by pretending to be lesbian. Today maybe she’d have to pretend to be handicapped and black too. (By the way, Sharyn McCrumb has dropped all her earlier mystery novels from her web site, except the ballad novels. She’s aiming for a literary reputation. Perhaps if she advertised as lesbian/black/disabled...?)

Patricia Roberts-Miller on the “English Studies and Political Literacy” sensibly said (p. 49):

...there can be a problem with political Calvinism on both sides, meaning that one’s identity exists only within this political framework and the result is that one stops listening as soon as they [sic] know what the other person “is” (meaning how they would label the other person).

(This was reported by Julia A. Seymour, who does not write as well as Malcolm A. Kline, so perhaps the error was hers, not Patricia Roberts-Millers’.)

The University of Colorado at Boulder (former intellectual home of Ward Churchill) is endowing a chair for a professor of conservative thought and policy. This is necessary in order that there be more than one opinion present, and even permitted, on campus. Note the comments on the linked page announcing the chair in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Coincidentally, after receiving The Real MLA Stylebook this week, I read a review of Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in City Journal:

He made him, in other words, a representative of the emerging academic culture that was turning against the Western tradition it was entrusted to transmit: ignorant, coarse-minded, anti-intellectual, irrational, hyper-ideological, sex-crazed, substituting sloganeering and invective for argument, obsessed with the marginal and the “oppressed” as evidence of Western society’s fundamental, inexpiable injustice.

Pillars of Participatory Medicine

In his old blog, Dave DaBee wrote,

On the New Life blog I'm starting a beginner's guide to participatory medicine. It's my effort to share what I learned last year, with the intention that others can take a shortcut. In particular I recommend the chapter about 'the five pillars of participatory medicine.'

Note the “pillars” metaphor, alluding to Islam’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Dave must have been reaching for the sturdy pillar image as well as the alliteration, though not the number. But I thought it was interesting that it wasn’t the “five commandments of participatory medicine”.

Since Dave survived a particularly bad form of cancer after a hard year, his experiences and thoughts on medicine are well worth reading.

Commercial

I’ve added a few new things to my CafePress shop: there are new shirt and hat styles with embroidered patches, and those plus some of the other items now have the Catti figure with “Veritas Vincit”, the Keith clan motto ~ Truth Conquers ~ rather than “Parvum Opus”. Other new items are large and small pet food dishes, saying “I eat dead things”.

Parvum Opus 277 ~ High-Toned Vagaries

PARVUM OPUS

Number 277

______________________________________________

High-Toned

Vagary does not mean vagueness, which I believe Ted Belman meant in describing Barack Obama’s oratory as being full of high-toned vagaries. It means change, changeability, whim. (Belman was quoting someone else but I can’t find that original source.)

To Whom Much

Have you stumbled over this old adage, as I have?

“To whom much is given, much is expected.”

If you parse out that commonly used hash, you easily see the error:

Much is expected [of the person] to whom much is given.

I was happy to find that I’m not the only one who’s noticed that it’s ungrammatical. A more thorough discussion of it identifies the original quote in Luke 12:48, which in the King James Version is:

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

Diversity

It’s becoming clear to me that diversity doesn’t really mean variety anymore. In practice it always means other, specifically other than the majority of the population, which is obligated to adapt to the other, not the other way around. In your own home, you are not diverse and you have to bend to the other or become other, according to diversity law. Somehow this brought to mind what mathematician and surrealist Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice Through the Looking Glass:

"It's very good jam," said the Queen.

"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."

"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day."

"It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day’," Alice objected.

"No it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day; to-day isn't any other day, you know."

"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing."

I think the logic here is the same. Diversity’s like the guy you talk to at a party who’s always looking over your shoulder for somebody better. Or different.

Diversity also now means, in actual practice, that nothing is better than another thing, including a culture (or faith tradition) that insists it is the only thing ~ except if you have a criticism; that’s worse and unacceptable. Diversity in political opinion means left is right and the rest are evil (a la the diverse radical lesbian at the writer’s conference).

In other words, stop whatever you’re being and be something else. Be diverse. If you’re not, you know who you are, so stop it.

Diversity training in the next phrase won’t be about getting people not to insult each other (except it’s OK to insult white men, who already know how to insult each other with skill, humor, and vigor; nothing like a clean fistfight to clear the air). Diversity training will be about making everybody be different, like musical identity chairs.

The Quiz

Dave DaBee did a good job of solving last week’s little puzzle:

Fox is the evil network. (What other network has a moral reputation among some?) The radical lesbian or the minister would call it evil. (I have an uncle like that. A pious lay blame-slinger.) Nora Ephron's sister [is invented].

btw, I seem to be the only one who, upon first hearing Nora's name, instantly thought it's a pen name, a joke. (Really, I did.) Nora Pen Ephron. (Norepinephrine / noradrenaline.)

