This week in my B&C blog: On the decline of expository preaching, as politics and psychology dominate the pulpit. Also: Why Manhattan is good for the environment, the true story behind premium gas and fortune cookies, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE

Skip to my language column
posted by Nathan at 9:16 PM 0 comments

 
My latest B&C Book of the Week:
Review of Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/041115.html

I wanted to use the phrase "fiery folial finery," but I thought that would just be a pile of glop. More on autumn leaves here and here. Another brilliant picture here.
posted by Nathan at 9:12 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Det. Free Press op-ed:
Why I'm a "values voter" and went for Kerry.
http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/ebierm16_20041116.htm

• I got the 8 in 10 stat here, but Christianity Today has a much better breakdown of the "values voters" numbers here. (Also see Slate on why James Dobson must choose either church or state.)

• At the risk of making it look like I'm tooting my own horn (my wife will tell you I do enough of that after we eat at Chipotle), I wanted to pass along some of the e-mail responses I got as a way of exhorting fellow left-leaning Christians to keep the faith. I was stunned that of the over 40 e-mails I received, all but a half-dozen were positive (My favorite negative one was this: "I guess at our local paper in metro Detroit, we ran out of liberals to write columns so we are starting to recruit them from neighboring communities.")

Here are a few fellow bleeding hearts:

- I would like to tell you how heartening it is to know that there are Christians out there who think the same way as my family. After the elections, I did not want to go back to our church and be associated with people who limited their Christianity to 2 issues. It seems the whole country is full of them. I know God is sovereign and in control but I am struggling with the fact that an incompetent person is once again at the helm. ... Let's not stop praying for our country.

- Thank you for putting so simply ... what I have been feeling these many long months about the "Christian values" issue. Somehow it's all gotten twisted around. ... I am passing your article along to others who share my feelings. Regards, Another "2 in 10er"

- I myself am a Christian - attend church every Sunday and Wednesday and actively involved in other church activities- that voted for Kerry. I even felt like the black sheep among my fellow Christians, and questioned myself and prayed on this issue. To me the two big issues that swayed Christians are small issues and are being approached in the wrong way. ... I want to thank you for making me feel that as a Christian, that I did not neccesarly vote wrong when I voted for Kerry.

more

• Some of the negative responses I received said there was a contradiction between my points that values always affect voting but that church and state should be kept separate. I should have clarified that. The difference is this: the institutions of the church and the government should be kept apart (so James Dobson should not seek to be a power-broker in the Republican Party, as he is, and President Bush shouldn't be a figurehead for certain religious groups, as he seems to be). The church must speak truth to power without becoming part of that power. But individual citizens couldn't separate their values (whatever they are) from their voting if they tried.

• I was a little reluctant to publish this op-ed, since some consider it bad form for a journalist to disclose her voting preference (others appreciate it; but since a sizeable majority of those in mainstream media vote Democratic, there isn't much suspense to begin with). If I were a news reporter instead of a features writer, I might not have done it.

My reluctance came from the likelihood that some readers will now dismiss everything I write about anything, since they have successfuly identified me as a member of a vast left-wing conspiracy, an evil empire whose corruption of my cerebral capabilities is so complete that I am unable to put together a single sentence without submitting to it and extending its nefarious influence.

Meanwhile, those who agree with me may presume that I bat for their team and have abandoned any effort to locate wisdom among people with different views. They, too, are wrong.

If you think that either of the above is true, I despair of persuading you that my articles about language and other topics should be read in their own context and on their own merits, rather than as undercover dissemination of an agenda that will either degrade or transfigure America. So I leave it up to you.
posted by Nathan at 9:11 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune language column:
On the fascinating history of the alphabet.
temp link/perm.preview

This was cut:

As a result, C has multiple personalities, changing sounds in the words “critic,” “dance,” “ocean,” “chain,” and “indict”). The letters M, B, and D are the easiest to say, so they're the first sounds out of the mouths of babies ("ma," "ba," and "da"). The sounds "er" and "sh" take them longer to learn.

Also see this chart on various world alphabets.

From the Plain English Campaign, 10/7

Last week we set you the puzzle of trying to work out the abbreviations in the following passage.

"The CoLP COG and the MPS wish to work together to create a DCPCU. The EIDU, in partnership with BDB has been assisting AC SCD with securing s93 or s25 PA funding from APACS and HO once approval has been given from HMC&E regarding the VAT issues."

The answer is as follows.

"The City of London Police Chief Officer Group and the Metropolitan Police Service Management Board wish to work together to create a Dedicated Cheque & Plastic Card Unit. The Events and Income Development Unit, in partnership with Bircham Dyson Bell has been assisting Assistant Commissioner Serious Crime Directorate with securing Section 93 or Section 25 Police Act funding from the Association of Payment and Clearing Services and the Home Office once approval has been given from Her Majesty's Custom & Excise regarding the Value Added Tax issues."

Inflections
• The Daily Show's Ed Helms described the Democracts as "feckless--devoid of feck." M-W: Scots, from feck effect, majority, from Middle English (Sc) fek, alteration of Middle English effect

• Another Comedy Central show, which is animated, is called "Drawn Together."

• A reader asked me about the word triennial. I had to look it up:

M-W:
1 : occurring or being done every three years (the triennial convention)
2 : consisting of or lasting for three years (a triennial contract)

AHD:
ADJECTIVE: 1. Occurring every third year. 2. Lasting three years.
NOUN: 1. A third anniversary. 2. A ceremony or celebration occurring
every three years.

So I advised that treat it like biannual/biennial:

biannual - twice a year
biennial - once every two years

triannual - three times a year
triennial - once every three years

• A CTA infomercial on Windy City TV (trust me, it was better than anything else in prime time last Wednesday after West Wing) referred to bus drivers as bus operators.
Who in the world--outside of CTA headquarters--actually calls them "bus operators"?

• From wordcrafter:

Vixen is one of extraordinarily few words beginning with v which comes from Old English, rather than a foreign tongue, typically French or Latin. (The only others are vane and vat.)
Also, though the names for this animal (a fox if male but a vixen if female) seem related, but why do they begin with different constants? Which led to the other, and why? The root of these oddities is the region dialects of southern England, where folk tend to pronounce an initial "unvoiced fricative" as a "voiced fricative". Putting that in ordinary terms, an s is pronounced z, and an f is pronounced v, at the start of a word. For example, the locals in Somerset will pronounce that name 'Zomerzet'. The word fat became vat, and the Germanic word fahne = flag became vane. In Old English, the feminine of fox was fyxe or fyxen, which the southern dialect converted to vixen. These three words are the only such bits of such dialect that have worked their ways into standard English.

• Two interesting words posted recently at DTWW (I especially love the second one):

king v. among graffiti artists, to (pervasively) paint one’s name or symbol (throughout an area); to own an area through tagging or bombing. link [Is this like checkers? "King me!"]

unass v. to dismount or disembark (a vehicle); to get off of (something); to unseat (someone); to leave (somewhere). link

• Nicholas Kristof quoted the following in a recent column:

"When a Texas governor, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, barred the teaching of foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, 'If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us.'"

ASD-L says there's no evidence for this quote, though there is for a related quote from a different person. more (at bottom of page)

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 7:33 PM 0 comments

 
New Yorker moview review links I want to save: Anthony Lane on Wicker Park, Motorcycle Diaries, P.S., Enduring Love, and The Incredibles; David Denby on I Heart Huckabees, Vera Drake, Sideways, and Ray.
posted by Nathan at 7:24 PM 0 comments

 
10 so-called bright ideas from the London Guardian:

1. The Environmental IQ: profiling the impact of products
2. Hibernation Day: an international duvet day for the world
3. Fame Lottery: people get their 15 minutes, money goes to charity
4. A city/country house swap network to house everyone efficiently
5. Lottery entry slips to have a tick box for 10% to charity
6. A proportion of defence spending to tackle the causes of terrorism
7. Heavy parking fines (but only for persistent transgressors)
8. Charging the candidates for political apathy
9. A focused eco-tax on using animals in product marketing
10. Using cartoons to assess middle management problems
more ...

