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