Napowrimo 22: Self-Talk

For the twenty-second day of National Poetry Writing Month, the challenge was to write a poem in which a speaker is in dialogue with perself.

Self, how pedantic shall I be?

(Long past, on Linguist List, folks sought

The first use of "Self..." sophistry

In literature. I could have taught

Them: Dwain Reed, in a Nashville song

(Was it in 1971?),

Used "I said to myself, 'Self...'" Long

Before his time, most of his con-

Structions were used by simple folk

In the Blue Ridge Mountains. Should I go

Back to that post, at its end poke

Data--from twenty years ago?)

"Life is too short. The linguist who

Put up that post is long retired.

Address the question: who should sue,

Or who should call to have whom fired,

When Black students demand the 'right'

To write, speak, paint, and chant vile slurs

On all (even their own mothers) White

Americans..." The mind's eye blurs.

Whatever fun distractions be,

Life's far too short to be p.c.

Book Review: Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go

Title: Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go

Author: John O’Hayre

Date: not given

Publisher: U.S. Goverrnment Printing Office

ISBN: none

Length: 113 pages

Illustrations: cartoons

Quote: “The Bureau of Land Management...can work together...only when we understand each other...Our comunications have sometimes failed because of a fascination with the traditions of officialese...”

Right. Despite the cartoons, this is not really a funny book. At times it approaches earnestness. It’s a serious guide to the art of corporate communication.

It is, however, a book some people need. It analyzes why some communication efforts fail, and suggests improvements that need to be heeded by all employees of private corporations or government offices, all authors of high school and college textbooks, and anyone who admits having taken courses toward an M.B.A. You know someone who needs this book...and it’s recommended to anyone who dares to send it where it may do some good.

Advanced English Grammar, Part 1: Fewer Bottles Less Water

It's a series! Some time ago this web site linked to a list of "25 Grammar Rules You Weren't Taught in School." Since the list appeared as a meme that may have been difficult for some readers to see, and since some readers like examples, here's a fuller and snarkier explanation of one of the rules...

1. Fewer bottles, less water.

"Less" was originally the comparative form of "little." It was one of those irregular sets of words like "good, better, best" and "many, more, most": "little, less, least." 

"Fewer" was the comparative form of "few." "The rules of badminton are few. The rules of billiards are fewer." 

The rule is: Use "fewer" when things can be counted, "less" when they can't be counted or are counted as single things.

If you had $56.78 in your pocket yesterday, and you were very frugal with heating in December, so your bill came to $42.46, and your municipality successfully upheld your right to pay the exact amount in cash, so after paying your bill you now have $14.32, you now have fewer pennies, or less cash, in your pocket. If you had to pay some sort of third-party handling fee, you have even less cash. We should always pay in cash because third-party handling fees add up to a substantial overpayment for the same things, or, the more often we pay in cash, the less we pay for whatever we buy. 

Anyway, when the precise value of the coins and bills in our pockets are added up, we have more or fewer dollars and cents; while we are only thinking about the amount of unsorted stuff in our pockets, we have more or less cash. Pockets may also contain more or fewer cards, more or fewer keys, more or fewer tissues, but only more or less lint. 

If, however, you decide to slim down your wallet by using up giftcards and not carrying store discount cards, as you use up the value of a card and pay the balance in cash you might cheerfully say "One less card!" You are now thinking of cards as an uncounted mass of clutter. If, as a cyclist or pedestrian, you bought things with the "One less car" slogan, and if they are what the name of the opposite-of-sainted Renee Good now brings to your mind, you think of motor vehicles as an uncounted mass of traffic hazards. These phrases are correct because these ways of thinking are correct. 

A forgettable song of years gone by told the story of a man who had been, or claimed to have been, a lawyer in Philadelphia, trying to seduce someone else's wife. Maybe she was only his girlfriend--I forget. Anyway the woman's faithful husband, or boyfriend or whatever he was, heard the so-called lawyer proposing plans for her to leave him and run off with the lawyer, and committed a crime of passion. "There's one less Philadelphia lawyer in old Philadelphia tonight!" The singer was clearly thinking of Philadelphia lawyers as an uncounted mass of men with low moral standards, or a title claimed by such men. Whatever one might call them, the audience tended to agree, the fewer of them are left alive, the better.

Depending on the size of the animals you feed, you measure out more or less kibble, more or less grain, etc. If you don't have anything better to do than count the individual grains or kibbles in each measure, you might be able to report exactly how many fewer kibbles you gave the Chihuahua than you gave the Doberman.

Meanwhile, as the English language has developed, "little" has become one of a minority of words that have sets of regular and irregular forms. When thinking of a quantity of something that might or might not have a physical shape, we still say "little, less, least." When thinking of the size of something that has a single physical shape, many of us choose a word that came into English by way of Scotland and say "small, smaller, smallest," but some now say "little, littler, littlest" in contexts like "She had the littlest waist he'd ever seen." "Littler" and "littlest" are understood and are used in conversation by people who speak English well, but it's probably best to use "smaller" and "smallest" in written English.

"Little" also has an extra comparative form "lesser," which was probably never part of standard English conversation but which has become part of some phrases and names. Probably "lesser" entered standard English through jokes, like "worser," where nonstandard word use was part of the humorous effect. We say "the lesser of two evils," rather than "the less of two evils," most often to refer to voting for a candidate whose bad ideas we think may be easier to correct or recover from, in the absence of any candidate who we believe has good plans. "Lesser" also appears in proper names, but "less" is generally the word to use.

"Lessor" comes to English from a different source. It means one who leases, lets, or rents out property to another person, a "lessee." Someone who has two rental properties, both in terrible condition, might be described as a "lessor of two evils," though if the properties are all that bad the person probably won't be a lessor for very long.

Vanishing Words

I just happened to see a column in the Powell Valley News about some endangered phrases the author's elders used to use. Part of our hillbilly dialect that outsiders never got quite right, because the point was that, before radio and television, people talked the way their elders did and there was not necessarily one consistent pattern of "dialect" even for an individual town. Which of these things, Steve Roark asked, have readers heard someone say? Do we ever  use any of them nowadays?

1. "Daub" for a quantity, probably in between a dab and a blob, of something daubed onto something else with a knife, like butter or jelly. "I like a daub of jelly on a biscuit." I've heard it, but not thought of it as regional, just as a word that sounds somewhere in between dab and blob, all of which are smaller than a glob. 

2. "The devil of" something: Possibly related to the Irish use of "devil of..." to mean "never a bit of...," but more often used to mean "a difficult," or even "a large." Heard on a record by Ralph and Carter Stanley where they told old jokes: "I don't know how to get to Little Rock, but there's a devil of a big rock down in Pap's old pasture." (Note that this was a comedy routine with men from Virginia making fun of people in Arkansas...but yes, I heard people say "the devil of" in that sense in casual conversation.) "I had the devil of a time trying to finish the project on the computer with all the Microsoft 'updates'." 

Also heard: "a devil's washboard," meaning a rough road. The Devil's Bathtub, a deep round pool in a mountain stream, was named before the Gate City Blue Devils but, so far as I know, it's a unique place name rather than a generic phrase.

"Blue devils" was an old slang phrase for alarm and despondency in the nineteenth century. Since all slang references to the Devil were classified as profanity, "blue devils" was politely abbreviated to "the blues," which then got to be the term for a genre of music felt to express that sort of mood. Then in the World Wars, first a French and then a Canadian military group were nicknamed "Blue Devils." Duke University's team was nicknamed in their honor and several high school teams wanted to be nicknamed by association with Duke University.

"The devils' own" (whatever) is extremely difficult and disagreeable, something that seems as if it were invented to torment human beings.

3. "Dew poisoning": Nobody I knew ever used this phrase seriously. Water-borne bacteria can cause infections and an infected skin would on the foot was blamed on walking through heavy dew. "Mountain Dew poisoning" would be a clever phrase for hypercaffeination or for the effects of drinking home-brewed alcohol, but it's not in general use in either sense. 