Also from the Guardian: superstitions of the British isles
posted by Nathan at 7:22 PM 0 comments

 
I hope lightning from heaven strikes whoever actually wrote about God's comeback in a headline about election and religion:

Religion plays new election role
God's comeback changes interplay between hopefuls
posted by Nathan at 7:20 PM 0 comments

 
Three years. I started this blog on November 14, 2001, as an intern at the Chicago Journal. So many links, so much ... junk, really, though I've tried to keep things substantive here. Of course, I've since started a blog at booksandculture.com, and so it's rather unseemly to ask people to read two blogs now. For that reason--and for the principle of it--I'm determined to do less blogging and more reading in the next 3 years.

It won't be easy. Addictions die gradually.
posted by Nathan at 7:16 PM 0 comments

 
The post to end all posts
Here lie links I don't want to lose but don't want to clog my bookmarks folder, either. They go to show that for all the compulsive instaneity of blogs, sometimes the most worthwhile links are to longer and older pieces of writing.

Skip this

• 2Blowhards on bestseller lists, Mozart's economics, and Frank Lloyd Wright

• Alfred Bierstadt paintings

• Archaelogy interview with Robin Lane Fox, classics scholar and advisor to the film Alexander.

• Atlantic Monthly on truth and articulation, the computer delusion, Annie Dillard on appalling fecundity, the Market as God, the moral state of marriage, the state of America in 1987, Guglielmo Ferrero in 1913 on the riddle of America, and David Brooks on democratic elitism

• The Australian on Shakespeare

• Banner of Truth archive; pedestrian lives and glorious destiny

• The BBC on a ride in the clouds of Eritrea

• Beliefnet on Science and Religion: The New Convergence; Gregg Easterbrook on secular humanism; Alan Wolfe on Rick Santorum.

• Blogistan Theology blog

• Books&Culture: C. Stephen Evans on Kierkegaard, jottings on back of movie poster

• Book Magazine on the lives of fiction writers

• Boston Globe on the no-kids movement

• Brain, Child on what motherhood does to you

• Brad DeLong review of Guns, Germs and Steel

• Brookings Review on Russia's geography and economics and trends in math

• BrothersJudd.com review of Nickel and Dimed

• Butterflies&Wheels on postmodernism and truth

• ByFaithOnline Paul in Athens; Do Not Be Conformed

• California State's Michael Foucault pages

• Calhoun Community College on Southern Literature and Culture

• Calvin College exhibit: Religious Observation within American Protestant Homes; Lewis Smedes obit and links

• Calvin Institute of Christian Worship on justice in worship and Neal Plantinga on Isaiah 60

• Calvin Theological Journal: John Bolt on common grace and civic good

• CBS News on online searches for classmates
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/05/60II/main552363.shtml

• Center of Theological Inquiry on Einstein and God (more here and here); Stanley Hauerwas on Bonhoeffer; Moltmann on Western values; N.T. Wright on Paul and Caesar

• Chicago Reader's Straight Dope column on butlers in whodunits, deja vu, the hiccups, the right to bear arms
and more

• Chicago Tribune on Dave Eggers, Julia Keller's Pulitzer

• Chimes on Grand Rapids sports

• Christian History on the Reformation and the sola scriptura principle, Calvin and missions

• Christianism bibliography; NT history

• Christianity Today on the definition of an evangelical, tradition vs Scripture, why not to imitate Christ, Robert Bellah and the sociology of religion, why God loves baseball, Philip Yancey on the need for gracious evangelicalism and holy sex

• Christian Science Monitor on how a bullet started a friendship in South Africa

• Christian Thinktank on the soul; women in Paul's epistles

• Chronicle of Higher Education on the economics of government help for the poor, the study of emotions, Shakespeare and pop culture, Is grad school a cult?

• Comment on the next neo-Calvinism; our civic ties; CCO Jubilee on Kupyer

• C.S. Lewis links index and book synopses; quotes from The Weight of Glory. More apologetics links

• Dead Poets Society script

• Debra Rienstra's Great With Child reviews

• Democracy in America text

• Detroit News on malls and 'lifestyle centers', Billy Sunday, more Detroit history

• DoHistory's Martha Ballard's diary

• The Economist on the homosexuality in the 19th century (more), review of The Earth: An Intimate History
on eBay

• Elliott Bay Booknotes on books on deserts, on indep bookstores (more)

• ESPN.com on athletes and video games

• FAA.gov on bird strikes and migration patterns

• First Things on the history of moral philosophy, Jane Austen and theology

• Flak on sports franchises and economic development

• Forbes on neuroscience and marketing

• Founders.org on evangelism and Calvinism

• Gadfly on a day in the life of a Parisian cafe

• Geoff Nunberg's timeline of the history of information

• G.K. Chesterton quotes

• Good Will Hunting script draft

• Globalization bibliography

• GreenwichMeanTime.com on the uses of GMT

• The Guardian Beethoven's lover, Google tricks, on Chekhov, reviews of Space Between Our Ears, Our Shadowed Present, Living With a Writer, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, Myths We Live By, Unbearable Lightness of Being

• Haddon Robinson sermons

• Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Suit (1837)

• Hornes.org on a Calvinist Christmas

• HUD on West Michigan regional activity

• Hudson Review on Ovid

• Human Nature Review on evolutionary psychology

• Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty

• James Lileks on political lumping and a day in his life

• John Ellis blog

• James Wood on John Updike, on beauty, on J.M. Coetzee

• Jonathan Harwell links

• Kalamazoo's historic buildings

• Lawrence Crowl on the naming of the months (more here, here, here, here, here, and here)

• LinksNorth.com on the history of Canada

• Linguistix on the relationship between knowledge and understanding

• The London Review of Books on Pattern Recognition, conjoined twins, the history of touch and power, the politics of sin in American history, Left Behind, and Terry Eagleton on The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

• Mad About You finale script

• Martin Marty on Christianity and Literature and Irony and Religion

• MaryLaine.com's neat new Net stuff

• Matrix review essays here, here and here

• Melbourne Age on sex in the suburbs

• Michigan History back issues

• Monty Python scripts

• NPR's Fresh Air interviews with Simpsons writers and actors

• The New Criterion on Hugh Kenner (more) and the role of the critic

• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (contents)

• The New Republic: Richard Posner on Sherlock Holmes

• New York magazine Michael Wolff archive; David Denby on Wag the Dog

• New York Observer Jason Gay archive

• New York Review of Books on gays and genes, Mark Twain, history of masturbation, review of Nature via Nurture

• New York Times on its font change; series: six months in the life of a NYC classroom; how non-profits are benefiting from post-bust dot-com real estate vacancies; air passengers carrying on meals; strangers carpooling; cellphone towers in church steeples; writing students expecting hollywood offers; anniversary of NASDAQ peak; faith vs. reason; virtual museums; more on museums; the metaphors of football; A.O. Scott on the history of sex research; Peter Steinfels on Walter Rauschenbusch and the social gospel; review of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps; review of James Wood's Book Against God

• New Yorker on traffic; the history of childhood; Tocqueville (more); Stanley and Livingstone; James Wood on God's Secretaries; scandals at the NY Times and CBS News (more); Roger Angell on the Red Sox' championship; Richard Wilbur's poetry; writer's block; Desperate Housewives; Nicholas Lemann on hatred of the media

• Nietzsche's second "Untimely Meditation," review

• Ohio U on agenda-setting and the media

• Oregon State's Daniel Taylor on Roman coins

• Oxford American back issues

• Religion-online.org link

• Philosophy Now on Charlie Brown as an existentialist

• Plus on why cars in the next lane go faster

• Policy Review author index; Martha Nussbaum and the cosmopolitan illusion; Mark Bowden on the transcontinental railroad; review of Elizabeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic

