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Monday, May 17, 2004
This week in my B&C blog: K.A. Paul, the most famous spiritual leader you've never heard of; a hovercraft in a York cathedral; the philosophy of disgust; the danger in Asia's boy boom; why churches should (or shouldn't) think like corporations; and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE My latest Tribune language column: On the translation of the New Testament into sign language by the Iowa-based Deaf Missions. temp link/perm.preview Here's a site that lists the number of verses, words, and letters per testament, along with a bunch of other trivia. Speaking of sign language, how sickening was it to read last week about allegations that nuns at one Massachusetts school punished and abused deaf children for trying to use sign language. One other language note: Today is the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. On NPR last week, historian James T. Patterson noted that the ruling instructed schools to implement changes with deliberate speed--a phrase so vague, he says, that it condoned foot-dragging and necessitated a follow-up ruling.  I wrote earlier about some of the many flaws in Samuel Huntington's alarmist new book about Latino immigration, noting that white males retain their hold on, for instance, Congress and the Fortune 500, despite the "onslaught" of foreign immigration. This point was made poignantly by this picture in last week's Onion, above the headline: "Mexicans Sweeping the Nation."
Also, Louis Menand's enlightening takedown of Huntington ran in last week's New Yorker. And, further distancing us from doubts that politics kills brain cells, there was a recent flap in Maryland when (and no, sadly, this is not Onion satire) the governor defended the state comptroller for announcing he would no longer eat at McDonald's after being served by a Spanish-speaking cashier. As one Latino activist pointed out: "It's very, very important that you learn the language. ... But people have to understand that it takes time to learn English." More here and here. Call off the Great Commission! Chicago monk Wayne Teasdale in U.S. Catholic, March 2003 (via the Chicago Reader): Well, first of all, let me say, we do have the one true religion. But I don't think we should be broadcasting that. We may believe that, but I think the gospel compels us to have sensitivity to people of other traditions who have no desire to be Catholic or Christian. We have to find a different approach besides the evangelical approach, which just doesn't work. After all these centuries of missionary activity in Asia, only 2 percent of Asia is Christian. You can find anything on the Internet, including the Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. Which should come in handy (pun intended) if you're competing in the Southwestern US. Rock-Paper-Scissor Pro-Am Invitational on June 5 in Healdsburg, California. • Etymology Today from M-W: maffick \MAFF-ik\ : to celebrate with boisterous rejoicing and hilarious behavior "Maffick" is an alteration of Mafeking Night, the British celebration of the lifting of the siege of a British military outpost during the South African War at the town of Mafikeng (also spelled Mafeking) on May 17, 1900. The South African War was fought between the British and the Afrikaners, who were Dutch and Huguenot settlers originally called Boers, over the right to govern frontier territories. Though the war did not end until 1902, the lifting of the siege of Mafikeng was a significant victory for the British because they held out against a larger Afrikaner force for 217 days until reinforcements could arrive. The rejoicing in British cities on news of the rescue produced "maffick," a word that was popular for a while, especially in journalistic writing, but is now less common. • Previous E.T. Monday, May 10, 2004
 My latest B&C article:
A review of a PBS documentary on the history of Tupperware, which airs tonight. http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2004/003/8.00.html This week in my B&C blog: More thoughts and articles on consciousness and perception. LINK/ARCHIVE
Saturday, May 08, 2004
 My latest Tribune language column:
On "Wordcraft," a new book that shows how brand names are birthed. temp link/perm.preview My closing line was cut from the final version of the piece: "Of course, this kind of inspection could backfire, as Nunberg observed last year in the New York Times. "As advertisers have known for a long time," he wrote, "no audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly confident of its own sophistication."" Here's a 1997 article in Wired by the author on corporate naming. Here's a Stanford lecture and a UPenn lecture on the language of advertising. While reading Wordcraft's chapter on pharmaceutical names, I was struck anew by how drugged we are as a culture; just in the past years and decades, we have turned en masse to drugs to transform our lives. The essential story on this is here, in the New Yorker, summarized by this blogger. (The story's subtitle: "Dietary supplements are unregulated, some