4. "Dinner" for the midday meal: Still used, though I've heard it explained in elitist terms that "dinner" meant the main meal, farm laborers ate their dinners at midday, while landowners and the bourgeoisie at their dinners after the day's work. In practice I think people say "breakfast, dinner, and supper" or "breakfast, lunch, and dinner" according to which their elders said. The job status thing may or may not be reliably correlated with the word usage.

5. "Dinner on the ground": a picnic. Roark associated it with Decoration/Memorial Day. I've heard it associated with summer "camp meetings" where members of various churches used to take up to a week of vacation time in or near woods, praying, studying the Bible, singing, catechizing converts, and mainly keeping cool during what was expected to be the worst heat wave of the summer. "All-day meeting with dinner on the ground." The original idea was that the meal was brought out in a hamper and set on a tablecloth, or sheet or blanket or whatever people had, spread on the grass, and people sat around the cloth to eat. "Dinner on the grounds," carried out from a restaurant or served from a vehicle or vehicles, eaten on the chairs or bleachers available, is more often seen and heard these days but it's a variant.

6. "Disgust-es" for "disgusts": Yes, some people make a point of enunciating the "sts" combination in this way. If something disgust-es you, is it more disgusting than something that merely disgusts you? I don't know; people I know don't make this distinction.

7. "Done" for "already" or "completely": I think all of my elders used this one, especially (with a hint that the phrase had once been considered funny) "They'd done done it." "I've done finished it." 

A variant form, also apparently considered funny at one time, was "He'd done'ready done it."

8. "Dog" or "dogged" used as a less offensive substitute for "damn/ed": Even my oldest elders thought of this as an outdated phrase most likely to be put in the mouths of fictional comic characters. Mark Twain's characters say "dog my cats!" and no doubt some people in the mid-nineteenth century really did. I grew up saying "darn/ed." I've felt funny about saying things like "that darned commercial" ever since I said it in front of a child I used to baby-sit, and the child repeated it in the presence of its mother, a church lady, who didn't dare to scold me (I didn't go to their church so couldn't be expected to know anything) but got up and spanked the child. (And anyway, darning is mending and ought to be used in reference to things that are worth preserving.) On the blog I say "dang," and, in contexts where it really is the proper usage, "not worth a daam"--the coin that was worth less than the cost of making it. In real life, before becoming an aunt, I sometimes said "damn/ed," but not often.

9. "Doins," "doings": Technically includes all the things people might have been doing, but used especially of a gathering. I've heard this one, less often over the years.

10. "Dope" for soda pop: Several older neighbors used to say this. It referred to the fact that the original formula for Coca-Cola included a bit of cocaine, which the company says hasn't been used since the 1890s. "Dope" then came to be used to mean an addict, or any stupid person ("The boys/girls at my school are a bunch of dopes"), and "Coke" came into use, probably peaking before I was born, to mean any soda pop. When a character in a 1950s novel went to the drugstore with friends or a date for "cokes" some of them were probably sipping Sprite or Grapette. 

11. "Drag up" or "draw up" a chair to join a group: More likely to be expressed as "take a seat" or "get (oneself) a chair," but not unknown. Probably less common because public gatherings are less likely to take place in a large room with folding chairs leaned against the wall, taken out and unfolded as people come in.

12. "Draw out" for "remove the infection": Less common because the treatment is less common.  A poultice containing a topical antiseptic, or something people hoped would work like one, was applied to an infected skin wound before injections of antivenin, antibiotics, or antihistamines became available.

13. "Dreamt" for "dreamed": Used when people want to sound quaint. Up into the nineteenth century we find some authors writing "he dreamed" but "she had dreamt," and others using "dreamt" as both simple past and past participle. "Dreamed" became more fashionable about a hundred years ago and used to be one of those words that identified people who were and were not following linguistic trends.

14. "Dreckly" for "directly," but used ironically in the sense of "at some unspecified future time, not necessarily in this year," in contexts like "I'll oil that squeaking hinge directly." Some people may have been more likely to mean "directly" in the original sense that they were moving in the direction of doing whatever-it-was when they said "di-rect-ly" instead of "dreckly," but this is uncertain. Many people who were attracted to this use of "directly" seemed to me to be procrastinators in any case.

15. "Druther" for "would rather": This was a status indicator but I'm not altogether certain how it worked. Generally the less educated said "ruther," those calling attention to their education said "rah-ther," but I'm not sure whether it was the middle class, the real flat-heeled aristocrats, or both who traditionally said "rather" like "lather." (One of my fence-sitting habits is alternating between saying "rather" like "father" and like "lather.") 

"Had one's druthers," meaning "had one's first choice," is sometimes found in written English and was sometimes used by my elders. 

16. "Dull as a froe": I've never heard this. I've never heard "froe" used in casual conversation. It was a tool used to split wood. Roark explains that it was traditionally dull-edged. My elders split wood with an axe, hax, hatchet, sometimes a chisel; they didn't have the specific old-time tools called froes. I did know that a froe was an old-time tool, but not one my elders used or talked about.

Both "froe," the tool, and "fro" meaning "from," were used before a curly hair style was called an "Afro" or 'fro." 

17. "Dusky dark": for dusky, crepuscular, twilight, gloaming, the time between sunset and dark; if people I knew used this they probably thought they were quoting a poetic phrase. About a hundred years ago there were a lot of songs sentimentalizing this time of day, the time when sweethearts were allowed a good-night kiss if they made it reasonably quick. My elders knew and sang a lot of those songs but their everyday word for this time of day was probably either "sunset" or "getting dark." 

Fun with Functional Shifts

This web site owes somebody a series of posts on the topic of frugality. Those posts have been funded, and will appear here on Thursdays. I have not whipped them into shape yet so here's a little reflection on word usage I dashed off some time ago, for this week. Frugality studies are forthcoming.

One of the most confusing things about English is the way English words (but only some English words) can undergo what is called "functional shift" (but only some "functional shift") in what is considered correct English.

A "functional shift" is the use of a noun as a verb, or a verb as a noun, or a noun as an adjective.

Native speakers of English might note something, or take note of something, or notify someone of something, or annotate something, or notate something--and those are different actions. 

There is no general rule that tells native speakers of English when a "functional shift" will sound right or wrong. We just pick these things up by hearing them. Sometimes using a noun as a verb or vice versa is correct, and sometimes it sounds all wrong, like a way to identify a non-native speaker of English. 

"Invite," for example. In the twentieth century when most of us were learning English, there was no such thing as "an invite." If we wanted to invite someone to do something, we sent the person an invitation. "An invite" was commonly found in nineteenth century fiction, in the sort of "dialect writing" where someone's incorrect English was supposed to be the joke. Fiction that was written to teach people etiquette used to describe characters who were very poor, or ignorant, or foreign, who were just thrilled to get "an invite" to dinner with someone who was better off. The character who got "an invite" would then proceed to do and say other things that displayed per ignorance, at the dinner. Depending on how snobbish the writer was, the character might be presented as a complete fool, or more sympathetically portrayed as someone who just didn't fit in with more sophisticated people. 

That's why older English speakers still cringe when we read "an invite," or "an e-vite," today. Around the turn of the century computer users, who liked to abbreviate everything, started typing "invites" rather than "invitations." It's no longer absolute proof that English (or "standard" English) is not their native language but it calls to our minds the suggestion that they're making fun of people whose native language is not "standard" English. If you want to express altogether good intentions, you send people invitations. 

"A read" is not really "standard" English either, but "a good read" has been accepted in colloquial English for a long time. "A fun read" is newer, but sounds colloquial rather than awkward. "A read" sounds wrong to many native speakers of English. It's new slang; I've seen it on the Internet but not heard it spoken in real life.