• Poynter Institute on the New York Times Book Review

• Positionem on the Pruitt-Igoe projects

• Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation link

• Public Culture articles

• Raleigh News-Observer: Yanet Shimron on Stanley Hauerwas

• Reason on All Culture, All the Time

• Rebecca Mead on Sophie's World

• Read recently by Fernando Gouvêa

• Reformed Reading List by R. Scott Clark / more

• Religious Thought in the West bibliography

• Richard Rorty on fascism in postmodernism

• Robert Putnam on the Strange Disappearance of Civic America

• Salon: Anne Lamott archive; Confessions of a semi-successful author

• San Diego Union-Tribune on Detroit's Comerica Park

• San Jose State on Inductive vs Deductive reasoning

• Scientific American on The Brain in Love

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer: blog

• Seattle Times: Life today would seem a fantasy in 1900

• Slate on secular life ceremonies; media bias; review of A&E's 'Airline'; voice-over voices

• SNPP.com on The Simpsons as social satire

• Smithsonian on Rockwell Kent; the history of American transportation

• Sports Illustrated Steve Rushin archive/Cheatin' Hearts; sports smells; World Series archive

• Sports Night scripts

• Stanley Fish on academic administration

• Sydney Morning Herald on personal ads

• StretcherBearers.com review of Paul Tournier's Meaning of Persons

• San Francisco Chronicle on older bachelors

• This American Life Shoulda Been Dead

• TimPorter.com on the nature of journalism/more

• Tom Wolfe's Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died

• Touchstone: Alan Jacobs on the Apocalypse

• UR Chicago on keeping the faith

• USA Today on the 10 hardest things to do in sports, minorities becoming majority in more U.S. areas

• U of Virginia on The Puritan Tradition and American Memory

• Virginia Postrel on Dallas megachurches and other D Mag Spaces columns; consumption patterns in an experience economy

• The Washington Post on the burst of the baby boomer bubble; profile of Lloyd Nance, USDA grader; abuse of indigenous Saskatchewanians; a football team as the soul of a Montana town/review of The Meaning of Sports; More being treated for depression; ad placement in video games; Paul Theroux on The Writing Life; profile of John Updike; Jay Rosen on What Liberal Media?; newsless networks; the Google-ization of the world; ping-pong; Annapolis politics; Michael Kinsley on the future of capitalism

• Washington University course on Information Research Strategies in History

• WBUR's The Connection on Marshall McLuhan

• The Week on how Google and eBay conquered the world

• Washington Monthly on courtship

• Wired News on the sorry state of e-books; blogging Alzheimers patients
posted by Nathan at 7:10 PM 0 comments

 
Books I would read if I had nine lives:

• The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer

• History of Reading in the West by Chartier and Cavallo

• Conspicuous criticism : tradition, the individual, and culture in American social thought, from Veblen to Mills by Christopher Shannon (more)

• Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Dayby G.J. Whitrow

• Rome Is Love Spelled Backward: Enjoying Art and Architecture in the Eternal Cityby Judith Anne Testa

• Public Life in Renaissance Florence

• Taboo, Truth, and Religion: Selected Writings (Methodology and History in Anthropology , Vol 2) by Steiner et al.

• Medieval Civilization, 400-1500 by Jacques Le Goff

• Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences (Wildavsky Forum , No 1)
by Mary Douglas

• Is the Market Moral?: A Dialogue on Religion, Economics, and Justice (The Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life) by Rebecca M. Blank and William McGurn (
also: The Mind and the Market)

• Anthropology of Media (Blackwell reader) by Askew et al.

• The National Gallery of Canada: Ideas, Art, Architecture by Douglas Ord

• Source Book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to Present by G.E. Kidder Smith

• You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore

• Utopia and Reality: Modernity in Sweden 1900-1960 by Windenheim and Rudberg

• Amazon list: Reformation Theology

• The Greatest Stories Never Told by Rick Beyer

• Amazon list: books on Indiana

Added:
• History of Listening
• Intro to Italian Poetry
• Literary Book of Economics
• Simpsons and Society
• Writing Material : Readings from Plato to the Digital Age
posted by Nathan at 7:09 PM 0 comments

 
Now that this blog has veered in a linguistic direction (and now that I've outed myself as a Kerry voter--although I remain committed to looking for sense on both sides), it's time to retire this blog's slogan ...

Random Curiosity. Ideological Ambivalence. Purposeful Diversion.

... Aggrandizement:

"Thought-provoking ... worth viewing."
Chicago magazine online / more

... and "About" blurb:

About this blog:
My weblog is primarily my personal scrapbook for clipping articles and keeping track of story ideas. It is also meant to reflect three asssumptions and observations about the media: 1) The most important and interesting news is usually just below the media's radar. There is no such thing as a "news cycle" in the real world--only the constant daily drama of people's lives and the fascinating dynamics of culture.
more
2) Rather than ghettoizing news into sections, the media should promote and satisfy broad curiosity about the world, seeking to connect not with consumers in categories, but with readers in general.
3) The media must find the balance between personal voice and public responsibility. Newspapers are typically dry and lifeless, blogs are typically pointless personal or political bloviating. There is a place for personal analysis written with voice, so long as it is wise, balanced, and humbly provocative. more

Also, you can never have too many B&C banners:

posted by Nathan at 7:04 PM 0 comments

 
headlines

Ashcroft Loses Job To Mexican

Domineering Wife Specifically Said 'Chunk-Style' Pineapple

Local Life-Insurance Salesman A Catalog Of Horrific Sudden-Death Scenarios x

Opinion: What Happens At Yucca Mountain Stays At Yucca Mountain x
posted by Nathan at 6:56 PM 0 comments

 
This week in my B&C blog: A roundup of recent articles on philosophy and reason in America today, including the Sopranos-and-Philosophy craze. LINK/ARCHIVE
posted by Nathan at 2:49 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune language column:
On a new kind of sentence fragment in TV newscasting: so-called "ing-lish." Plus: Overheard on Election Night; Tom Brokaw's pronunciation.

temp link/perm.preview

My closing line on "ing-lish" was cut:

For the viewer already dizzy from all the news crawls, instant online polls and ever-shrinking sound bites, it's getting harder to tell the difference between what has happened, what is happening, and what will or may happen in the future. These days, everything seems to be happening at once.

However, if you really dig grammar (God bless you!), you know that this line, and my line about "putting everything in the present," are regrettably misleading. Absolute phrases and gerunds have NO tense--they are non-finite, since they do not specify tense, agent, and number. There's a good, clear breakdown of this at I.G.O.E. My English professor's more thorough explanation is here. He adds a few common absolute phrases:
"all things considered, all other things being equal, God willing..."

This essay at News Lab and this PBS segment suggest the phenomenon has something to do with "dropping the verb," but in fact only the auxiliary verb ("is," "have been," etc.) is dropped; the verb remains in something resembling absolute form.

More on newsspeak here and on Election Night here. Transcript of CNN's 7 p.m. hour of Election Night here. The Seattle Times on how the media can get it right next time. And more Ratherisms.

I was really interested by David Gergen's "locust of lawyers." Here's more:
locusts

United Press International
October 15, 2004 Friday
HEADLINE: Analysis: Will lawyers decide the vote?
BYLINE: By MICHAEL KIRKLAND
Like a biblical plague of locusts, lawyers are gathering by the thousands at the call of the Democratic and Republican parties to handle voting-related court challenges both before and after the Nov. 2 presidential election.

Election Integrity At Stake
By George F. Will
Sunday, October 24, 2004;
Today's worry concerns a cloud of locust-like lawyers asserting novel theories that purport to demonstrate that sensible rules, such as requiring voters to have identification, are illegal, even unconstitutional. This locust litigation will erupt around any close election -- any not won beyond "the margin of litigation." link

CNN:
GERGEN: What the attorneys will be looking for is the same thing the monitors will be looking for. And both sides will have them out in force. As George Will called them, the locust of lawyers.

Inflections:

• Slogan of the Nader campaign, qtd in the Chi.Tribune: Bush and Kerry make me want to Ralph.