are unsafe—and Americans can’t get enough of them.") My language column last week was on Chicago's Noble Street Charter High School, a mostly Latino school that requires students to study Russian for their foreign language credits, as a way to level the playing field among students with varying proficiencies in Spanish. I think the link is still working, although it was supposed to expire, but here's the preview, and here's the principal's testimony before the U.S. House on alternative approaches to education. Finally, I wrote earlier about Lynne Truss, whose book on punctuation has now become a bestseller in the U.S. Since then the London Guardian wrote a piece on Truss and pedantry, and the NY Times just ran an op-ed by the Times' Almanac editor saying Truss and other pedants should lighten up.  The Mars rover Opportunity took this panoramic photograph of the 430-foot-wide crater known as Endurance, which scientists are eager to explore with the rover's instruments. At a news conference [Thursday], NASA ... called a high-resolution color panorama "surely the most spectacular image yet from this mission." NY Times  A.O. Scott makes a good point about the new documentary Super Size Me. Despite its overt anticorporate sentiment, does the movie actually elevate the importance of individual responsibility, since the narrator's unhealthy consumption of fast food is so willful and blatant? (Then again, isn't it odd how righteous McDonald's tries to appear by acknowledging that its product is unfit for regular consumption?) (I wrote about the legal questions of fast food last fall in the Tribune.) At first I thought I saw some sacred allusions in the architecture of this Chinese oil refinery, pictured in the New York Times--those rims vaguely reminded me of the ones on the Petronas Towers--but I guess they're more functional than aesthetic (whatever their function is). Come to think of it, I wonder if there are any architecturally significant oil refineries anywhere...• Etymology Today from M-W: abnegate \AB-nih-gayt\ 1 : deny, renounce 2 : surrender, relinquish There's no denying that the Latin root "negare" has given English some useful verbs. That verb, which means "to deny," was the ultimate source of the noun "abnegation," a synonym of "denial" that began appearing in English manuscripts in the 14th century. By the 17th century, people had concluded that if there was a noun "abnegation," there ought to be a related verb "abnegate," and so they created one by a process called "back-formation" (that's the process of trimming a suffix or prefix off a long word to make a shorter one). But "abnegate" and "abnegation" are not the only English offspring of "negare." That root is also an ancestor of other nay-saying terms such as "deny," "negate," and "renegade." • Previous E.T. Tuesday, April 27, 2004
My latest Tribune language column: On the ambiguities of the word "values" in business and political slogans. temp link/perm.preview I wanted to include what I saw last month at ESPN.com, which asserted that the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl "with talent, passion and values." Pity the poor Carolina Panthers, defeated by a last-second field goal, who presumably are morally lax. My B&C blog is idle this week; it returns next week with a roundup of the month's news and book reviews. I've returned from the Festival of Faith and Writing enriched for having heard one of the 20th century's most underrated novelists, Frederick Buechner, and having finally picked up his collection-glossary, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC. At the risk of making him sound like a hokey spinner of Hallmarkisms rather than a miner of the subtleties of the soul, here are the Seven Deadly Sins as defined in his book. I especially like how Buechner, as with the Beatitudes, turns them from Don't's to Do's: Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations yet to come ... in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. Enron evildoers' excuses are so maddening, they may as well pray this prayer of confession, says David Batstone in Saving the Corporate Soul (quoted in The Christian Century): Almighty God, I may or may not need your mercy, for I am neither admitting or denying that I have transgressed. For I would come to you with a penitent and contrite heart, if I were guilty of sin, which I am not saying I am, and I am not saying that I am not. I may have turned from your love and your path, but I am confident that any such allegations made against me will in time be proven unfounded. ... Wash me clean and restore me in a right spirit, notwithstanding the fact that my present spirit may require neither washing nor restoration. Amen. A Maine resident who lives along the Canadian border was fined $10,000 for driving around an unmanned border checkpoint on Sundays to go to church, even though the man would have to drive 200 miles out of his way to reach a station that is staffed on Sundays. Last week I wrote about dimwitticisms. Since then I saw that the BBC is hosting an all-cliche short story written collectively by