"A write" is another bit of computer users' slang that sounds clunky to native speakers of English. People at writing sites type "a write" with tongue in cheek, as a bit of new slang. Victorian novelists didn't make a cliche of members of the so-called lower class having enough education to try submitting "a write" to a teacher or editor. So "Thanks for sharing your write" doesn't sound like a reference to Victorian fiction, but it doesn't sound right. It sounds to me as if the person typing it isn't sure what the piece written was supposed to be... "Was that a letter? I wouldn't call it a poem, but did s/he think of it as a poem?" What participants in a formal class or informal writers' group submit, if you want not to offend them, are written pieces or pieces of writing or perhaps writings, writing samples, or writing exercises. Or, on the Internet, simply posts. 

Some functional shifts have appealed to some native speakers of English who thought they ought to become standard. Would people use their leisure time more creatively, feel more satisfied with life, or even produce more or better folk art and folk music, if we said "to art" and "to music" instead of "to make art" or "to make music"? Some writers have hoped so. Would English speakers be less judgmental, or sound less judgmental, about other people's feelings and attitudes if English were one of the languages that don't have the "noun-verb-adjective" sentence pattern, but use adjectives as verbs? Would it be easier to make clear whether we meant "he felt or showed happiness at a given time" or "his entire life can be called a happy one" if we said, in the first case, "He happied"? Some competent writers have made cases for "They were on the porch, musicking" or "She happied when she read the letter," but these functional shifts have not caught on. 

"To joy" came closest. A few hundred years ago poets did sometimes use "joy" where "enjoy" became standard. The only really well known example of this word usage that is still around is the English version of the Bach chorale, "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," which contains the line "I joy to call Thee mine." This is one of the lines that are accepted because they are traditional in songs or poems, but would be less acceptable in speech or writing. People who sing "I joy to call Thee mine," in a traditional hymn, would raise their eyebrows if they read "I joy to call you my friend" in a letter.

"A swear" was occasionally used to mean "an offensive word" in the twentieth century--"he said a swear"--but this usage was perceived as childish. Children who heard and repeated an offensive word were scolded or punished for "swearing" or "using 'swear' words" even when the word in question was not used in "frivolous swearing." "Frivolous swearing" used apparently to be a more common way of using English to offend people than it is now. People apparently used to say things like "By God, that was a good meal" just because it was offensive, in the same way they'd say "Then I went to f'ing lunch" today. "By God" was, in such cases, frivolous swearing such as Jesus taught His followers not to do in first-century Greek, which apparently had many analogs to "by God" referring to the hundreds of different "gods" Greek Pagans recognized. Technically speaking, the offensive word in "That was a d'd good meal" is a profane word rather than a "swear' word, and the offensive word in "That was a f'ing good meal" is an obscene word rather than a "swear" word. All of them are of course things native speakers of English say with the intention of being offensive and identifying themselves as habitually angry, bad-tempered, unpleasant individuals. "That was a good meal" is what a native speaker of English who is not habitually angry would say.

Often a functional shift is used in one context but not other possible contexts, in English. Scott Adams often uses "a tell." All native speakers of English know that "True is the tale that I tell of my travels"--we can call the travelling we have done or are doing "travels," but we have to call the telling we have done or are doing a "tale," not "tells" or a "tell." (And we say "my travels," not "my travel," even in reference to one single journey...but "my travel" could refer to a person's whole history of travelling, so that the singular word could refer to more different events than the plural word. Are we completely confused yet?) So "a tell" is something different from "a tale." In this particular case "a tell" is old show-business slang for what a larger number of English speakers would call "a giveaway," meaning the bit of someone's behavior that tells observers (or "gives the person away") when someone is thinking or noticing something. "The way Donald Trump's voice rose on that sentence is the tell that he was lying" is more logical, more literal, than "The way Donald Trump's voice rose on that sentence is the giveaway that he was lying," but "giveaway" is still closer to being "standard" English. However, during the twentieth century hypnotists successfully upgraded their image from being a class of mountebanks who often sold useless or toxic patent medicines to being a class of psychologists, lower in status than PhD researchers or MD's specializing in psychiatry, but at least as respectable as counsellors or therapy group leaders. Accordingly, when Adams uses "the tell" as hypnotists' jargon, he's making it a higher-status alternative to "the giveaway." This would not have worked in previous centuries. It may work now. "That's a tell" is not yet standard English, but it's the kind of high-status deviation from standard English that may become standard English in the future. 

"To note" is used when someone makes either a mental or a literal note of something for their own use, "He noted that they were running low on paper towels." "Noting" can sometimes extend into writing: "As Shakespeare noted in Romeo and Juliet, students often show a lack of enthusiasm for homework." Mental "noting" may involve a little more attention than simply "noticing," but a "notice" is posted more publicly and formally than a private "note" handed to a friend. This kind of variation in word usage developed over centuries of history and was not deliberately planned to confuse language learners, though language learners could hardly be blamed for thinking it was.

"A do" is one (or two) things, "ado" is another thing, and "a deed" is yet another thing. Most things people do are deeds. "A do" used to be slang for a party, and, after most people had forgotten that bit of slang, reappeared as slang for a hairstyle. "Ado" became acceptable even in written English, as a word for a state of unrest, confusion, distraction, excitement, and/or bustling about among a group of people, because Shakespeare used it/ "To-do" is a variant from. In casual conversation these words are likely to be used when the level of activity rises, sometimes in a good way, as when people decide to restore an old house or a store runs a big clearance sale.

What a person sings is always "a song." If some people stand still and sing, and others stand or sit still and listen, different words might be used depending on the formality of the event. It might be a "sing-along," a show, a performance, a concert, a recital. "A sing" is rarely used when the event takes place within a traditional culture that believe singing has special spiritual or magical powers; it seems, when I think about it, that I've seen sentences like 'The tribal healers came in for a sing" only in reference to Navajo people.

What is given is always "a gift," but if it's made by hand the effect of its having been worked on might be "the work," or "the handwork," sometimes "the needlework," "the brushwork," or "the work" of whatever other tools or techniques were used. Ornamental work can be either "worked" or "wrought"; the use of "wrought" tends to reflect the influence of "wring" and describe things with scrolled, rolled, or twisted effects, which is why James Thurber's joke about someone who "wrote, or wrought, a piece of writing--it sounded wrought to me" is funny. 

What is taken is not usually "a take" or "the take," unless the speaker is asserting that the person taking it is "on the take," an old slang phrase that used to be associated with Irish-Americans whose energy and good work allowed them to get ahead of English-Americans who had started out with more and made less of it. Confusingly, "on the take" was usually used with disapproval, because people who used it were often expressing the Deadly Sin of Envy. "A take" is used now, in a neutral sense, to mean one photograph or video sequence from a group of several that were "taken" or "shot" in a quick sequence. A photographer might display "the best take" in the batch; the video sold after a movie has had its chance in theatres may contain "out-takes" that were cut out of the movie version due to time limits. In colloquial English, "a take" can also refer to an opinion that differs from others' opinions because of someone's different position or experience: "My take on what Donald Trump said about the value of the house, as someone who used to live in New York City, is that everyone up there used to inflate the value of any house, because the local real estate prices were so inflated."

