My latest Tribune language column:
On the ambiguities of the word "values" in business and political slogans.
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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.
posted by Nathan at 10:56 AM

 
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.

Avarice [and] greed ... are based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of Jesus ... is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are.

Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.

A glutton is one who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.

Lust is the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst.

Pride: Humility is often confused with the polite self-deprecation of saying you're not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are. ... True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. Lazy people, people who sit around and watch the grass grow, may be people at peace. ... Slothful people, on the other hand, may be very busy people. They are people who go through the motions, who fly on automatic pilot. Like somebody with a bad head cold, they have mostly lost their sense of taste and smell. ... They are letting things run their course. They are getting through their lives.

posted by Nathan at 10:49 AM 0 comments

 
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.

posted by Nathan at 10:30 AM 0 comments

 
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.
posted by Nathan at 10:24 AM 0 comments

 
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.

Way down deep he's shallow.

He's a unique type.

You have one choice.

Anyone who reads this is illiterate.

Acupuncture is pointless.

posted by Nathan at 10:14 AM 0 comments

 
• 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.
posted by Nathan at 10:12 AM 0 comments