• "'Wal-Mart Republicans' is probably more accurate [than "Religious Right"], given that Bush's majority was built up in the same kinds of small communities where the world's largest retailer thrives." x

• "I have to admit that I am a little confused by all this talk of 'man date' by Republican leaders in the days since the election. I thought they were opposed to same-sex fooling around." x (more on mandate)

• This was from a rerun of either Seinfeld or Sex in the City, I forget which:

To boyfriend: "Here's the thing."
Bf: "Oh no, not the thing! I hate the thing."

• A word from WorldWideWords I want to save: sonofusion

• My wife spotted a flyer nailed to a phone pole that said "Found: Lost Cat." "It's not really lost anymore, is it?" she observed. On the other hand, the alternative is posting a flyer that says: "Found: Cat That Had Been Lost At The Time We Found It But As Of Its Finding Is No Longer Lost"

• Someone found this blog by doing a search for the architect of the "ifill tower." (I had posted a quote from the debate moderated by Gwen Ifill, and said something somewhere about a tower, so voila.) I wonder if that surname was originally someone's attempt to name their family after the famous landmark? I doubt it; the name is probably older than the tower.

• "If "The Incredibles" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them," wrote the Tribune. This is approaching cliche territory, suggests a quick search for "If x did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him/her/them."

• Googling my name (everyone's entitled now and then), I found this post from a Lon Bierma, my relation to whom (if any) I don't know.

From: Lon Bierma
Subject: Words with Opposite Meanings
Sigmund Freud speculated that language may have first developed with one word representing both one thing and its opposite. He cited several examples but let's use the word 'day'. Day can be used to represent both day and night or only daylight. Picture two people without a language trying to communicate the meaning of day and night as they watched the sun rise or set. It is easy to see how one word would suffice. Freud also pointed out that when we hear a concrete word our minds immediately jump to its opposite. Try it on friends. When you say black the first word to come to their minds will be white. Same with up/down, hot/cold, etc.

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 2:46 PM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: nexus \NEK-sus\
1 : connection, link; also : a causal link
2 : a connected group or series
3 : center, focus

"Nexus" is all about connections. The word comes from "nectere," a Latin verb meaning "to bind." A number of other English words are related to "nectere." The most obvious is "connect," but "annex" (meaning "to attach as an addition," or more specifically "to incorporate into a political domain") is related as well. When "nexus" came into English in the 17th century, it meant "connection." Eventually, it took on the additional meaning "connected series" (as in "a nexus of relationships"). In the past few decades it has taken a third meaning: "center" (as in "the trade nexus of the region"), perhaps from the notion that a point in the center of an arrangement serves to join together the objects that surround it.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 2:41 PM 0 comments

 
Red and Blue America? Nope

-

From Slate:

George Bush is already proclaiming a mandate, for chrissakes. If the narrow margin of victory in this election had swung the other way, does anyone doubt for a moment that an army of Republican surrogates would have immediately fanned out to the shouting-head shows to argue, until they were collectively blue in the face, that the election of John Kerry was nothing more than a statistical fluke that certainly carried with it no greater meaning?

"I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals."
- George W. Bush, 11/4/04

Now that's conciliatory!

"How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?"

-headline in London's Daily Mirror.

It's not just the 59 million--we're all stupid, says Jason Keglowitz.

Not Quite 'Dewey Defeats Truman':

posted by Nathan at 2:35 PM 0 comments

 
'Tis the season--yes, already--for Christmas decorations. I did this brief for Chicago Tribune Magazine last year:

Q: ARE RETAILERS STILL PUTTING UP CHRISTMAS DISPLAYS EVER EARLIER?

A: We used to consider stores jumping the gun if they did it before Thanksgiving. Now they seem to start closer to Halloween. But there's little uniformity. Marshall Field's reports its holiday decorations went up chain-wide on the first weekend in November, a la the past 50 years. Bloomingdale's followed two weeks later, same as last year (but its New York flagship decorated a week later than in '02). Many Mag Mile mainstays waited until the Festival of Lights parade on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And Nordstrom's brags that it waits untill the day after Thanksgiving.

Nationally, most stores started their holiday decorating on Nov. 1, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. "That's been pretty consistent for the past five years," said a spokesman. But Russell Salzman, president of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Assn., says the long-term trend has stores inching into October. "I'm sensing stores are looking to extend the holiday shopping season," he says. "Over the past 10 years, decorations have been going up earlier and coming down later." Longer or not, this holiday season is expected to bring a 5 percent jump in spending over last year, according to the National Retail Federation. That would lighten our wallets by more than $217 billion.
12/14/03

My column on Christmas Web sites
posted by Nathan at 2:30 PM 0 comments

 
"If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
-Yogi Berra
posted by Nathan at 2:24 PM 0 comments

 
Posted without comment...

For a leap of faith, that's the breaks

Devin Rose
Chicago Tribune
October 31, 2004

My aunt is finding her new church surprisingly entertaining. She recently told of a sermon that left the youth minister in stitches--literally.

Young and exuberant, he bounded across the stage of the sanctuary one Sunday with a gleam in his eye, preaching the power of faith.

"I have so much faith," he exclaimed, "that I know I would be OK if I were to leap into the congregation right now, because my brothers and sisters would catch me."

To prove his point, he leapt.

His brothers and sisters didn't catch him.

Instead, panicked by the body hurtling toward them, they parted like the Red Sea.

The young preacher emerged with cuts and a broken collarbone, and, surely, a touch of wounded pride.

But his faith was unshaken--as he told it later, God might be teaching him not to take himself too seriously.

posted by Nathan at 2:18 PM 0 comments

 
Is this true?

The wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child--whoever these people are--turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer "new-speak" (they don't even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature, and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books. -Umberto Eco, On Literature

Last month was National Novel Writing Month. Yeah, like there aren't enough poorly written novels around.

Napoleon was, in writing, at least, quite the Romeo, according to the new book The Linguist and The Emperor:

I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest... Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an effect you have on my heart! I sent you thousands of kisses---but don't kiss me. Your kisses sear my blood. p26

posted by Nathan at 1:56 PM 0 comments

 


David Flemming, Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. link
posted by Nathan at 1:52 PM 0 comments

 
G.K. Chesterton on journalism:

We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson still safe” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, not dead yet.” link

posted by Nathan at 1:49 PM 0 comments

 
headlines

Nation's Poor Win Election For Nation's Rich x

Kerry Captures Bin Laden One Week Too Late x

Nation's Wildlife Fleeing To Canada

Self-Help Book Believes It Can Be A Bestseller Someday x

wdyt:
"Our nation may be bitterly divided, but at least our government can agree on being ultra-conservative."

"Now that the Republicans run Congress, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court, they'll just have to invent some new branches of government to dominate, as well."

"The fact that 48 percent of Americans voted for a boring placeholder like John Kerry is actually a really good sign for the Left."
posted by Nathan at 1:43 PM 0 comments

 
I'm still not sure the election was won on abortion and same-sex marriage. When you think about it, in nearly every election since FDR's Fireside Chats--which helped begin the personality era of presidential politics--the friendlier candidate has won (Eisenhower over Stevenson twice, Kennedy over Nixon, Carter over Ford, Reagan over Carter and Mondale, Bush Sr. over Dukakis, Clinton over Bush Sr. and Dole, Bush Jr. over Gore and Kerry). Nixon's wins might be an exception, but even he learned a hard lesson in likability in 1960. (In the case of Truman and Johnson, neither they nor their opponents--Dewey and Goldwater--were friendly, so it wasn't the friendliness factor, but the macho factor.)

So if the presidential nominees had been Edwards and Cheney...

[Update: Slate on the gay marriage election myth; Louis Menand on why voters weren't sending a message]
posted by Nathan at 3:06 PM 0 comments

 
This week in my B&C blog: October news and book review roundup. LINK/ARCHIVE
posted by Nathan at 3:23 PM 0 comments

 
My Tribune language column today:
On the new book "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion," on why animal communication doesn't qualify as language.
temp link/perm.preview

Here's author Steven Anderson's page at Yale. Here's the full text of The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and here's much more on the series. Here's the NYT on Anderson's book. Here's a clip from my story this summer on Rico the dog.