Occasionally a word has meant so much to so many that one can find examples of its being used in almost any way a person can think of. As if it weren't confusing enough that "to love" can refer either to the practice or to the emotional feeling of any combination of admiration, affection, loyalty, benevolence, friendship, compassion, sympathy, enjoyment, preference, infatuation, and other things, either a thing or a person loved may be "a love," especially of a particular individual: "She was his love," or "Astronomy was his love." The variety of use of the word "love" has prompted some people, even lovers, to say that the word has been so much used that it's lost its meaning. As a remedy some English teachers used to teach, as a rule of grammar, that we should at least use "like" when the object of admiration, affection, etc., is an inanimate material object. One does not love strawberries, they preached; one can only like them. Other English speakers feel that the difference between liking and loving is a matter of enthusiasm. Others feel that it has more to do with the quality of the feeling or relationship expressed--that liking things means merely enjoying them, while loving them means serving their needs or interests, so a gourmet likes strawberries but a gardener loves them. Then there is Internet-specific usage, where promoting or advertising things can be regarded as serving their interests, so product reviewers "love" the products reviewed, while "liking" things tends to mean, specifically, clicking on a button to award points to things that may or may not get any further benefit from the points awarded. And then...native speakers of English bicker and "correct" one another's use of "love" often, but at least they always seem to enjoy the debate.

Some Nice Obscure Words

Long & Short Reviews invites bloggers, this week, to share some obscure words we've learned and liked.

There are obvious reasons why one of my favorite obscure words remains obscure. The verb form, "assythe," seems to suggest its correct pronunciation but the noun form "assything" looks like something completely different. It means a gift, offered freely or imposed by a judge, to someone you insulted or offended. It's not compensation for damages; the idea here is to offer a gift nice enough to relieve the person's hurt feelings. "Sythe" is probably related to "soothe." / 

A word this web site featured a few years ago was "galinsoga." It means a wild plant that can be eaten or used as a seasoning, but is often regarded as a weed. Food is not the only use that can be made of galinsoga. Though not usually considered very decorative, its flowers can look pleasant in arrangements. It can be dried and burned, or just allowed to displace nastier weeds like bermudagrass in the garden. 

Galinsoga photo from Google; their latest Googlitch concealed the photographer's name.

"Murrey" is an old word meaning "mulberry-colored." It's a darker color than burgundy, reddish purple more than purplish red.

"Bananaquit'" is a cute word for a cute thing. In Jamaican dialect a "quit" is a small bird that might make a noise that sounds like "twit' or "quit." A bananaquit is a kind of small bird that flits around banana trees. 

"Purfle" is a recent addition to my vocabulary. It means "to decorate the border of" anything, usually a piece of clothing or a violin. Chroniclers of the Tudor court described those monarchs wearing things "purfled with miniver," which means white fur. 

Google has photos of these things, but Google is misbehaving and failing to display them here.

Let's Make "Karen" the Woman of the Year

I admit it--I tweeted a link to yesterday's full-length blog post after writing it. And even clicked on a "trending" tag and read until I came to a blue tick, just to check whether the "notifications" page collects any evidence that Twitter's even trying to save itself. So far, none.\

The "trending" topic was the word "Karen." Some people think it's cute to take the name some other person's parents gave that person and use it as slang for something else. I don't think that's cute. Using names from history is merely obfuscatory; there was only one Benedict Arnold, but there was a real Benedict Arnold, and if any of his relatives resent the way we remember his name, well he deserved it. Using names from literature, ditto, and at least there never was a real Uriah Heep or Caspar Milquetoast; people recognize those stereotypes but the names given to them are unlikely to be heard as unintended insults to any real person.. But just randomly picking a given name that means any of several hundred thousand living people? ??? Hello, if you're not using the name to refer to a specific person ("then she started singing like Karen Carpenter," e.g.) or homonym ("Many of the people who named their daughters  'Karen' didn't even know it was also the name of an ethnic group"),  then using it as a slang word is just plain obnoxious. And tacky.

I looked this up. As a term of hate for (a) a White woman and/or (b) a woman who insists on getting what she's paying for, "Karen" does not refer to any actual example in history or literature. Somebody just picked on that name and an admittedly silly-looking hair style to create the stereotype that, when a White woman demands her due, she's doing it to persecute some poor Black youth who has some sort of natural right to come to work stoned and fail to do per job, right? 

I would really prefer to leave the chastisement of people who use "Karen" to mean anything but "someone who inherited that as either a given name or an ethnic group name" to competent, responsible Black adults. When I worked in the D.C. school system I knew several. To the best of my knowledge none of them ever used a computer other than at work, though, so I've waited in vain to read where any of them has come online to say, "If you mean 'someone who has made it a goal to get you fired from your job,' you should say that." 

Anyway, the tweet: Women who demand their due are doing a GOOD, GOOD, GOOD thing. If you mean a racist, you should say "a racist."

And you should also be able to prove that you do mean "a racist," as completely different from "a person insisting on the product or service person is paying for." The suggestion that those two disparate things are normally linked--now THAT is racist.  

There is no natural correlation between being Black and being dishonest, lazy, or incompetent.

Women, even in African Muslim countries, have generally been trusted with a positive duty "to reward good and punish evil" by shopping responsibly. That is one of the main ways the virtuous wife in the Book of Proverbs "will do [her husband] good and not evil all the days of her life." A good homemaker is, like a good middle manager or small business entrepreneur, prudent and frugal. She demands her due when she pays for anything. That cultural expectation is global. 

When did "race" come into the picture? When the French Romanticists, concerned about the effect of recognizing women's civil rights during the French Revolution, concocted the idea of disabling women by marketing an ideal of femi-ninny-ty in which the virtuous woman stayed home, didn't bother her pretty little head about money, didn't have any money or go out shopping anyway, and focussed her energy on mystical communion with the dead. Men who worshipped science and technology, in Auguste Comte's demented vision, would feel tired, corrupted, and guilty, so they'd need to come home and unburden themselves to "the angel in the home," that artificially "sweet" (though probably insipid), preferably illiterate, friendless, vocationless, surely at least a little bit "crazy," baby-doll wife who was to be trained to direct whatever stunted intelligence she had toward communion with the dead because, by following Comte's prescription for life, she was pretty sure to join them by age twenty-five.

In real life very few parents seriously considered bringing up little girls this way, but a modified version of "the angel in the home" was sentimentalized about by men and even women who thought women shouldn't be "corrupted" by going to university or having a vote. The modern version is the Nice Girl who doesn't think about moral or ethical questions any "heavier" than some sort of ideal of making everyone feel good. The families that bought into the Nice Girl ideal, producing John Gray's "women from Venus" and Deborah Tannen's "relational women," were (in the United States) almost exclusively of European or Japanese origin. Very few human cultures ever took that ideal seriously. 

So when these typically pale-complexioned women have their own money and are responsible for using it to bring up children and manage businesses, woman-haters are trying to keep them from doing those things well by attacking them with the claim that some sort of stereotype of a woman who wants to talk to the manager, who knows what she's paying for and intends to get it, is...not being a Nice Girl. But these days the majority of American women are well past wanting to be seen as any kind of "girl" and are more concerned with being good women, as in grown-up, responsible, prudent, frugal--and not leaving the store without what we're paying for. So the haters escalate the attack by projecting some of their own racism onto the stereotype. Because these people are serious haters they imagine that the incompetent employee who's going to be punished for being caught cheating this woman is always going to have darker skin than she has. 

Nobody in per right mind seriously believes that it's kind to let people cheat and steal in order to pamper their emotional feelings. In fact, if the manager happens to be honest, the incompetent clerk is likely to be penalized for having too much cash in the drawer, as much as for having too little. When we demand honest, ethical trade, we are being kind to the typically young or newly hired people at the bottom of the company hierarchy who may not have intended to cheat us--the first time: we are teaching them not to cheat.

In real life, women who intend to get what we're paying for don't know or care what the incompetent employees may look like. What we want to punish is incompetence. There may be, in some places, a correlation between Blackness and incompetence. In the notoriously corrupt crony system that used to be Washington, D.C.'s, city government, such a correlation was easy to spot. Corrupt crony systems provide sinecures for incompetent White people in other cities and towns, but in the few places where it's possible for the ruling party to discriminate in favor of Blackness, or Hispanicity or Yiddishkeit or even Nice White Girlhood, then a non-causative correlation between minority status and incompetence is almost guaranteed to form! 

