Uh, Siriusly?

Sometimes I wish that the Democrats had the word coopting skills that the right has mastered so well. They call their education plan No Child Left Behind and, of course everyone’s favorite – their suspension of habeus corpus The Patriot Act. Wouldn’t it be nice to sponsor a war deauthorization called Safe and Victorious? Or instead of calling the campaign finance reform McCain-Feingold (catchy though it is), something like The Elections Aren’t For Sale Act.

I don’t know, I’m just tossing out ideas.

Anyway, this is all very tempting until I watch the other side do it, and remember how hopping mad and nauseous it makes me. It’s not enough for the White House communications staff to be hired out of Fox News, the President has to straight up steal their slogan. That’s right, LOLprez announced recently that the Libby pardon was “fair and balanced.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because those words are being tossed around with complete disregard for their definitions in exactly the same way over at Bill O’Reilly & Co.

My new favorite is Sirius Radio, who recently introduced two political talk radio channels: SiriusLeft, and… wait for it… SiriusPatriot. Now, I don’t personally bristle at the label of “Lefty,” but that’s because I am a bleeding heart pinko commie leftwing nutjob, and I embrace the title. Other, more middle of the road Dems who are less enamoured of Ralph Nader probably feel differently about the characterization. But that’s not what gets me. Nor is it the gross lack of any effort to be evenhanded. (Though seriously, is there some sort of problem with the parity of “Right” and “Left”? “Liberal” and “Conservative”? “Donkey” and “Elephant”? These terms come in pairs, they really do.) But no, it’s not the faulty parallelism either. It is the blatant misuse and coopting of the term “patriot.”

Obviously “patriotic” and “conservative” are not mutually exclusive. But they are also not synonymous, and I am really sick of having this word used so innapropriately. I’m saying this as a Democrat, and a democrat, and a liberal, and a patriot, but first and foremost as a person who uses words to communicate with other people, and so depends on other people to use vocabulary correctly.

And so, in the spirit of education and propgation of proper English usage, I am instituting the No Blog Reader Left Behind Vocabulary Initiative of 2007, which seeks to spread knowledge of words. I am starting with these:

Conservative

1. Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.
2. Traditional or restrained in style
3. Moderate; cautious
4. (often initial capital letter) Of or pertaining to the Conservative party.
5. Disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

Liberal

1. Favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3. Favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.

Patriotic
1. Having or showing great love for one’s country.

Make of these definitions what you will, and choose your talk radio accordingly, I suppose.

(Does anyone else find it particulary ironic that the very people [conservatives] who are so eager to use these two very different terms [patriot & conservative] interchangably are the same ones who would like to make English the official language of the United States, thus stopping the translation of any government documents [including ballot materials!] to other languages? Because if I were to get behind such an initiative, I would want to first make sure that I myself were fluent.)

Argh! To lighten the mood, I offer the following fair and balanced image of
Pug Dog Wearing A Birthday Hat.

A Vocab Lesson Courtesy of Norman Rush & Amy Goodman

Not to insult your intelligence, gentle readers, but I have recently come across several new words that I thought you would like to know about as well.

 From Mating, by Norman Rush (which, incidentally, is told by the most wonderful narrator I have ever met and which you must read if you like fiction at all), I learned the following words, which are all the more lovely because even though they are new and fancy, they are nice and short:

*  surfeit (v/n – Latin origin):  excess.  “Why not just say excess?” you may ask.  Because, first of all, surfeit is both a noun and a verb, which is fun, and because it connotes overindulge, particularly but not necessarily regarding food and drink.  So you can sit back at the end of a meal and rather than unbuckling your belt buckle and saying in a country accent, “I’m not near as hungry as I was,” you can just say “Mmmm…. surfeit.”

*  megrim (n – Middle English origin, from “migraine”): flight of fancy, caprice, depressions, moods.  Love how this little word has several different meanings.  Usually used in the plural, as in ”I have a case of the Monday megrims.”

*  cavil (n/v – French origin): a frivolous objection OR to frivolously object.  Again, a fabulous noun/verb ambidexter.  Look at all the syllables you will save the next time you find yourself needing to say “What a frivolous objection!” and can say instead simply, “What a cavil!” 

* noetic (adj – Greek origin): intellectual, mental.  This is not such a cool word in and of itself but it does have a pretty fabulous word cousin….

