Number 120
In the March 28, 2005 issue of National Review, David Frum wrote in "A New Word, A New Day" about a new word, heteronormative. The story goes that actress Jada Pinkett Smith gave a talk after receiving an award at Harvard, in which she said that women could have it all, family and career. The usual upbeat feminist-but-pro-family credo. The Harvard Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance took offense, because Smith implied that standard sexual relationships are only between males and females ~ i.e., heteronormative.
But think how many others Smith dismissed with her careless words. Celibates. Infants. Animals. Otherly-bodied or non-bodied beings like, oh, angels and demons. We need more words to describe these offenses.
Or maybe a law against norms. I know it goes against mathematics and statistics and so on, but the whole idea of a norm or an average is just as offensive as a woman speaking about her own experience. Perhaps Smith's entire being was an offense to everyone in that audience who was not exactly like her.
A hundred years ago she would have been dissed by most white audiences for not being caucasonormative. Poor girl, she hasn't found her era yet.
Dave DaBee wrote: Tut. "To whom do you turn...", not "Who do you turn to...".
The smiley face he added at the end would have salved my burning ears, had they been burning. Dave wasn't the only person to criticize my hypothetical widget ad: "Who do you turn to for first-class widgets? Ace Widgets." Fred also commented.
But, do you think potential buyers say "To whom do you turn" when speaking amongst themselves about widgets? I think not. When writing dialogue, you hear voices. That is, when I write dialogue, I hear voices. The voice I heard said "Who do you turn to?" (Remember the song, "Who can I turn to?")
And if that isn't enough to satisfy you, William F. Buckley responded to a similar complaint in the 3/28/05 issue of National Review:
Dear Mr. Buckley: From your column, "Personal to Johnny": "Scene: The Tonight Show. Guests: David Susskind and me (WFB)." In the absence of any context, the pronoun should be in the nominative case. Could the implied sentence be: "The guests are/were David Susskind and me"?
Dear Ms. Mochel: Formal rules sometime yield to revisionist usage, and the ear should inform us when that is usurpation, or blueblooded succession.
I couldn't have said it more irritatingly myself.
Ever get a commercial jingle stuck in your head? Of course you have. This cheery one popped up from ancient memory:
"Black Draught helps you feel fresh and clean inside!"
Black Draught is the brand name and also a generic name of a senna laxative that's been around for at least a century. (Black drop is an opiate.) Maybe I heard the ads on radio when I was a kid (somewhat less than a century ago), although research shows that the commercial was aired on the old Porter Wagoner show, which I didn't watch.
"Draught" is "the same as draft, the spelling with gh indicating an older pronunciation." However, the product was not pronounced draft, either, it was drat, as I remember it; maybe a Southern thing. You know that older pronunciation, though. It wasn't an F sound, it was more of a G sound from the back of the mouth as if you were trying to hawk up spit. Now, why does hawk mean to spit? Because it comes from Old English/Saxon/Nordic, meaning to heave. If you pronounced "draught" in the old way, like so many old English words (laugh, taught, rough) you'd be hawking all day long.
For you world travelers, Black Draught is also a brand of tap beer in New Zealand.
Either product might be able to clear out impacted
commercial jingles.
Omni animal post taxum triste est
Frank, who lives in Tucson, sent me links to a couple of local
news articles about the current border situation: My opinion Steve
Auslander: Ignorance simpler than insight | The Arizona Daily Star ® and Migrants shift
entry to dangerous west | The Arizona Daily Star ®.
He also wrote:
Trust me, I'm not supporting anything or
anybody illegal, though I can certainly attest to not being sure I know anyone
(you or I included) who hasn't been illegal at some time in some way but...this
from the NY Times via TIME:
$7 billion ~ Estimated amount of Social
Security taxes paid each year by illegal immigrants, even though they will not
receive benefits.
0% ~ Estimated percentage of last year's
Social Security surplus made up by those illegal immigrants' tax contributions.
$1.5 billion ~ Estimated amount illegal
immigrants pay each year in taxes for Medicare, for which they are also
ineligible.
. . . Also, while not income tax, these
people paid sales taxes.... But do you really think, with the wages paid most
migrant workers (the largest block of illegals), that they would even owe
taxes? ... It is a dynamic and complex economic synergy. Like it says in the
book What Would Bhudda Do?, what would he do if offered dessert? Why,
he'd eat it. But he would eat it thinking about all the people and things in
the cosmos that had to occur or get involved to bring him that treat, smile,
and give thanks.
But also this:
A local congressman's brother owns a border
ranch, and he said he recently retrieved a back pack with Arabic texts ~ lots
scarier than lettuce pickers.
The borders wouldn't be such big news right now if it weren't
for the war.
Dave DaBee wrote on the tax question:
One of Hartmann's books a couple of years
ago related the account of a Tea Party
participant. The common myth is that the colonists protested taxation without
representation, e.g. "it was the Crown's attempt to tax tea that spurred
the colonists to action and laid the groundwork for the American
Revolution". Hartmann found an ancient copy of the participant's book,
published in 1832, whose version corresponds to this page: "The
British Government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to
sell tea to the colonies without the usual colonial tax, thereby allowing them
to undercut the prices of the colonial merchants and smugglers." Whilst
working on that book I personally saw verification of that on the East India
Company's web site, but now the whole site has apparently been taken down,
perhaps for re-decorating, so I can't give you a link. What the wiki site
doesn't mention is that the Crown was friends of the owners (and I believe part
owner) of the company, so in a sense it was a classic case of favoritism and
cahootsism in the creation of tax rules... hardly the "We're
anti-tax" story we knew in our youthitude.
How disillusioning. (And should e.g. above be i.e.?)
But are we to conclude from all this that we ought to expect tax
or non-tax rebellion and revolution from the increasing population of illegal
Mexican immigrants?
BLEEP
Dave DaBee also wrote: "I have since learned that Bleep
has been largely discredited as an infomercial, with physics that is/are years
out of date." Infomercial for what or whom?
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