Number 98
Disinfotainment news:
[Actor] "Colin Farrel is still on the up and up in his career."
"Up and up" means honest, legitimate, straight and narrow. But others are seeing this new, or wrong, usage, meaning "rising". I'm inclined to think it a wrong usage when it comes out of the mouths of young journalists who specialize in news about movie stars. Thus does the language evolve. Or devolve. (See the Akron band Devo.)
By the way, a pretty good site on English usage I discovered while researching "up and up" is www.wordwizard.com. It's British.
Here's a selection of regional expressions recorded by a Kentucky gentleman. Many of the terms he recalls are specific to logging; some are more generally familiar. I'm passing on a few others that are new to me.
It's easy to see the origins of some of these terms (hoofs, bug hunting), the humorous observation (hydraulic jack threw me for a minute, till I remembered what a cat in heat looks like), the wordplay (bank rupture). Others would require some research to figure out: leather Jesus, remorizing, collar binder.
Regional accents are disappearing as everyone listens to the Ohio River Valley neutral American media voice. Too bad.
Car Talk is a PBS radio show with Tom and Ray Magliozzi (or Click and Clack), mechanics from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who take phone calls about car problems. They're very funny guys, with heavy Boston accents. The other day a woman called in from Maine who said she was originally from New York City. One of the Car Talk guys remarked that she had no trace of a regional accent (neither New York nor New England), and she answered, "Yes, I pride myself on that." Why? I understand that some people have reason to lose their accents, such as actors. I also understand that certain accents will cause some other people to stereotype you in negative ways. But you've got to resist that. Shortly after I moved to Boston from Kansas, I met a woman who thought I was from a farm. I didn't really have much of an accent, it was just non-East Coast. She seemed to think everyone out there lives on farms. A lot of people seem to have taken seriously Steinberg's famous map of the USA from a New Yorker's perspective ~ west of New Jersey, there's not much till you get to the Pacific Ocean. A couple of years later, I met a young woman who was surprised, while visiting her sister at college in Ohio, that the people there weren't really as stupid as she thought just because they spoke more slowly. Amazing that people not only think these things, but say them out loud. To one's face. East coasters can be so provincial. But they need to understand that people west of Connecticut speak more slowly because they are thinking as well as talking.
"Elite" comes from the same root as "elect" ~ to choose. You've all heard about how the "elite" press is ~ well, bad in some way. Usually leftish. Lots of people in the media say the media is (are?) controlled by the left, except for themselves, and lots of other people say the media is a mouthpiece for the right, but they're all getting their news from the same place. The rights like to call the lefts the "elite" media, as if they themselves aren't pulling in the big bucks and don't have their names and faces known by millions. Anyway, the "elite" are supposedly not speaking for "the people," the people being whoever agrees with you, the elite being those who do not. Everybody wants to claim the people, the real folks, as being on their side ~ until they obviously disagree, as in last week's election. People only like democracy when their side wins.
In the last week, the electoral majority has been called, directly and indirectly, retarded and evil and other things that show scorn toward people in the south, the middle of the country, and so on. The Democratic Party is going to have to be more tactful than that if it hopes to regain its traditional membership, but the party has shifted, probably permanently, from being the party of the "people," i.e. working class, to the party of the supposed supporters of the "people," the crowd who would like to make decisions for "the people" who clearly do not know their own best interests. There's a new web site called Retro vs. Metro whose goal is seemingly to drive further wedges between the (slight) majority of voters and the (slight) minority of voters.
My dad was a traditional Democrat, from a southern state, conservative in some ways; a World War II veteran, he voted for the Republican Eisenhower. He was a man today's Democrats would have been completely contemptuous of. I've mostly voted Democrat until I started to think the party didn't represent what it had traditionally (in five words, NAFTA). The parties have changed. This didn't make me a Republican. The Republicans aren't what they used to be either.
Fred reminds me that when we first knew each other, he pointed out someone wearing a belt buckle with a big "US" (meaning the USA), and he said he wanted to get one that said "THEM." Of course I fell in love. But I see us and them acting the same way. Here's a little exercise: Whenever you hear a general political exhortation or comment you agree with or disagree with, try substituting the name or idea you assume to belong to the opposite side, and see what happens. Example: "If you're against abortion, don't have one." Now try, "If you're against the war in Iraq, don't go." Of course it will get confusing and lead to fist fights, but it's fun. Try it.
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