Here's more on the Endings items: First Idea, parrot tongues, and bilingual brains.

Inflections
• As if voting weren't confusing enough, a sign yesterday said "Voting Enterance." (Is that syllable added in common pronunciation? I'm not sure.)

• "These restrooms are for accessible use only," a sign said in a hotel lobby. So I looked for an inaccessible one.

• Manny Ramirez on why the curse of the Bambino didn't stop the Red Sox: "You make your own destination."

• One of Jay Leno's Headlines, from an ad: "Going away? Don't Want To Leave Your Dog In a Canal?" (Sure don't. Wet dogs reek.) He also had an ad for "Frosted Shredded What."

• The NYT: "Music critics have a word for ... this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights.

• I want to look into the transitivity of the verb "quit" in British English versus its American intransitivity: "[Hostage] calls upon Britian to quit Iraq." (There's that line from The Raven: "Leave my loneliness unbroken! Quit the bust above my door!")

• The Trib on people with the last name of Frankenstein.

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 2:48 PM 0 comments

 
I've said it before and I'll say it again: What more does a president have to do to lose re-election? How do you look at President Bush and say, "Job well done. Please do more of it"? I guess the difference was the macho factor: "I have more testosterone in the fight against terrorists, and I don't like the thought of gay guys doing it."

But the harsher question goes to Kerry, the second-straight underachieving Democratic nominee. How do you lose to this guy, after these last two years? How many more vulnerabilities can a challenger ask for in an incumbent? Kerry should be prepared for even more Democratic hatred than Gore got--at least Gore won the popular vote.

Take a look at the last four Democratic losers: Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale. All aloof elitists, all vastly ineffective communicators. As was said last night, the Democrats are mostly a bi-coastal party, and desperately need to become a national party again.* You don't become a national party--you don't wade into that sea of red states--with Hillary Clinton. You might do it with John Edwards, but he doesn't make up the gap in the macho factor, especially not against Rudy Guiliani. You could do it with Barack Obama, but he won't be ready until '12 or '16, and will probably start out as a VP nominee.

There is just one consolation in all this: Now Bush will have to clean up his own mess. It wouldn't have been fully fair to ask Kerry to hoist us out of the hole--in Iraq and in the economy--that Bush dug. Bush will have to sleep in the bed he made. And he'll have to face, on a daily and public basis, his failure.

One last thought: will the Democrats pipe down now about the Electoral College? It nearly won them the White House this time despite a two or three percent deficit in the popular vote.

David Brooks registered his apt misgivings about both Bush and Kerry yesterday. William Saletan has a reality check for Democrats this morning. Nicholas Kristof in today's NYT on why the working poor vote for trickle-down Republicans. (Update: what went wrong, what won't work next time, and more on the "God gap" here, here, here and here. And Slate on how to move to Canada.)

* - States that Clinton won in 1992 and/or 1996 that neither Gore nor Kerry carried (with the exception of Gore's sort-of and squeaker wins in FL and NM): Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Montana, Ohio, Nevada, New Mexico, and West Virginia. (response/more results)

Look at how little these percentages budged after four years. Kinda makes you wonder, what's the point of all those ads, sound bites, conventions, debates, and most of all, all those polls?

STATE Bush-Gore Bush-Kerry
AL••••••57-42•••••• 63-37
AK•••••• 59-28•••••• 62-35
AZ••••••51-45 ••••••55-44
AR•••••• 51-45•••••• 54-45
CA•••••• 42-54•••••• 44-55
CO•••••• 51-42•••••• 53-46
CT•••••• 39-56•••••• 44-54
DE•••••• 42-55•••••• 46-53
DC•••••• 09-86•••••• 09-90
FL•••••• 49-49•••••• 52-47
GA•••••• 55-43•••••• 59-41
HI•••••• 38-56•••••• 45-54
ID•••••• 69-28•••••• 68-30
IL•••••• 43-55•••••• 44-55
IN•••••• 57-41•••••• 60-39
IA•••••• 48-49•••••• 50-49
KS•••••• 59-37•••••• 62-37
KY•••••• 57-41•••••• 60-40
LA•••••• 53-45•••••• 57-42
ME•••••• 44-49•••••• 45-53
MD•••••• 40-57•••••• 43-56
MA•••••• 33-60•••••• 37-62
MI•••••• 47-51•••••• 48-51
MN•••••• 46-48•••••• 48-51
MS•••••• 57-42•••••• 60-40
MO•••••• 51-47•••••• 54-46
MT•••••• 58-34•••••• 59-39
NE•••••• 63-33•••••• 62-32
NV•••••• 49-46•••••• 51-48
NH•••••• 48-47•••••• 49-50
NJ•••••• 41-56•••••• 46-53
NM•••••• 48-48•••••• 50-49
NY•••••• 35-60•••••• 40-58
NC•••••• 56-43•••••• 56-43
ND•••••• 61-33•••••• 63-36
OH•••••• 50-46•••••• 51-49
OK•••••• 60-38•••••• 66-34
OR•••••• 47-47•••••• 47-52
PA•••••• 47-51•••••• 49-51
RI•••••• 32-61•••••• 39-60
SC•••••• 57-41•••••• 58-41
SD•••••• 60-38•••••• 60-39
TN•••••• 51-48•••••• 57-43
TX•••••• 59-38•••••• 61-38
UT•••••• 67-26•••••• 71-27
VT•••••• 41-51•••••• 39-59
VA•••••• 52-45•••••• 54-46
WA•••••• 45-50•••••• 46-53
WV•••••• 52-46•••••• 56-43
WI•••••• 48-48•••••• 49-50
WY•••••• 69-28•••••• 69-29

Total 47.9-48.3••••••51-48

Bush 50,456,002
Gore 50,999,897

Bush 58,874,321
Kerry 55,319,301

(more numbers from CNN/WP; speech tranx's; more 2000 numbers here, here and here.)

So, ladies and gentlemen, here he is, your commander-in-chief, Mr. Mission Accomplished:



(Well, at least it isn't this guy!)



Tom Shales this morning in the WP: "We finally figured out who [Kerry] looks like: Jay Leno's grandfather."



Update: (I lost the source of this, sorry):

There were about 115 million votes cast. There are
217.8 million eligible voters. That means that about
52 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. That means
that the president was re-elected by 27 percent of
eligible American voters. And that Kerry received the
active support -- that is, taking the trouble to vote
-- of 25 percent of eligible American voters.

"Bad politicians are elected by good people who don't
vote." (George Jean Nathan)

concession speech delivered by Dick Tuck, a
candidate for California assemblyman in 1964:
"The people have spoken -- the bastards."
posted by Nathan at 2:23 PM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: tergiversation\ter-jiv-er-SAY-shun\
1 : evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement : equivocation
2 : desertion of a cause, position, party, or faith

The tergiversation of Ken's speech left his listeners confused about where he really stood on the issue.

The Latin verb "tergiversari" means "to show reluctance," and it comes from the combination of "tergum," meaning "back," and "versare," meaning "to turn." "Tergiversari" gave English the noun "tergiversation" and the verb "tergiversate" ("to engage in tergiversation"). "Tergiversation" is the slightly older term, having been around since at least 1570; the first known use of "tergiversate" dates from 1590. There's also the much rarer adjective "tergiversant" ("tending to evade"), as well as the noun "tergiversator" ("one that tergiversates").

• Previous E.T.

posted by Nathan at 10:55 AM 0 comments

 
Note: My "On Language" column in the Tribune is moving to Wednesdays as of today. Here is today's column, on political slang: temp link/perm.preview

Inflections

• When I saw the headline 'Kerry woos labor at Warren rally,' I thought that we usually use the word "woo" in cases of successful seduction, which did not necessarily occur in Warren (but three-letter verbs are a boon to headline-writers). The definition doesn't require success, but is that more common? (If I have time, maybe I'll fiddle around on Google and try to find out.)