Dave got two out of three. The evil newscaster was Sean Hannity and everyone on Fox and pretty much all Republicans and conservatives. The lesbian writer called millions of people evil. But the ringer was the converted clergyman; he was an invention. Hallie Ephron is a real sister of Nora Ephron.

Dave also pointed out that the coined noun should have been “egotesticle” rather than “egotestical”. Since I picked that up from a radio program, it was my error to spell it -cal, since it was intended to be a noun. Egotesticle it is.

Dave added, Are anonanonanons all nicknamed "Skipper"? Anonanonanons lead naturally to onomatopoeia, which I did not have to look up to spell. Actually it was the birds that made me think of it, this morning before dawn when they started singing, or chirping or tweeting. If early humans developed speech* by imitating nature sounds, as some theory has it, then the first speech was not based on thought (a behavior which clearly continues in the genetic lineage). I’d have a hard time trying to imitate bird calls, but it’s tempting to try to communicate with other creatures. Humans are lucky to be able to understand each other at all, when clearly we didn’t succeed with the animals, or else gave it up. I met an itinerant hippy once who said he could talk with garden plants. He’d get down real close to them and they’d let him know when they needed water. It was human speech he had problems with. He asked if he could bring anything to a potluck, and I said how about fruit or fruit juice. He brought a squash.

*The origin of human speech has a word, glottogony. Why does it need one word? I suppose so scientists who speak different languages can feel comfortable. (And why is speech spelled with two Es while speak is spelled EA?)

Etymology

Thinking of freight trains today, and why not, I started to wonder about the etymology of freight, if it’s related to fraught, etc. Dict.org gives: F. fret, OHG. fr[=e]ht merit, reward. Fraught has: Akin to Dan. fragte, Sw. frakta, D. bevrachten, G. frachten, cf. OHG. fr[=e]ht[=o]n to deserve. Obviously the same root. Then I thought, what about the vulgarism frig, a word that never entered my vocabulary and for which I can’t find an etymology. It’s like the British bloody; I know what it means but I wasn’t raised with it, and it seems even the English don’t find it as offensive as they once did. Neither word carries any emotional impact for me. But getting back to freight/fraught/frig, might there be a connection? I don’t get the “merit” sense but the more recent sense of carrying something might work for all three.

I’m Questioning

Bumper sticker: “Question consumption.” It used to be “Question authority” but now authority wags its finger at consumption. I was amused recently to find that some environmental questions aren’t met enthusiastically even by people who think I’m a troglodyte about environmental matters, such as, how about hanging your clothes outside on clotheslines? I ask that only because I like doing it when I can (which I can’t where I live now). It’s a pleasant chore in good weather and it makes the clothes smell good. But ... it takes more time. It’s inconvenient. Can’t do it in wet weather. Our forebears hung laundry indoors in wet weather, and unfroze it in the winter by ironing everything, including towels. How come they had more time than we do? Anyway, maybe we could buy carbon credits to compensate for dryers, or better yet, hire third-world labor to hang the clothes out for us.

I’m questioning light bulbs too. We changed out almost all our old-style bulbs for the cute new curly ones, and indeed have saved on the electric bill, plus they never seem to burn out. But now we find that they have mercury in them, and can be dangerous.

How about questioning the wasteful use of bumper stickers? They’re dangerous too, because I always try to read them while I’m driving, as well as tricky license plate numbers. I think I’ll make up new bumper stickers for my CafePress shop: “Question vanity plates” and “Question bumper stickers”.

How to Snafu

“They’re gonna screw up a one-car funeral.” (heard on Boston radio)

“They could screw up a steel ball.” (heard from Fred)

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning ~ Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2008. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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Parvum Opus 276 ~ Standardized Egotesting

PARVUM OPUS

Number 276

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Punctuation, Comma, Placement of, Curious

Mark Steyn (whose excellent book America Alone is now out in paperback) wrote about a first grader accused of sexual harassment:

"Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive." The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the First Grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

Actually, that structure sounds like part of an inventory of legal offenses: Sexual Touching Against Student, Inoffensive, might precede it alphabetically.

Dennis Prager interviewed Steyn on his free speech troubles in Canada (April 21, hour 3)

Need Mellowed

Dave DaBee wrote about someone he used to know who

endured a fair amount of disgust from me about using the rural Pennsylvania construction "needs cleaned," "needs picked up," etc. I presumed for no particular reason that it was Pennsylvania Deutsch, like other expressions from that area.

Could be, though Fred and I both think we've used the aforementioned colloquialism, "needs" plus a participle. But I was surprised at such an extreme reaction as "disgust" in the more than amiable Dave DaBee. He tells me his attitudes were majorly adjusted by a Landmark course. When I was young, hearing someone use non-standard English sometimes made me feel superior. It took me quite a while to figure out why not everyone had the same tastes as I did, why they didn't read as much as I did or the same things, and why not everyone wanted to be an English major. Which is why people hate English teachers. I don't think engineers and history majors have that snotty attitude about their subjects. I got over it when I became a teacher, and used to feel merely frustrated at times. Now, while I don't enjoy real illiteracy, poor logic, and so on ~ I can't stop writing about it ~ I enjoy regionalisms and other variants.