readers. It's a grotesque form of poetry. One of my favorite (and most useful) blogs, Language Log, linked to a 1985 report called Self-Annihilating Sentences, which contains these morsels of wisdom: This book fills a much-needed gap. • Etymology Today from M-W: hagiography \hag-ee-AH-gruh-fee\ 1 : biography of saints or venerated persons 2 : idealizing or idolizing biography Like "biography" and "autograph," the word "hagiography" has to do with the written word. The combining form "-graphy" comes from Greek "graphein," meaning "to write." "Hagio-" comes from a Greek word that means "saintly" or "holy." This origin is seen in Hagiographa, the Greek designation of the Ketuvim, the third division of the Hebrew Bible. Our English word "hagiography," though it can refer to biography of actual saints, is these days more often applied to biography that treats ordinary human subjects as if they were saints. • Previous E.T. Friday, April 23, 2004
This entry originates at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing. For the links for this presentation go to www.nbierma.com/weblogs. Update: Summary and surreal moment from attending blogger Anj Colyn. Monday, April 19, 2004
My latest Tribune language column: On the ever-growing dictionary of "dimwitticisms." temp link/perm.preview Here are some dimwitted cliches on the March 18 "Morning Edition" caught by NPR's ombudsman, who points out, "If the writer doesn't appear to care, why should the listener?" A nationwide manhunt ensued... • Earlier: Mixed Metaphor Watch 
This week in my B&C blog: The Atlantic on the case against genetic "perfection," right but weakly argued. Also: fighting crime with books in the Mexico City subway, and five articles more or less related to the topic of suburban development and cultural identity. LINK/ARCHIVE In the blog I poke some holes in David Brooks' argument about exurbia and American identity. Some other fallacies in his essay I didn't mention: he attributes the culture of exurbia to our hard work, but doesn't a culture that reveres the golf cart, the Big Mac, and (as I saw on a recent ad) the trash bag deodorizer actually celebrate laziness? Also, Brooks equates exurban migration with the Puritans' effort to establish a "city on a hill," even though exurbia encourages an escape to isolated private prosperity while the city was to be a cohesive, collective religious body. Finally, while admiring the creativity of our capitalistic culture, Brooks fails to invoke, much less address, the ambiguities of Joseph Schumpeter's fine phrase, the creative destruction of capitalism. Philadelphia magazine dug up some errors in Brooks' previous writings; I love the headline, spoofing his last book: Booboos in Paradise But overall I like Brooks' writing a lot. Among the choice phrases in his NYT piece, he gets off this line about Trader Joe's, the place where all the snack food is especially designed for kids who come home from school screaming, ''Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer!'' Speaking of American laziness, the chorus of excuses in the 9-11 testimony suggests we have gone from Can-Do America to No-Can-Do America, says Maureen Dowd. Update: USA Today on why suburban sprawl is bad for our health.  One year and one day after I saw Sammy Sosa's 501st career home run on a summer-like April afternoon at Wrigley Field against the Reds, I witnessed Sosa's record-tying 512th homer as a Cub on a summer-like April afternoon at Wrigley Field against the Reds. When Moises Alou followed Sosa's shot in the bottom of the ninth with one of his own to win the game, the stranger next to me hugged me amid the delirium. Probably the best baseball game I've ever seen in person.
-Essay: A Wrigley Field escape -From my Chicago album: Wrigley Field A letter writer to syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly found the seven deadly sins represented in the characters of Gilligan's Island: link Gilligan equals sloth and the skipper represents anger. Then Thurston Howell III equals greed, Lovey Howell is gluttony, Ginger is lust, the professor is pride and, finally, Mary Ann represents envy. Great Onion this week. A couple of highlights: New Negative Campaign Ads Blast Voters Directly link Man Nods His Way To The Top • Etymology Today from M-W: companionable \kum-PAN-yuh-nuh-bul\ : marked by, conducive to, or suggestive of companionship : sociable Someone who is "companionable" is a person who (etymologically at least) is willing to share bread with you. "Companionable" is the adjective form of "companion," which ultimately derives from the combination of the Latin prefix "com-," meaning "with, together," and the noun "panis," meaning "bread, loaf, food." "Companionable" first appeared in print in English in the 14th century ("companion" has been around for at least a century longer). Other descendants of "panis" include "pantry" (a place for storing food), "pannier" (a basket such as might carry food), and "panettone" (a kind of yeast bread). Even "food" itself is derived from the same ancient root that gave rise to "panis" in Latin. • Previous E.T. |