• Isn't it interesting how the article "a" can denote a hypothetical and/or future happening? "We do not know if a President Kerry would cross partisan lines to build a broad consensus on critical matters of foreign policy, health care, and judicial appointments." If he wins the election, just drop the "a."

• The Trib said that Norman Mailer did a creditable job of playing himself in a guest appearance on Gilmore Girls. I wondered, what's the difference between "creditable" and "credible"? Apparently not much: credible: "offering reasonable grounds for being believed"; creditable: "worthy of belief ... sufficiently good to bring esteem or praise." Did the Trib mean Mailer's self-impersonation was believable or praiseworthy, or both?

• E-mail I received: "Going forward, we'll work on getting the entire [newsletter] online." Easier that way than to go backward.

• `Would you mind if I called you Judy?' a Tribune reader asked a waitress. 'She said, `No, not at all.' Later, Judy returned to the table and handed me a piece of paper with her phone number on it. When I'd asked if I could call her Judy, she thought I was asking for her phone number.' more

• Always left out: A producer on the extras for the movie Miracle says that they looked for skaters "all over North America and Canada."

• ESPN's graphic for the highlights of a hat trick in Dutch soccer read Hoeden Truc (and translated it as "hat trick")

• "Here!" I yelled across our apartment in response to my wife's inquiry about my whereabouts. "Where's 'here'?" she asked. I had intended the volume and origin of my voice to convey how far away I was, but should have reported my location. "Here" is demonstrative; can it demonstrate distance, as I intended?

• I looked up kitsch after seeing this NYT article and picture: "originates from the German term etwas verkitschen (which has a similar meaning to "knock off" in English." (more earlier)

• Bulletin board ad in our basement for a used fur coat: "Like New Condition"

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 11:46 AM 0 comments

 
It's not healthy to get too worried about newspaper endorsements (at least they provide thought-out arguments, which are rare this time of year), but here's the full roundup from Editor & Publisher. Here in Chicago, the Tribune endorsed the Republican presidential candidate for the 287th time (prompting this rebuttal from ex-die-hard Republican Steve Chapman), but did give the nod to Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama. Here's the WP for Kerry (also: Slate and Nykr). The Cleveland P-D, which endorsed Bush in 2000, wants to back Kerry this time, but its tax-cut-loving publisher is standing in its way. Why not go the route of the Republican-friendly Detroit News, and decline an endorsement? (Update: It did.)

Here's the New Yorker on Kerry and Iraq and how Bush changed between Texas and Washington (more).

Meanwhile, nearly as important as the presidential race is the balance of the Senate, Daily Kos has a roundup. Just in case, ABC's The Note has a list of excuses ready for whichever presidential candidate loses.

Egad! An article about issues less than a week before the election! USA Today on stem cells.


Despite these links, I really am getting sick of politics--promise. I need some political humor to lighten the load. Sojourners saw a bumper sticker that said: "Bush/Cheney '04: Because you don't change horsemen mid-apocalypse."

Other moments of political pithy:

Vote for the man who promises least. He'll be the least disappointing. -- Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)

I never vote for anyone. I always vote against. -- W.C. Fields (1879-1946)

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in. -- graffito in London, 1970s

Q: Where does one find dual air bags? A: At a political debate. -- Johnny Hart

One last thing, on Bush's metaphysical ruminations, via Slate:

A "senior adviser to Bush," Suskind reports, says to him that "guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' ...

The problem with this now-famous anecdote is that it has nothing to do with certainty based on religious faith or with the tension "between fact and faith" that Suskind claims to find in the Bush White House. The aide isn't talking about ignoring reality and living in some spiritual dream world, he's talking about changing reality through worldly action (e.g. war). His point is less Christian than Marxist, a vulgar Bush corrolary to Marx's famous Theses on Feuerbach , the last of which is carved into his tombstone: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." The press and much of Washington studies the existing world in various ways, the "senior advisor" seems to be saying. "Meanwhile we're changing the world in ways that make your studies obsolete."

OK, maybe one more thing, on political journalism: I wrote here in my college paper about the overabundance of sports metaphors in political coverage. This headline is a classic case: "Kerry Returns Bush Volley On Health Care" As I said earlier, Geoff Nunberg noted that the most apt sports metaphor for the debates is figure skating: "a quadrennial competition that nobody has any idea how to score unless one of the competitors actually falls down."

Finally, even worse than a biased media is a banal media. When reporters bend over backwards to be artificially neutral (Daily Kos says coverage of the veep debate was "Both Sides Mislead: Cheney Erroneously Claims Not To Have Repeatedly Linked Iraq to 9/11, While Edwards Overestimates US Spending on Iraq Reconstruction by Less Than 1%") they get stiff. Is anyone informed or illumined by this lead of David Broder's story on the final debate?

Reprising policy battles that Republicans and Democrats have contested for decades, President Bush and challenger John F. Kerry sharpened their differences on social and domestic issues last night, with each candidate comfortably articulating the positions his most loyal supporters wanted to hear.

Update: More on Bush's certainty an NYT op-ed.

As I've written--and let me again disclose I'm fervent about my Christian faith--faith isn't faith without a healthy dose of doubt, without the tension between a sense of credulity and incredulity. Certainty is a form of denial of the complexity of the world. So it's fatuous of the media to necessarily equate spiritual belief with single-mindedness, but it's also fatuous of Bush to treat his morning devotions as a pep talk rather than as spiritual reflection, as he reportedly does.

Another update:

"[A] political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief." President Bush, Oct. 27

Couldn't have said it better myself. I have just one question about this election, and this is the absolutely last thing I'm going to get off my chest. Whatever your beef with Kerry (and I have many), what more does a president have to do in his first term to lose re-election? On what basis will you ever vote against an incumbent in the future if you vote for this one? What more will that incumbent have to do, and will the country be able to survive it?

Update: Relief in the form of Onion humor:



Election Day tips:

The new electronic voting machines are complicated. But don't worry: Octogenarians will be on hand to troubleshoot any technological problems that might arise.

Don't wear dress shoes. They leave black scuff marks on gymnasium floors.

If you are black and a resident of Florida, work out two or three alternate routes to your polling place to avoid police checkpoints.

If you live in Florida, for Christ's sake, look at the ballot very, very carefully this time.

Keep in mind that the name of every person who votes against George Bush is going to be read aloud on television the next time we're attacked by terrorists.

- Other headlines:

Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3 x

Study: 100 Percent Of Americans Lead Secret Lives x

Assistant Uses Cake To Smuggle Cake-Decorating Set To Martha Stewart x

Op-ed: Converting to the Metric System Starts With the Individual x

Street poll on bringing back the draft: x
"If I get drafted, I hope they put me on one of the swift boats. From what I gather, those guys are never in any danger."

Well, okay. As long as it's only a small draft and then they promise to stop."

That's it. I'm voting for the candidate who would flip-flop on sending my son to die, rather than the one who'd do it without hesitation."

- What do do about the flu vaccine shortage x
posted by Nathan at 11:38 AM 0 comments

 
Time Out NY on media people's media diet.
posted by Nathan at 11:33 AM 0 comments

 
Clinton Stockwell of Chicago Semester on Christian urban engagement:

A few years ago, when thinking about the focus of another urban program, we came up with the following: that there was a great need to “create a new generation of leaders for a world that has become increasingly more urban, more global and more culturally diverse.” Biblically, as many of you know, perhaps the most significant verse in scripture for me comes from the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. There, Jeremiah exhorted the exiles, who found themselves in pagan Babylon, not to flee or revolt, but to “seek the peace of the city, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace, one would find their peace” as well.
In a world rife with conflict, tension and danger, we desperately need such leadership. We need those who can navigate cities, can make connections globally and
will “stand in the gap” between cultures, and between differences of race, class, nationality, gender, ethnicity and religion.