For instance, Fred used to work with a guy who'd say things like "Go open the door for he can get in" (instead of "so he can get in"). This might also be some vernacular echo of, say, a German construction. Fred thinks it sounds quaint.

Mark Steyn, in an interview on Boston's AM680 WRKO, said "I et what they et" (about his visit to Guantanamo). "Et" is an archaic past tense of "eat", heard sometimes instead of "ate" in the U.S. (as sub-standard English) only in the south or in the mountains; it's apparently still extant in England, where Steyn grew up. You might find that form in Jane Austen or other old English lit.

Here's another recent example of something I wrote about once before: a man from Texas said, "I think that's something you and your dad might could do something with." Might could is a substandard construction, heard in certain regions. We would correctly say perhaps could to combine the senses of possibility and ability, but "perhaps" sounds very formal, even pretentious, to some people. Maybe could would be a sort of half-way point between the two. In might could the word "might" is used as an adverb rather than an auxiliary verb.

Inexpense

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day listed "inexpense" as a nonword and an unnecessary coinage, whose place is better filled by "low cost" or something like that (e.g., "The relative inexpense [read 'affordability'] with which a band can record and manufacture a disc has blown open the playing field to anyone with a credit card."]

When I see "inexpense" I don't think of a noun form of "inexpensive" (which would be the awkward "inexpensiveness"), it makes me think the opposite of expense (expenditure), which is no expense. No cost, not low cost. It's not so much that it's not a logical construction, but that it conflicts with what's already developed in this word family.

Radio Callers Phone It In

||| Egotestical is an over-confident nut (referring to the Irrev. Jeremiah Wright).

||| "I disagree with anything that's negative." (Including this statement?)*

||| There's a 12-step group for compulsive talkers called Anonanonanonanon. (Reminds me of Dave DaBee's bananananana tic.)

The Great Egotest

Speaking of the Great Egotest, Jeremiah Wright's recent triumphalist declamation to the National Press Club (find it on www.youtube.com) revealed more of his interesting takes on a number of subjects, such as education. Black and white people actually have different brains, Wright says, and black people think more with their right brains. This is why black children learn differently, cannot be expected to sit still in class, and do poorly in an educational system designed by and for the white brain. Check the article by Heather MacDonald in City Journal:

When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation decision, Wright said, his white teachers "freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk." Instead, the students "climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a 'subject,' not an 'object.'"

Thus, according to Wright, black children are all little Helen Kellers.

Mad Anthony Wayne Rides Again

Last weekend I went to a writers' conference for the first time in several years, the third annual Mad Anthony writers' conference in Hamilton, Ohio. It was small and the speakers were not famous, but it was interesting and useful. One of the best workshops, "Murder and Mayhem", was a panel of local law types such as are often assembled for writers' conferences: a coroner, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a police detective, an arson detective, and a DNA expert. They're not writers but they answer a lot of questions for people who write crime fiction. Even if you don't write, it would be worth going to one of those workshops just to listen to people like that: experienced, smart, tough-minded.

The other workshops generally offered practical advice about publishing as well as specific writing tips. I didn't go to the workshop on creating characters, but while it's true that a good fictional character is not simply a stereotype, stereotyping is unavoidable. I came up with a little game for you to test your own stereotyping. It's a sort of double blind experiment because you have to guess two things. First, one of the workshop presenters, a writer, characterized a certain political commentator on a certain cable network, as well as a certain political party, as "evil", saying "All evil sticks together". Can you figure out:

1. Which network and which party was called evil (evil is the key word)? (You don't have to pick just one commentator.)

2. Then, which presenter made that remark?

a. A less famous novelist sister of famous writer Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail), who does book reviews for the Boston Globe. (Their parents wrote the Spencer-Tracey classic, Desk Set.) It was Nora Ephron who recently said that white male voters will demonstrate whom they hate more, blacks or women, in the upcoming elections (at least in the primaries; she didn't mention white men hating old people).

b. A clergyman who wrote a history of his conversion (you guess what he converted from and to).

c. A tall, black, ambitious, self-identified in-your-face radical lesbian writer/editor, with 1/8-inch-long hair, wearing camouflage-print cut-off pants, a pale pink sweater with the Lacoste alligator logo, and small gold earrings.

d. An attractive but slightly sad looking woman with a day job in marketing who gave a workshop on writing humor. She promotes her memoirs with "beach party" trinkets in bars and copyrighted the slogan "Will dance for margaritas".

e. Any of the legal personnel in the "Murder and Mayhem" workshop.

3. Which of these was not a real presenter?

Answers next week.

Bleak of the Week Movie Picks

American Dreamz: Funny Bush parody, where he ends up saying about the Middle East, "The problems there will never, never, never be solved."

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed: Do not discuss among yourselves.

Idiocracy: Duuuuude!