My mother often reminisced about her first grown-up job. Back then "lace-curtain Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" Protestants wer part of the mainstream but Irish Catholics were still a distrusted minority, working their way up; there was a serious question whether an Irish Catholic like John F. Kennedy could ever be electable. Mother's first employer was an Irish Catholic just like the young men, stereotypically all called "Paddy" after their patron saint, who dominated several city police forces; but she judged policemen by their body shape rather than their Irish-ness. "See that fat policeman out on the street? You know he's a crook. Hangs out in places that give him free drinks and snacks all day, never gets any exercise. If he bothered to chase any thief that tried to rob a shop like ours, he couldn't chase the thief ten yards before he'd flop over dead! It's about time for a new politician to promise to reform the system. Then we'll see a lot of slim, trim policemen who will actually do their jobs...until they start hanging out in the places that feed them, and then it all starts over again." 

Identifying incompetence with obesity makes more sense than identifying it with skin color. In Washington when I was there, the shiftless, clueless, working-to-rule or actively-sabotaging-the-office bureaucrats who "lost" payments, misdirected mail, took an hour to do what their counterparts in the suburbs could do in three minutes, but at least were easy for those inclined that way to cheat because they didn't care, were without exception Black--but so were the honest, hardworking people who made the city work. Too many people in the city were Black to make it possible to use "Black" as an identifying trait if you wanted to describe an individual others might want to support or avoid. "Black" was the default. It might be worth the time to mention that someone was not Black. But quite often the incompetent ones were also fat. A correlation between obesity and incompetence can be produced by disabling thyroid disease, or by a tendency to indulge in the Deadly Sin of Laziness. 

When a responsible (and virtuous) woman insists on correcting a bill rung up by a chatter-cheating cashier, on getting a replacement for the object that was broken in the box, on making the person who sprayed poison around the power line replace her now stunted and barren fruit trees, generally getting what is due to her and her family, it's not about the person who could just apologize and correct, or pay for, the mistake. But if that person fails to correct the mistake, but adds insult to injury--telling her she's not acting like a Nice Girl, horrors, she's being a kvetch, a yenta, a strega, bossy, intimidating, domineering, a shrew, a harpy, a "honey," shrill, strident, abrasive, "crazy," "hysterical," "emotional," an emasculating b***h, or these days "a Karen"--nice to drag in all those thousands of random older women--then, perhaps, all of us should be making it a point to go punish that person. The hater.  

"She's just a Karen" is almost as loaded an insult as "honey" is; it manages to insult the generation of White women for which "Karen" was a trendy name, all Black people, and the Karens of that tropical Asian country that can't make up its mind what to call itself in English, all at once. If you really want to insult that many people all at once, nice going, Trash Mouth, you are telling the world you're a serious hater.

It's time to push back against the haters.

What do nice people do when a woman, especially an older woman of European or Japanese descent who may still be dealing with the baggage of the Nice Girl stereotype and whose manner may consequently be brittle or shrill, is standing up for her rights? Why, they stand beside her, of course.

Say, "Yeah!"

Say, "Right on!"

Say, "What she said!"

Say, "Hey, me too!"

Say, "Go, girl!"

If any of those anti-woman dogwhistle words have been used, say "I heard that! Now you do whatever the lady says, fool, because you've got witnesses! What's your name, anyway? What's your job description? Who hired you, and what was the matter with them?"

These days, if a White person uses the N-word in public, per career is over. Why is there still any difference between that and a man using any of those anti-woman words? 

We might even want to sing a little chorus of,

"Dare to be a Karen! Dare to stand alone!

Dare to have a purpose firm, and dare to make it known!"

The last time I went anywhere on a Greyhound bus was the worst bus trip ever. It started innocently enough--for some reason the bus just was not moving at traffic speed, so it was further behind schedule at every scheduled stop. Then for the middle third of the trip the driver was visibly in an altered state of consciousness; he was rude, hostile, racist, and mean, and everyone knew it, and everyone also knew that our only chance of getting to where we were going that day was to ignore the driver's drugged-out condition and pray that he didn't crash the bus. Then there was a long sweaty delay in the Great Dismal Swamp while a bus in working condition was found. Everyone was thoroughly sorry they'd bought bus tickets. 

For what it's worth, the drugged driver, against whom I wrote a complaint the next day, was White. He was also obese. The nice driver who just couldn't get the bus going, on the morning shift, was also White. The tired, surly, but competent driver on the evening shift was Black.

Nobody was very friendly or cheerful as we boarded the working bus with the grumpy driver, but finally we rolled into Washington. I stood up to remove my duffel bag from the luggage rack, as people have always done on all the bus trips I've taken in my lifetime, and the driver squawked, "Sit down while the bus is in motion!" as if he thought he were driving a school bus. I stood there loading my bag onto my shoulder, and the idiot driver said, "I can put you off this bus!" 

I looked out at the Union Station, which was where everyone going to Washington wanted to get to anyway, and called back, "Yes please!"

It was terrific. The bus exploded with laughter and relief. "Yeah, me too!" "Me three!" People stood up and laughed and cheered. 

On that particular occasion, the sight of city buses and trains still at the Union Station, meaning that some of us were going to get home that night after all, undoubtedly had something to do with the change in the atmosphere on the bus. 

Nevertheless, standing beside women who are claiming their due, for the benefit of humankind as well as themselves, feels wonderful. Try to find a way to do it today.

Word for Wednesday: Uppity Nation

Only recently I discovered a Live Journal blog post from 2008: 

https://ravan.livejournal.com/2008/09/12/

This is normal. LJ is such a glitchy site that it’s a chore for me to maintain my own blog, let alone explore all those of other people whose comments interested me. On LJ I fail to visit blogs I follow for a year or two after they’ve ceased to exist. This in spite of the fact that keeping up with other people’s blogs—even if they don’t blog about glyphosate—is definitely part of any activist’s job description. Even if your purpose in using the Internet is just to sell things, communication needs to work in both directions.

Anyway: In 2008 we had the unprecedentd phenomnon of a presidential election featuring not one but two candidates who...

1…were extremely young by White House standards. The Presidency is generally regarded as the peak of a long successful career, which, however successful people’s early lives have been, generally happens after age 60. Younger Presidents are problematic. Their children are so young it’s cruel to subject them to White House life, they’re still subject to hormonal distractions, and if they’ve served two terms and still have thirty or forty years ahead of them, what do they have to look forward to? So it’s not ageism or generational prejudice that makes me say: Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are about my age, and in 2008 neither of them should have been a presidential candidate. (Palin was not technically a presidential candidate but, in view of McCain’s age, was consistently considered as one.) Yes, one of them won; he may regret that now.

2…were, to our national shame and my regret, “historic firsts” because one wasn’t male and the other was less than 50% White. We’ve had other Presidents of whose ancestry Hitler would not have approved, but they’ve all, except Obama, been legally White.

3…were, let us face it, high-powered, hard-charging individuals who obviously had to make an effort to seem “non-threatening” to TV watchers, and it didn’t always work. Classic Cholerics, though Obama can pass as Phlegmatic for short periods of time. People who like to look busy while taking a lot of breaks and keeping the office social life going would not want to work with either one of them. In among the legitimate concerns about their age could be heard all of the code phrases for “…works too hard and makes me look bad, so I haaate him/her.” Both Obama and Palin embodied our age group’s preppy ideal of sailing through life looking as unruffled as a swan, while, like the swan, working furiously below the surface and prepared to knock any challengers flat with one blow.

Some poor idjit was obviously feeling that kind of discomfort about Obama because, of all the things it was possible for reasonable people to have called Obama, he chose “uppity.”I’m not going to mention his name here, in case he has children.

He claimed he was using this word in its dictionary meaning. I’ve never owned a printed dictionary that acknowledged “uppity” as a word. If they had included “uppity” they would have flagged it as “slang” or “dialect,” but afaik none of them included it even as that.