Earlier: Gideon Strauss on six principles of Christian cultural engagement
posted by Nathan at 11:28 AM 0 comments

 
Apparently the technical term is racing thoughts, but here's a clip from CTILibrary.com: "Finally, if you're cursed with a runaway mind, remember, as Oswald Chambers said, "God . . . loves me, and I will never think of anything that he will forget, so why should I worry?"

This will get your thoughts racing, from NYT's review of Harold Bloom's latest:

Yet the title of Bloom's antiphilosophical book, ''Where
Shall Wisdom Be Found?,'' is, of course, an ancient
philosophical question. He never stoops to say in a
reductive way what wisdom finally is, but he does give us
some of its characteristics. He speaks of the ''wisdom of
annihilation'' in Ecclesiastes, of the ''structure of
gathering self-awareness'' in Job and ''King Lear,'' of
how, from Homer, we learn the hard truth that ''the gods
are selfish, nasty spectators, all too happy to see us
suffering in their theater of cruelty.'' Yet human
suffering can be made bearable: ''Wisdom literature teaches
us to accept natural limits.''

posted by Nathan at 11:26 AM 0 comments

 
Daylight Savings Time is confusing, especially in Indiana.


ABC News' The Note: Futures Calendar:

— Oct. 27, 2004: Game four of the World Series in St. Louis
— Oct. 27, 2004: President Bush campaigns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan
— Oct. 27, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigns in Iowa and Minnesota
— Oct. 27, 2004: Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) campaigns in Florida
— Oct. 27, 2004: Vice President Cheney campaigns in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
— Oct. 28, 2004: Game five of the World Series in St. Louis if necessary
— Oct. 28, 2004: National John Kerry Meetup Day
— Oct. 28, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin
— Oct. 29, 2004: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) campaigns for President Bush in Columbus, OH
— Oct. 29, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigns in Florida
— Oct. 30, 2004: Game six of the World Series in Boston if necessary
— Oct. 31, 2004: Game seven of the World Series in Boston if necessary
— Oct. 31, 2004: Daylight savings time ends
— Oct. 31, 2004: Halloween
— Nov. 2, 2004: Election Day
— Nov. 2, 2004: Scheduled start of the NBA's 2004-2005 season
— Nov. 5, 2004: President George W. Bush and Laura Bush's 27th wedding anniversary
— Nov. 5, 2004: National unemployment numbers for October released
— Nov. 5-8, 2004: International Association of Political Consultants' 37th world conference in Vancouver, British Columbia
— Nov. 7, 2004: 35th Annual New York City Marathon
— Nov. 11, 2004: Veterans' Day
— Nov. 17, 2004: Fmr. Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT)'s birthday
— Nov. 18, 2004: Official opening of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock, AR
— Nov. 19, 2004: State unemployment numbers for October released
— Nov. 25, 2004: Thanksgiving Day
— Nov. 30-Dec. 4, 2004: National Lague of Cities' Congress of Cities and Exposition in Indianapolis, IN
— Dec. 1, 2004: World AIDS Awareness Day
— Dec. 3, 2004: National unemployment numbers for November released
— Dec. 4, 2004: Louisiana congressional runoff
— Dec. 7, 2004: Hanukkah begins
— Dec. 7, 2004: Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day
— Dec. 11, 2004: Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)'s birthday
— Dec. 13, 2004: Presidential electors meet in state capitals across the country
— Dec. 15, 2004: Bill of Rights Day
— Dec. 21, 2004: First day of winter
— Dec. 21, 2004: State unemployment numbers for November released
— Dec. 25, 2004: Christmas Day
— Dec. 26, 2004: Kwanzaa begins
— Jan. 6-8, 2005: Southern Political Science Association conference, New Orleans
— Jan. 7, 2005: National unemployment numbers for December released
— Jan. 16, 2005: 62nd Annual Golden Globe Awards
— Jan. 20, 2005: 55th Inauguration of the President of the United States
— Jan. 21-23, 2005: American Association of Political Consultants' 14th annual conference in Washington, DC
— Jan. 25, 2005: State unemployment numbers for December released
— Feb. 13, 2005: 47th Annual Grammy Awards
— Feb. 26-27, 2005: National Education Summit on High Schools cosponsored by Achieve, Inc. and the National Governors Association in Washington, DC
— Feb. 27, 2005: 77th Annual Academy Awards
— May 19, 2005: Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith opens in theaters
posted by Nathan at 11:06 AM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: slake \SLAYK\
1 : satisfy, quench
2 : to cause (as lime) to heat and crumble by treatment with water : hydrate

"Slake" is no slacker when it comes to obsolete and archaic meanings. Shakespearean scholars may know that in the Bard's day "slake" meant "to subside or abate" ("No flood by raining slaketh...." - The Rape of Lucrece) or "to lessen the force of " ("It could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart." - Henry VI, Part 3). The most erudite word enthusiasts may also be aware of earlier meanings of "slake," such as "to slacken one's efforts" or "to cause to be relaxed or loose." These early meanings recall the word's Old English ancestor "sleac," which not only meant "slack" but is also the source of that modern term.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 10:41 AM 0 comments

 
My B&C blog is idle this week. You can catch up on recent Places items on San Juan de Teotihuacan's pyramids, Danish restrictions on marrying foreigners, South Africa's wildlife reserves, paintings found in a Philadelphia school (2nd item), Redesigning NYC's streelights (2nd item), the Mormon temple in Nauvoo, Illinois (2nd item)
posted by Nathan at 1:52 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune language column:
On the phrase "in harm's way," which has doubled in use over the last month.
temp link/perm.preview/reprint

More from Safire on "in harm's way":

The phrase is rooted in its opposite: out of harm's way, coined by the
English divine Thomas Fuller before 1661: "Some great persons . . . have been made sheriffs, to keep them out of harm's way." Apparently the sheriff's job was a political plum, not then dangerous. ... Thomas Manton, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, delivered a [17th century] sermon arguing that man's "duty is to run in harm's way" because "there are none so much harmed, maligned and opposed in the world, as those that follow that which is good ... The hoary phrase has more power than the bureaucratic "in the face of impending hostilities."

More on the debates: tranx's and search/more. "Cheney's top three phases were Saddam Hussein (11), fact of the matter (10) and United States (10), while Edwards' were John Kerry (36), American people (28) and tax cuts (16)." More on Bush's pauses (I'm not buying the idea that this is evidence of Bush being wired). Also: Kerry and Bush acc. speech texts.

More on the candidates' language: LL on Kerry and contractions; Bush and tautologies. Kerry said "ladies and gentlmen" 13 times to Bush's 0 in the second debate, which could have come off as patronizing. Bush said "steadfast" four times to Kerry's once (in a "yes, but" rebuttal) and "firm resolve" or "firm and resolve" three times to Kerry's 0. As I wanted to say in the story, you can be steadfast and have resolve and still be guilty of what H.L. Mencken called a "foolish consistency." Also: USA Today noted that Bush said in his acc. speech. "Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called walking," and "Now and then I come across as a little too blunt."

Some interesting observations on the candidates' speaking styles--although, as I quoted Mark Liberman in my story and as Arnold Zwicky wrote me by e-mail, let's not go overboard and let these superficial analyses override matters of policy.

Geoff Nunberg on Kerry in July:

Kerry's involuted syntax is less a sign of prevarication than an excess of prudence. He steps into a thought like someone wading into a rocky stream, always probing with his toe for stones. And when he does finally set his foot down, it's cushioned in abstractions -- "We're not maximizing the potential for the outcome we went in there to achieve." When he's finished, it's not always easy to tell if he has actually touched bottom.

Geoff Pullum on Bush and clarity:

For a start, there is nothing indecisive-sounding about this sentence of Kerry's, with its series of illustrative examples and its succession of parenthetical phrases ... Yet there can be plenty of indecisiveness in a stream of fairly simple clauses if they are all over the map in terms of subject matter.