* noosphere (n – Greek origin):  the sphere of human thought.  Fun!  (pronounced nu-ah-sphere, not new-sphere, in case you are already planning to whip this one out in casual conversation.)

That’s it from Mr. Rush, now just one more vocab lesson, this one from Amy Goodman, host of the Democracy Now! radio show.

extraordinary rendition (n – Pentagonese origin) :  “This is White House for kidnapping,” says Amy. Use it in a sentence, you say?  OK:  “When the U.S. government arrested Canadian citizen Maher Arar at JFK Airport and sent him to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months before being returned to Canada and declared completely innocent of any crimes, that was an example of extraordinary rendition.”

“A society is generally as lax as its language,” or Vocabula to phonelesscord: Ohhh Snap!

To supplement my paltry salary at my (rewarding!  remember, it’s rewarding!) nonprofit job, I edit college and grad school admissions essays for an online company.  As part of this service, I rewrite essays, reorganizing them and revising them for style/concision, etc.  For the most part, this is fun work.  It is fun to go in with an objective eye and organize an essay so the client’s undergraduate research as Such And Such Biochem lab, or that eye-opening volunteer project she undertook the summer after sophomore year, or whatever, sounds really important.    And it’s fun to correct for style, and make things more concise, because, well, because I am a nerd and I like it.

 The part of this job that makes me cranky and sometimes resentful of the education system and of the lazy students who would rather pay a couple hundred dollars to a website than carefully proofread their own essay, is correcting for grammar.  I don’t mean the trickier stuff - structuring long sentences with lots of subordinate clauses, using semicolons - that’s fun.  I’m talking about misusing “its” and “it’s.”  I mean using the word “literally” for emphasis.   (Did he “literally explode with rage”?  I doubt it.  I literally doubt it.)  I correct these things, and avoid the temptation to write my clients a note asking how, if they are as detail-oriented, intellectually curious, capable, motivated, and all-around snazzy as they insist throughout the essay, did they manage to get through all of high school and college without learning that ”accept” and “except” are very different words.

This leaves me feeling very much like a crotchety old lady who should just chill out and watch a sit-com.

 So I was overjoyed to read an article in the Wall Street Journal last week about a man who is even more of a crotchety old grammar-and-usage nerd than myself.  And he has a website!  The slogan of this nit-picking and very fun site?  The stern, “A society is generally as lax as its language.”  I like this.  This makes me feel like my prowling through essays for subject-verb agreement is part of some larger, more significant societal crusade.

Vocabula Review, which is both a website and paper publication, includes regular columns with great titles like Bethumped with Words, Grumbling About Grammar, and Top Twenty Dimwitticisms.  Is anyone else getting excited about this?

And then the website promptly burst my self-important bubble, when the first article I read was about a grammatical crime of which I am guilty.  Damn!  Just when I thought I was a good-guy.  The article begins,

“ When someone says we need an epicene pronoun, what do they mean?

Since when has they been third-person singular? That’s what he or she means. The epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral device for referring in the third person to the generic human being, without falling back on the discredited universal masculine or stumbling forward over the incipient singular they. “

Insert sheepish face here.  Yes, only moments ago I wrote, “… avoid the temptation to write my clients a note asking how, if they are as detail-oriented …. blahblahablah … did they manage to get through all of high school and college without learning that ”accept” and “except” are very different words.”

In other words, the article opened with a massive oooooooh snap! that seemed to be directed right at me.

Obviously there is a lesson here about being judgmental, self-righteous, and cantankerous, but this post isn’t about life lessons, it’s about grammar and usage!  So, onward.

The article goes on to suggest that, instead of the awkward “s/he” or the incorrect “they,” we just invent a third person, singular, gender-neutral (epicene, if you will) pronoun.  He suggests :

For he/she: esh, hesh, heesh, shehe

For him/her: rim, mer, hmer, hrim

For his/her: ris, ser, hris, hser

Yup, they sound funny.  But witty Vocabulist Michael Berger has this to say in these new pronouns’ defense:

“Granted, a person might find the proposed candidates a bit odd and unfamiliar, but esh would get used to them, and ris vocabulary would be fully up to date with ris attitudes and social practices. A bit of an awkward start and a learning curve is a small price to pay to enable rim to refer to people individually as human beings per se.”