WHERE DOES YOUR TOWN LIVE?

Online directions: "Hingham resides in Plymouth County." Hingham is a town. Can a town reside someplace? A town can exist or be or be located or be situated or even sit. No one uses "reside" this way and it doesn't add any special meaning. It's wrong.

BUSSES

Sue S. wrote:

When I was at this art walk one year I went to the local school where they had food and crafts for sale. There was a sign with an arrow pointing to the driveway that read "school busses."

"Busses" is an alternate plural for "bus". Sue was bothered by the fact that "busses" is also the plural for "buss" meaning "kiss". We use both the two-s and the one-s version for more than one bus (busses or buses), but we always double the s for the tenses bussed and bussing, so we don't say "byoosed" or "boosed" or "boosing" or "byoosing". The double consolant (ss) retains the short vowel pronunciation in English spelling. Usually.

WIKI AND SQUIRE

Mike Sykes wrote:

As a Wiki-skeptic, you may be interested in "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past". Admittedly, it's about one subject area ~ history. And it's so long that I can't claim to have read all of it. However I've read sufficient to find it encouraging, as I hope you will.

It is long and I haven't read it yet. Mike wrote further:

By the way, one of the more curious uses of 'squire' is given in my dictionary as:

esp. (colloq.), a jocular form of address from one man to another.

I've never used or encountered it much, except in tv programs set in the southern part of England.

"Squire" isn't used that way or any way in the U.S. anymore. But men use many other terms of joking respect: sir and mister; titles like doctor (or doc) and professor with men who seem to be knowledgeable; captain, chief (Navy and Indian); boss, "you the man"; and so on. I don't think women do the same thing with each other so much. In fact I can't think of an example. They'd have to adopt the traditionally male titles. But I think in either working or casual relationships, if women don't use terms of endearment, they're not going to use terms of respect.

KREM-LAN

Someone on TV pronounced "Kremlin" as Krem-Lan, with both syllables equally stressed and the second syllable sounding like "pan". Why? The sound clip on yourdictionary.com gives it as I've always heard it, "Kreml'n." Perhaps the script reader had never heard of the Kremlin before. It's like pronouncing Akron, the city of my birth, Ak-Ron. Sounds like my name if I were related to Superman.

WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?

Warning: You're about to learn about stuff that's politically incorrect and politically correct at the same time, so if you're easily offended or confused, watch out. But this is just too good to keep from you any longer. Attached is a sound clip from Shirley Q. Liquor, the nom de ignunce of Charles Knipp, a most brilliant parodist. This clip dates back to the early days of George W.'s presidency. So what's the deal? Shirley Q. Liquor is one of the characters created by Knipp, a drag performer from Texas. (His Betty Butterfield character is also fabulous.) Shirley is the more controversial because he plays her in blackface, but he/she has plenty of black fans ~ including black drag diva Ru Paul ~ and Knipp learned the accent from black friends at college and also from his family's housekeeper, who was a friend. (Betty Butterfield is only controversial if you don't think it's OK to joke about the mentally ill, as when someone objected to the Ernest T. Bass character on The Andy Griffith Show. You've got to assume that you aren't crazy to any degree to hold this position.)

Here's a checklist to measure your politically correct humor threshold. You can use any rating system you like, 1-10 or 10-1, OK or Not OK, Good or Bad, smiley and frowny faces, to show you how confused you can get with Shirley Q. Liquor.

___ Gay man

___ Gay comedian

___ Southern comedian

___ In drag

___ In blackface (or "black ladies' makeup" as Knipp says)

___ Using a southern accent and dialect

___ Making fun of George W. Bush

___ Making fun of pro-Bush voters

___ Joking about executions in Texas

Chances are many of you will find yourself going through this starting with smileys and then getting frowny and then getting smiley again and ending up frowny.

Humor is dicey. Who's allowed to laugh at what? Is it OK to laugh at the elected leader of the free world who has trouble speaking, but not at a poor black woman who doesn't speak standard English? Is it OK for a white man to do either or both? Is it only OK to laugh at powerful people? (Democracies generally don't choose a leader because he's a superior being; that's the point.) Is it OK for a man to parody any female? Is it OK for a man to dress up in drag in order to be funny? Was it OK for Milton Berle or Flip Wilson? Would it be OK for a black comedian to parody a white person? Should comedians only joke about themselves or people exactly like themselves? Is all humor intrinsically malicious?

My subjective but considered opinion is that Knipp is sympathetic to his characters, like Lily Tomlin, who once said that all of her characters liked themselves. I think Knipp is a comic genius and I was lucky enough to see him live in Cincinnati a couple of months ago. Lucky since sometimes his performances get canceled because of protests from people more sensitive than I am, including some gay and lesbian groups.

But censoring a particular character is a mistake, not only because of the First Amendment, but because it's a mistake to extrapolate from one character or one story the assumption that the character represents every person of that group. That assumption means you couldn't invent or reveal a non-white American comic character, it's only OK to have variations amongst white people, who have a greater number of public media images. Our paranoia about this issue is why we don't see reruns of the very funny old sitcom, Amos and Andy. But those comic characters were not stereotypes, they were different personalities who displayed universal human traits. And anything funny about people other than "us" that's not universal ought to be considered part of the greatly revered "diversity". If nothing else, Knipp is preserving a particular American regional accent and dialect, which are disappearing down the black hole of television.

Knipp has a Cafepress store where you can buy a bumper sticker that says: "Racism is ignunt because there are so many other great reasons to hate people on an individual basis."

I knew a writer named Kevin Robinson who had been quadriplegic since a 1975 accident. He used to write a column for the Detroit Free Press on living with disabilities, but one of his columns was rejected because he told a funny story about a man who fell down a hill in a park because he refused help. So Kevin could laugh about his issues, but he wasn't supposed to tell anyone else this story. Some non-disabled person might laugh. But if we live long enough, most of us will be disabled to some degree. Some of us fumble in our speech, like George W., and some of us drink too much and make poor personal choices, like Shirley Q. As long as we think all of these characters are "other" then we can't laugh at them because we can't see ourselves in them. Sometimes if you can't laugh at them, it's because you really do think they are beneath you and it wouldn't be fair. But Shirley Q. can take care of herself, make no mistake about it.

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