"I don't believe it's going to happen.... I've shown the American people I know how to lead.... I understand everybody in this country doesn't agree with the decisions I've made.... People out there listening know what I believe.... This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate.... We have a duty to protect our children and grandchildren.... Ten million citizens [in Afghanistan] have registered to vote."

My reading of the whole answer is that we're looking at a man in a panic who has no idea what to say to the question. He has been taught a whole slew of tough-sounding clauses to reiterate, but can think of nothing to do but hurl them around at random. He demonstrates ... real intellectual weakness and indecisiveness when faced with a challenging question. ... Neither of the current stereotypes about styles of speech seems to be true: Kerry does not engage in long-winded unstructured rambling; Bush sometimes does.

James Fallows in the Atlantic this summer:

During his career George Bush's speaking style has changed significantly ... [In a 1994 gubernatorial debate with Ann Richards,] Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two ("million" when he clearly meant "billion"; "stole" when he meant "sold"), but fewer than most people would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. "
more

Inflections
• "On the Media" on October surprise. (This year's OS? albeit unplanned)

• Ever since the graphic of a swing (that you swing on) next to this NYT op-ed about polling, I've had this image of a voters swinging back and forth on swingsets whenever I hear the term swing voters.

• In his new book on animals and language, Yale's Stephen Anderson cites an eleven-letter, vowel-less word in Georgian that is monosyllabic: gvprts'kvnis ("he is bleeding us, financially"). (p.123; see #5 here.

• Reading a New Yorker piece from this summer on Reagan by Edmund Morris: "Gorbachev once remarked on Reagan’s “balance” to me in an interview. But he used the Russian word ravnovesie in its wider sense, of psychological equilibrium. The President’s poised body and smooth yet inexorable motion telegraphed a larger force that came of a lifetime of no self-doubt."

• From Dave Barry's Mister Language Person: Melba Glock sent in a story from the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star headlined ``Volunteers needed to help torture survivors.''

• A memo from our apartment building informed us that "the tuckpointers will be setting up their equipment" this week. Had no idea what that was; M-W: "tuck-point/ transitive verb/ : to finish (the mortar joints between bricks or stones) with a narrow ridge of putty or fine lime mortar"

• The memo also alerted us to a new coffee shop that was a "flavorsome" alternative to Starbucks. I didn't think that was a word, but M-W has it and it gets some 6,600 hits on Google

• Speaking of hits, Red Sox slugger David Ortiz has been hailed by fan signs as papi, which the announcers identified as a term of respect in Central America. Haven't found anything on it yet (I'm assuming it's a variant of papa, which M-W says derives from "French babytalk"; unlike "pappi," a part of a fruit, which comes from the Greek "pappos.")

• On the last "Scrubs," J.D. asks for a milado cookie and is told it's a milano. He's relieved and says: "I always thought that was a little bigoted for a cookie."

• At the store, I wondered, is Lunchables what linguists call a substantivized adjective--an adj. that functions as a noun, as in "through thick and thin"?

• From LL:

A friend once told me about an idiom that nearly ended a relationship. He was northern European, not a native speaker of English, sojourning at a university in the midwest. She was American, reading a map in the passenger's seat of the car he was driving. "OK," she said, "at the next intersection, you want to turn right." He was furious. Internally, of course. "How does she presume to know what I want?" There were other issues here, but her idiom crystallized his sense of psychic intrusion, and he brooded about it for days.

• And LL on the NYT's "after boring of the task."

• I came across the adjective a prioristic last week; I forget where. I thought it was suspect. M-W has "apri·or·i·ty" (which would make the adjective "aprioritistic"); Google has 493 hits for "a prioristic" and over 2,000 for "aprioristic."

• From IMDB.com: "The change [of title] is clear in the movie, as in the song before the credits, the singers interlock between calling the movie "Sharkslayer" and "Shark Tale".

"Interlock between"? M-W: interlock: "1. to lock together: UNITE 2. to connect so that the motion or operation of any part is constrained by another." How about "alternate between"?

• Movies as sponsors are getting strange--yesterday's World Series telecast included something like the "Polar Express Play of the Game"--but an NYT printer-friendly page was confusing, running its announcement and movie title side-by-side:



so that it naturally reads: "Printer-Friendly format I [Heart] Huckabees/Sponsored by In Select Theaters Now."

• Finally, from a Kodak ad: "The best part about photography are the pictures."

It are?

• Previous column and inflections
posted by Nathan at 11:26 AM 0 comments

 
Onion headlines:

U.S. Finishes A 'Strong Second' In Iraq War x

Millions of American Lips Called To Service In Fight Against Poverty x

Tibetan teen getting into Western philosophy x

Jacques Derrida 'Dies'
posted by Nathan at 11:22 AM 0 comments

 



Slate's breakdown of major polls gave Kerry a 276-262 Electoral College edge on 10/19 (above), Bush a 271-267 edge on 10/24

This is (duh) all a crapshoot, not least because in many cases more people hang up on pollsters than talk to them (as I've covered before; more this week from the NYT and NYkr [Update: Slate too]), because of the ambiguity of who is a "likely" voter, because of last-minute voting decisions or changes of mind, and because the election will probably go into the courts for a few weeks again. The AP outlined a few scenarios that will make the election anything but cut-and-dried:

For example, if just New Hampshire and Nevada (or West Virginia) shifted from favoring Bush to the Democrats this time, there could be a 269-269 tie, leaving it to the House to pick the next president and the Senate to pick the new vice president come January. That would leave open the jarring possibility of a Bush-Edwards or Kerry-Cheney pairing, depending on the political leanings of the new House and Senate.

More likely is the chance that results from one or more states could be up in the air for a while because of a recount, challenges to provisional or absentee ballots or lawsuits related to other voting problems. Both parties have lawyers primed to pounce at any target of opportunity this time. And the opportunity for challenges has grown under a new federal law requiring all states to allow people to cast provisional votes if their names don't appear on registration rolls. ...

Michael White, the federal official responsible for coordinating certain aspects of the Electoral College, says he'll be keeping an especially close eye on Colorado, where voters are considering a referendum to divide the state's electoral votes proportionally among the candidates rather than using the existing winner-takes-all formula. A lawsuit is virtually guaranteed if the referendum is approved, meaning the state's nine electoral votes could be a lingering question long after Election Day.

posted by Nathan at 11:09 AM 0 comments

 
Baseball History is Made



Boston Globe
posted by Nathan at 11:03 AM 0 comments

 
via G&M's Soc.St.'s:

"There is in most literary biography a single detail that speaks volumes about its subject," writes Paul Theroux in The New York Times Book Review. "Thoreau almost never left home, Henry Miller was henpecked, Borges lived in fear of his mother, James Joyce was afraid of thunderstorms, Freud was angst-ridden on railway platforms, Wittgenstein was addicted to cowboy movies, Wallace Stevens to candy. Jack Kerouac had copies of National Review by his bed when he died."

Perched five stories above Columbus Circle in the Time Warner Center, Rafael Viñoly's new design for Jazz at Lincoln Center has a cool ethereality that lifts it above the mediocrity of its setting. It's a reminder that some experiences become more intimate when they are shared in full public view. NY Times

posted by Nathan at 10:57 AM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: chicanery\shih-KAY-nuh-ree\
1 : deception by artful subterfuge or sophistry : trickery
2 : a piece of sharp practice (as at law) : trick

"We have hardly any words that do so fully expresse the French clinquant, naiveté ... chicaneries." So lamented English writer John Evelyn in a letter to Sir Peter Wyche in 1665. Evelyn and Wyche were members of a group called the Royal Society, which had formed a committee emulating the French Academy for the purpose of "improving the English language." We can surmise that, in Evelyn's estimation, the addition of "chicanery" to English from French was an improvement. What he apparently didn't realize was that English speakers had adopted the word from the French "chicanerie" before he wished for it; the term appears in English manuscripts dating from 1609. Similarly, "clinquant" ("glittering with gold or tinsel") dates from 1591. "Naïveté," on the other hand, waited until 1673 to appear.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 10:46 AM 0 comments