But “uppity” is another word like “ain’t” and “ort.” They may not be in the dictionary but nobody has to look them up anyway. Everyone who hears them used knows what they mean.

“Ort,” in written English, is a word meaning a leftover piece of food. I tried reviving it in college. Nobody picked it up. However Americans feel about the food, they're comfortable with the word "leftovers," and recognize “ort” in spoken US English as a variant form of “ought.”

“Ain’t” started out as a variant form of “aren’t” but it stretched to include “isn’t” and “haven’t.” All of these contractions were considered slang, "incorrect" in written English, into the early twentieth century. "Aren't," "isn't," and "haven't" were then accepted as standard, while "ain't" continued to be disparaged as nonstandard. So does "amn't." It became "correct" to ask "Wasn't I?" and "Haven't I?" but grammarians still insist that we ask "Am I not?" where many people feel that "Ain't I?" would be more appropriate. I personally have no problem with "Aren't I?", and if the definition of correct English is based on what our best writers and speakers say, I'd accept "Ain't I?" on the authority of Sojourner Truth--but your teacher or editor may not.

And “uppity” means “I believe in a rigid social hierarchy, and I believe that person belongs on a lower level of it than I think person is acting appropriately for.” That’s not a thing Americans can comfortably say, so “uppity” is mostly printed as used in a sarcastic way, as in Vicki Leon’s studies of female achievers as Uppity Women of [insert historical era]. 

If and when we use "uppity" we probably should understand it to describe someone who understands that, philosophically speaking, the whole idea of a human hierarchy being anything more than a short-term way to organize a specific job is pretty ridiculous, but, if a hierarchy is formed, it should be based on merit, talent, achievement. And who then proceeds to demonstrate that per place in the hierarchy of a "meritocracy" is well above per critic's. Probably the best response to being criticized as "uppity" is to go out and get yourself elected President of the United States. 

To use “uppity” to describe an undesirable quality of personality or charactr is to confsss, and prove, that you have that quality in abundance. By the barrel, by the yard, almost certainly much more than the other person may have.

This pollie said it, apparently with a straight face, about Obama. Glumph. I do believe that comment deserved some kind of trophy for tackiness.

“Uppity,” when it’s not clearly used to express admiration of achievement-against-all-odds, is a word that says much more to disparage the person saying it than it says about the person so described. In the United States, a politician who says it, or thinks it, needs to go home. The best thing to be said for that one is that he was probably thinking "uppity young man" more than "uppity Black man." 

More people publicly made more purely nasty, purely personal comments about Palin but, in public at last, none of them called her “uppity.” Palin and her backers might have used that word in a snarky, Leon-referenced way. The blogger known as Ravan used it in a fine, American way.

President Obama's greatest achievement may have been surviving eight years of drivel about being "the first African-American President" without publicly cracking his bland, "No Drama Obama" mask, but his doing that was an achievement against odds and a thoroughly American thing. We as a nation were, and still are, regarded by the decaying nations of the Old World as an Uppity Nation. And should we not be proud of it!

Affect, Effect, Impact, Compact: Words That Confuse Native Speakers of English

I don't remember when or how I learned the words "affect," "effect," "impact," and "compact." Maybe I learned them by reading them. Maybe that's why I've never mixed them up, as even native English speakers often do. They are four distinct words. Each can, however, be used as either a noun or a verb, and "compact" is also used as an adjective. 

As Nouns... 

"Affect" is most often used in psychological or medical writing. It means a patient's or informant's general air, manner, apparent mood, the sort of thing Americans often casually call "attitude." It's not commonly enough used to appear on the first page of a Google search for definitions of "affect," which list the word only as a verb. You're most likely to see references to "his affect" in clinical psychology: "With flat intonation and neutral affect, without eye contact, he said that he believed he was in the hospital because he was the New Messiah and must be tortured for the sins of humankind."

"Effect" is often used in ordinary speech to describe a change or influence someone or something has on someone or something else. "The warm water finally took effect, and the lid came off easily." 

"Impact" properly means the effect of things being smashed together. Some editors will allow it to be used in writing to mean the same thing as "effect," so we do sometimes read things like "The teacher's methodical approach had an impact on the students' test scores," but this is wrong. "Impact" can be used metaphorically to mean an effect that was like being smashed into something else, in some way: "In South Dakota Blues, the character John can hardly bear to talk to other men because of the impact childhood bullying had on his personality." More properly, it describes the effects of things like tornadoes and car crashes: "The car's impact on the wall shattered the window."

"Compact" is most often used today, as a noun, to mean a small streamlined object, often a round flat makeup box, sometimes the efficiency model of its kind: "Among new cars, the Honda Civic, Mazda 3, Volkswagen GTI, and Toyota Corolla are the most popular compacts." An older, more formal use of "compact" as a noun was an agreement, like the Mayflower Compact.

As Verbs... 

"Affect" is what you're most likely to want to do to another person. It means to influence or change either a person or a thing. "His lack of sleep affected his driving." Often, though not always, people use "affect" when something or someone had a very strong effect on their emotions: "The vegan's passionate speech about factory farms affected everyone's appetite." "To affect" can also describe what you do to a mood or manners you consciously tell yourself to use: "She affected sympathy for his children as a pretext for visiting his country house after his wife died."

"Effect" is what you do to the change itself. To effect a change is to put it into effect: "The CEO ordered RIFs in all departments, the change to be effected by Friday." 

"Impact" is most often correctly used in the past tense: "The student's biggest medical expense was his impacted wisdom teeth." It's often used, incorrectly, in places where "affected" or even "effected" might belong, where what it communicates is primarily that the writer wasn't sure whether to use "affected" or "effected": "The drought impacted the price of lettuce." It did no such thing. The price of lettuce was not ground together; it soared. The drought affected the price of lettuce.

"Compact" was sometimes used, in the past, in the sense of "to make a compact": "Passengers on the Mayflower compacted that they would stay together as a group governing themselves according to English laws." It is also used in the sense of "to press things together into a compact size": "She sat on the suitcase, trying to compact all the clothing she wanted to take into one small box."

As an Adjective... 

"Compact" is the only one of the four words that is normally used as an adjective: "Small items like lipsticks, needles, and erasers are often grotesquely overpackaged because more compact packaging makes them easy to steal." 

"Affected" is sometimes used to describe either a person who puts on an act, or the act the person puts on: "The freshman curled his little finger away from the handle of his coffee mug, called the German teacher 'Herr' Fultz, and referred to the chemistry 'lab-orat'ry' at the University of Nebraska in an affected way." 

"Effective" is often used to describe a person or thing that has an effect, nearly always a good effect: "The cleaners applied water, muscle, baking soda and vinegar in such an effective way that the bathrooms sparkled." 

Members of this web site have seen "impactful" used as if it were an adjective, but this web site does not accept it as being one. If you want to describe a presentation, try "effective," "impressive," or "memorable." 

Ideas This Web Site Classifies as Rabid Right: Part 5 ot 5

This is the end of the series about the way this web site uses the terms "Right" and "Left," as opposed to "Rabid Right" and "Loony Left." Right-wing extremists are rare, but people do keep reporting evidence that they exist. They...

* Really do not like or trust any foreigners at all. Accept the benefits of peace but think we might be better off to build an empire.

* Often don't like or trust other parts of the United States either. Stereotype States to their North, South, East, and West with reckless abandon. May seriously think secession, or dividing the Union in some other way, would be a good idea.

* While it's easy to exploit racism, it's not so easy to practice it. Even Hitler found it necessary to enter into alliances with people who, urgh ick, were not German. Rabid Right people might spout hate of some demographic group or other while having active and prominent members in their own groups who have come out of the group their group supposedly hate. This type of person, typically a young man, is thinking clearly about what he feels--hostile energy--and what he wants--a good rumble, "good" being defined as one he or his gang will win. He is not so clear about whom he wants to fight with and why. He may form a pattern/habit of picking fights with other young men in town, in the expectation that the young women they date will talk them out of fighting before they actually come to blows. 

