BANANAS

Adding to the list of food-based ethnic insults, word maven Richard Lederer sent this: "Common among Asians is the term 'banana' to describe an Asian who is yellow on the outside but white on the inside." And I don't know who told me this, but a "milano" is someone who's white outside and black inside, after the Pepperidge Farm cookie.*

Speaking of insults, today's news carried three stories about insults and the law.

||| In California, some high school kids were teasing a student for being Mormon, and she answered, "That's so gay." A lawsuit and countersuit followed. "Gay" is used by kids today to mean lame or stupid. It's not precisely analogous to the way "queer" was used when I was a kid. Last year "Zits" cartoonist Jim Borgman had his protagonist Jeremy make fun of someone's shoes by saying they looked gay, and his friend said, "I am gay," after which Jeremy asked himself why people always misinterpret what he says.

||| The second story is about New York City passing a symbolic resolution to outlaw use of the n-word by anybody.

||| And in Florida, a senator wants to outlaw the use of "illegal alien" in official documents. This phrase isn't even an insult, it's a statement of legal fact.

I was recently insulted by being called "white trash". Imagine my surprise. But I would not outlaw language. First Amendment and all, you know. I would fight to the death her right to say it. That is, the death of the woman who insulted me, who was white, by the way, and a rank stranger to boot.

ACTIVIST

I saw the new movie, Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce, who was largely responsible for ending England's slave trade in 1807, after many years of campaigning. In one scene, his friend observes that he's having trouble deciding whether to do the work of God, or the work of a "political activist". Somehow the phrase "political activist" struck me as anachronistic. I asked Mike Sykes to tap into his Oxford English Dictionary, which has the best historical sources I know of, to find out how old that usage of "activist" is. Sure enough, the earliest uses of "activist" (and "activism") only go back to the early 20th century (that is, the instances of the words in print). The OED, or possibly Mike, added, Notice that in 1915 the noun was still being put in quotes. The 1915 OED example refers to the word(s) as "jargon". So I was right, but I still don't know why. I didn't consciously remember not having read the word in any literature earlier than 1900, yet it's used all the time now, and has a modern ring to it.

When scriptwriters of historical movies don't have a feel for the language of the period, the effect is like the (alleged) scene in the 1960 movie The Alamo, where a yellow school bus (allegedly) could be seen in the background. And that's why no one should write new dialogue for movie versions of Jane Austen's books. I always know what she actually wrote, and what she could not have written. In the latest American version of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Wickham were talking during a sermon; that wouldn't have happened. Misrepresenting Austen is nearly as bad as misrepresenting history.

A BBC radio program (or programme) called In Our Time, produced by Melvyn Bragg in England, covered Wilberforce recently; you can listen to it online. In his newsletter about the program, Bragg said:

Wilberforce, to my mind, deserves the proper recognition which he has been denied for so many decades, deserves, in effect, a resurrection in the history of this country, deserves, if I may push it further, to be someone who leads a movement of the reassessment of what this country, in various ways and individuals in particular ways, have added to the world, as distinct from the constant cry of what we have taken from it.

Hear hear, I say, and same goes for us in the U.S. That's what I call political activism.

I met Melvyn Bragg years ago when he taught a summer class at The University of Tulsa. I'm glad to see he's "reassessing" his homeland and our mother country.

CARBON FOOTPRINT

By now, you've heard the phrase "carbon footprint" if you're environmentally conscious or if you watched the Oscars. At Carbon Footprint online, you can calculate how much of a waste of space you are ~ I mean, how much waste you produce in the form of carbon emissions ~ and then buy indulgences ~ I mean, make up for your excesses. Now, every time you fly in your private jet, you can compensate by planting a billion trees in the U.K. or Africa. This is called a "carbon offset". You can also compensate by trading points with someone who uses less. I may not understand completely how it works, but on my own I have mentally matched myself with several families in ~ well, someplace poor ~ so the many plastic bags I get at the grocery stores are totally compensated for by their total lack of plastic bags. I feel better about myself.

RHETORIC: ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER

Columnist Ellen Goodman must be too old to have played the Sesame Street game of compare and contrast. She wrote that "global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers." I'm not sure if global warming deniers include people who think there are causes for global warming other than human pollution. Once again, I wish people would get a grip on their Hitler/Nazi analogies. Hitler and the Nazis are the paradigm of human evil, yet people use this benchmark without any consideration of reality. Let's go over it again: People who think global warming does not exist, going by their own admittedly limited experience, reading, and understanding, might be short-sighted, but not evil. People, including scientists, who think that global warming is cyclical, and thus disagree with those who think humans have done it entirely on their own, could be wrong, but they are not evil. Furthermore, disbelief in history is not the same as disbelief in a future disaster that may or may not happen.

COREX

*One of my typos last week was "good insults" instead of "food insults". There were others. It had been a long week. My brain went through a hard freeze and then a thaw at least twice, and some early buds froze. When I find errors, I correct them before I post the PO on my web site, which is only one of the reasons I appreciate it when you catch my errors and tell me about them.

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HUR HERALD

Parvum Opus is now being carried by the Hur Herald, a web newspaper from Calhoun County, West Virginia. See Editor Bob Weaver's interview with me (February 10, 2007 entry), and the PO every week in Columns.

NEW! SHORT ORDER

Short Order is a new series of my short stories in 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" booklet format. The first two are available now for $5 each (includes mailing).

/// In Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn, a young computer guy who dreams of becoming a big-time gambler sets up web sites for his role model, a real big-time gambler, Stockyard Stan of Kansas City. But when Carl comes up short on his gambling debts, he finds himself wearing concrete boots in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. 26 pages.

/// Still Ridge is about what happens when the old-time moonshine business meets up with a predatory modern bottled water corporation. How far will Kate, a newcomer to the mountains, go to protect the water supply? 22 pages.

THIS IS REALLY NEW! For women who get massage or chiropractic treatment, who sleep on their stomachs, or have implants, try Rhonda's original Breast Cushion to take the pressure off. Go to www.keithops.us/cushion.

WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video clips of Sonny Robertson and the Howard Street Blues Band at www.sonnyrobertson.com and www.youtube.com/rondaria, with his new original song, "A Different Shade of Blue".

Check out the new "Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" shirts in the Parvum Opus CafePress shop, plus a new Parvum Opus mouse pad! Now you can buy neat products with the Parvum Opus / KeithOps Catti logo at CafePress.com/parvumopus.

SEARCH IT OUT ON AMAZON : It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. Proverbs 25:2

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories. The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

NEED SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.

Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2007. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.