* If not physically predisposed to brawl, may find other ways to cling to race prejudice, even though racism is hard to practice in real life because it is unrealistic. What they really feel is infantile fear of strangers. They cope by telling themselves that people who look or talk like them in some way are part of their "family" category of people, often a dangerous mistake, and people who don't are the ones they can safely fear and reject, often an expensive mistake.

* Deep fear of other people, in adults, comes from distrust of oneself. People who are not afraid of strangers don't believe that everyone is a friend, but do believe that they'll be able to take care of themselves if they find themselves talking to, working with, car-pooling with, or even living with people who prove to be enemies. People who are afraid of strangers sense that they don't have any skills for coping with other people's undesirable behavior except hitting, kicking, and biting, all of which are likely to lead to fights they are likely not to win. This makes Rabid Right "racists" very undesirable as neighbors even for members of their own official "race" group.

* Deeply dislike, distrust, and fear the effects of overpopulation but, due to their twisted thinking about people inside versus people outside whatever groups they may identify with, may cling to the idea that their having more children will give them more allies in the constant struggle against other people. Worry a great deal, if White, about the trend for White people to be leading the world away from the dysfunctional old idea of having multiple children.

* Believe things they've heard from Old Left propaganda--e.g. that all Black Americans are poor and this poverty is what makes them violent--and react to those things in the way the propagandists didn't want--e.g. believing that all Black Americans are violent and need to be cowed by displays of superior force. 

* Once led into that critical mistake of thinking that life's conflicts consist of "my group against other groups" instead of "my ability to defend myself against harm," may fall for any number of additional fallacies, though these vary from year to year and not all of them are likely to be present in the same individual. Take war propaganda and campaign rhetoric literally. Believe that

** All men are violent bullies who believe might is always right and brawling is the ultimate solution to everything.

** Women (or women other than the Rabid Righty's mother, sisters, and/or daughters) are good for only one thing and should not be really trusted even in regard to that.

** The old take away more than they give to the young.

** Today's young are more clueless than today's adults were at their age. (This is possible?)

** One's own religious beliefs are altogether true and divinely guided, and all other religious beliefs are false insofar as they differ from one's own and of satanic origin, and therefore people of other faith can be considered decent human beings only after they convert to one's own school of thought.

** Alternatively, in some religious beliefs, people of other faith can't convert to the One True Faith because it consists partly of physical descent from the right ancestor, and there are no good people outside the tribe. Or, as in medieval Jewish writings, there are exactly 36 righteous Gentiles scattered around the world.

(This kind of beliefs usually come in matched sets for back-and-forth hostile exchange.)

* So, favor censorship as long as it's "our" kind of censorship. Ignore the probability that "our" kind of censorship will be taken over and used against "us" by "them."

* Favor technological espionage and "social credit" systems, on the same reasoning, or lack of reasoning.

* Believe nothing can be learned from history and we're all doomed to repeat it endlessly in any case.

* Seriously believe that the world, or at least some part of it, was a better place when women weren't hired for most full-time jobs and "racial" groups were segregated. There is usually something in the way of a base for these beliefs; some South Africans can make a plausible case that some ethnic groups in that country have reacted badly to the official policy that grants them equal civil rights, some people feel very bitter about their early family lives, etc. 

* Claim to revere the Bible or whatever portion of it their religious group accept as valid, but do not study it in depth. Want to believe that everything in the Bible boils down to whatever subset of simple rules and doctrines the individual was taught as a child. Never take a bite of the "strong meat" of biblical teaching for adults. 

* Probably don't believe that ethnic groups recognized today can be traced to those mentioned in the Bible but, if they do, hold rigid and judgmental beliefs about those groups. Memorable barbs aimed at the policies some groups or leaders were taking, by contemporary preachers, must be accurate descriptions of the way every member of those groups will always be. (People who think this way try to ignore the implication that even the apostolic Christians of pure Jewish descent were "children of Hell.")

* Distrust radical, "fanatical" followers of their own religious traditions and may persecute them as viciously as some Jews did Jesus or some Christians did Luther. (Deep down they do feel called to follow the same radical practices these reformers do, even if it is true that, as with Ann Lee and lifelong celibacy, it's feasible for only some people to be called to practice certain disciplines. But liberal believers who simply don't feel called to lives of celibacy, or communalism, or evangelism, don't feel a need to throw stones at those who heed such calls. The haters who do throw things at the radical believers are really fighting against a feeling of inferiority because they either have not had such callings or have rejected the callings they had.)

* Really yearn, because of their fundamental inability to rely on themselves, to follow a leader who they expect will be able to make everything better. (No matter how blatantly flawed a man may be, if he gets into a leadership position and is then able to use the talent and experience he has to make some improvement in the organization or the nation, these people want to believe that just keeping him as a leader will make everything better. Thus the widespread support for Trump in 2024, ignoring the fact that Trump's age was already working against him in 2020 and the probability that he'll be physically unfit for the presidency by 2024, as well as the number of things he did that were unwelcomed even by Republicans and were counterproductive for the nation. Trump briefly reversed two major D policy mistakes, therefore Trump must be the savior of the nation.)

* While only a few can fairly be called neo-Nazis (radical rebels in the U.S. who believe that even the German Nazional-Sozialist party at least corrected some Marxist Communist mistakes), this kind of Rabid Right thinking is compatible with other versions of fascism. The American Rabid Right can usually see clearly where Hitler, Mussolini, and Saddam went wrong but they may think that Francisco Franco's approach to government has possibilities.

* And it does not go by ethnicity alone, but these people are substantially more likely to have German or Slavic rather than English or Celtic names; the Rabid Right don't come from old established families, or have much appeal for those who do. They tend to be closer to Eastern Europe, where feudalism led directly into socialism without people having had the benefit of a better political philosophy. One can see how that would tend to make fascism look good, or less bad. 

One more...

* Are subject to parody by moderate Rightists who don't take the Rabid Right seriously. Thus, after certain memorable outbursts of political hate from the Left, bloggers who had previously identified as centrists or moderate Rightists started adopting screen surnames like "Deplorable," "Ultra MAGA," "Terrorist Domestique," "Pirate," and "Refusenik" (that one was in regard to coronavirus vaccines). So far as I've been able to determine by following them on Twitter and at forum sites, most of these people are retirees whose online activity is more social than political.

The Rabid Right are so incompatible with the socially liberal, libertarian, individualist thinking found at this web site that we tend to forget that they exist. They are a small minority not represented in our part of the world. They are human beings too, and deserve to be loved and educated...but other people are more likely to be able to love and educate them than we are. I usually write to Righties because that's the largest recognizable category of this web site's readers, but I wouldn't know what to say to the Rabid Right--if they'd even listen to a biracial woman, which I doubt.  

Ideas This Web Site Classifies As Right Wing: Part 4 or 5

(This post is part of a series, links to the rest of which are on the right side of the web page, about this web site's use of the categories "Left" and "Right," as distinct from "Loony Left" and "Rabid Right." Rightists...)

* Came from good families and tend to believe that all families are basically good, that even dysfunctional families are better environments for children than anything government could do.

* Feel satisfied with traditional religious identities, affiliations, or practices.

* Don't want their freedom to be based on the denial of anyone else's freedom, or their wealth to be based on less than fair and honest trade with other people, and vigorously resist any claim that it does, even when...to some extent...some of it...well...sort of does. (If they agreed that factual evidence supported the claim that modern Britain still had any wealth stolen from India, rather than having lost it all in the struggle to save the world from the more racist and oppressive Third Reich, they'd feel that reparations were owed. But they don't agree that modern Britain has such wealth, and they think it's petty and mean to doubt that Britain has been more than fair in inviting people from ex-colonial countries to live in Britain and be British.)

* As a result of this sense of justice, are disproportionately delighted by the fact that Indigenous American groups that have received less federal handout money tend to be better off economically than groups that have received more. 

* Do not hate any particular ethnic group, (It's not that White or Black Rs hate the other color group, believe that they personally ever could participate in the oppression of the other group, or would want to oppress any group if they could; it's that, in the absence of the rituals of tokenism that both Black and White Rs despise, they expect hostility from the other side of the color war and don't know how to make friends on the other side. They want to have friends on the other side. They kvell over any evidence of friendliness, neighborliness, or even individual pity--as for a disability--from people by whom they expect to be hated. I have seen older Rs, male and female, shed tears when people in what they used to believe were hostile groups have claimed them as friends.)

* May, if they grew up long enough ago, harbor strange, quaint ideas about groups different from them. And probably will say things that gravel the souls of their first few friends in those groups. But are deeply hurt, and vehemently enraged, by having this ignorance confused with what they remember of real racism. 

* Actively try to show good will toward people from different demographic groups--while remaining wary of tokenism, which they know their counterparts in those groups loathe. (Through several presidential elections now, Rs have nominated candidates from ethnic minority groups, and a similar pattern has been observed: Most Rs were interested in the minority-type candidates but, after reading more of those candidates' stated positions and watching them in intra-party debates, decided to back rich White men anyway, citing pragmatic reasons such as concern that the richest White men, e.g. W Bush or Donald Trump, would sabotage the candidates they might have found more likable.) 

* Probably live in homogeneous neighborhoods and attend homogeneous churches. However, if their churches are part of worldwide denominations, they welcome foreign members, and if they happen to take jobs or go to school in big cosmopolitan cities, then their circles of friends may be as diverse as other Rs wish their circles of friends were.

* Usually--pace Pat Buchanan--think a little cultural appropriation is an excellent thing, a way to open the door to inter-group friendship. ("A little" remains a keyword. They do have their own traditions to preserve. John Verney's satire of a frivolous teenager expressing interest in Italy in terms of shoes and spaghetti, though British, was accurate for some Rs--but, like Verney's teenaged character, most of those Rs have lived and learned.)

* Had grandparents or great-grandparents who were taught to hate or at least fear some group or other, as enemies during a war or disease carriers during the plague years. (Hello? Unless they were Black Americans, that would have happened before 1945. How many of that generation are still alive?) 

* Were taught, in their traditional religious groups, not to hate demographic groups.

* Prefer peace to war, but prefer not to mention this at times when it might be construed as showing a lack of Support for Our Troops. Believe that failure to Support Our Troops is treason.

* Aren't going to flip the beliefs they learned early in life. If loving our flag and our Declaration of Independence was good in 1976, it'd be best to forget about trying to rebrand patriotism as a bad thing or market any "Declaration of Interdependence" now...even if there were any objective evidence of any good reason to make such efforts.

* Basically tend to feel that civilization reached perfection in the United States in 1950. Acknowledge the necessity of some changes, e.g. that President Eisenhower had to retire, and didn't notice that the presidential administrations they liked, e.g. Reagan's or Trump's, enabled other changes some of which were undesirable. Can be reminded that the world depicted on old TV sitcoms was always fictive and that many things needed changing in 1950, but even after being reminded, they still feel, deep down, that everything was better in 1950.

* Have always tended to agree with "progressive" socialists that changing some things would be progress in the right direction, then withdraw support for what merely represents "progress" toward socialism. (Women needed and deserved equal employment opportunities, equal pay...and men deserved equal rights, along with women, to pursue more "liberating" self-employment, or work in smaller businesses, rather than indenture themselves to huge corporations, including federal or even state-level government.) 

* Take the benefits of living in a democratic republic for granted. (The Tea Party movement lost momentum when people realized that it was going to call for radical efforts, such as, well, spending our online time following the state legislature rather than friends' blogs and football scores.) Resist awareness that opposition to political movements that are organized into actual jobs may take some thought and effort too.

* Often aren't very active or demonstrative in support of their churches or charities, either. 

* Support a strong military presence, not because if we must fight wars we should give our troops as much protection as possible, but because they seriously believe fighting wars solves problems.

* Seriously imagine that if women aren't able to have abortions either those women or someone else will want and love their babies, who will be born healthy and brought up happy, and everyone will live happily ever after. 

* May believe that verbal abuse is part of healthy relationships among people who never seriously question their value to the family, the social group, or society as a whole. Thus ethnic slurs, or even references to physical quirks or disabilities, can become nicknames people use with pride. (Mary Daly, who was not on the right wing, was referring back to her traditional-Catholic-Irish-American roots when she wrote that "[the sentence] 'She is a Revolting Hag' would never be mistaken for 'She is a revolting hag'.")

* May have grown up with other cultural traditions that are dysfunctional; feel defensive about these dysfunctions and don't want to reexamine or discuss them. For example, if they didn't grow up with a strong extended family in a neighborhood with a solid sense of community, they may tend to underestimate the benefits of those things.

* Are well off but not super-rich. Appreciate the value of money. Understand that respect for private property is the foundation of civilization.

* Know what it means that our Constitution describes us as a Sovereign Union of Sovereign States and that three of those "States" actually call themselves "Commonwealths," but soft-focus on these things and don't insist on maintaining the sovereignty of the States and Commonwealths or the difference between them.

* Admirably recognize gender and ethnicity as necessities not virtues. May underestimate the value of women's and minorities' struggle to overcome bigotry. May give too much weight to men's ego defenses and pay serious attention to claims such as "women commit just as much domestic violence against husbands as men do against wives." 

* May be in denial about the effects of overpopulation and overcrowding on humans.

* May be in denial about the root cause of overpopulation and the only reliable, ethical method of preventing it. 

* May actually have pulled themselves up by their own proverbial bootstraps, at some time in their lives, and consequently fail to realize that big strong central governments have deprived other people not only of proverbial bootstraps but of proverbial boots. Grossly underestimate the harm welfarism does to communities and individuals. 

* Believe in being prepared for self-defense. Typically own a few firearms and shoot for sport once or twice a year, which may mean the weapons in their collections are cleaned, loaded, and used once in a decade or less often. Think the idea that having firearms predisposes people to use them violently is laughable, because nobody they know well has ever had Prozac Dementia.

* May believe that things themselves, rather than individual reactions to those things, "are safe." If it's safe for me to shoot, drive a car, drink alcohol, pop Prozac, or work on roofs, it's safe for anyone else to do those things. This can be a fatal mistake.

* Probably let themselves be peer-pressured into adopting the belief that nobody has time to walk to work, school, shops, church, or social events, and that people who walk to these places do so because there's something wrong with them that prevents them being able to drive to these places. Distrust the idea that it's healthy to walk, or harmful to form a habit of driving short distances, because they've heard things like that coming out of the mouths of Lefties. Are shocked, sometimes into uncharacteristic rudeness, when they hear a "conservative" argument that it's liberating to be able to walk...here I stand to testify!

* Fully sympathize with real women's demand for self-employment that permits quality time with their babies. Not necessarily so sympathetic when men want the same thing. Wouldn't have questioned my Dad's machismo when he was saying he wanted it, but might now question the machismo of young men who want it today. (Nature did not intend that all of us would be big strong polio survivors. Short White guys can be Real Men too.)

* May believe that forcing people to "compete" and "meet challenges" to get the jobs they want is good for the people, the jobs, or society. 

* Grew up with the belief that it's built into the teachings of the major religions that we should respect each other's right to practice our religions. May have attended some of the more public celebrations of religions other than their own. May earnestly believe that, if you were brought up to be something other than a Christian, then Jesus wants you--and they want you--to be a good, faithful whatever-else-you-are, at least until you receive a religious "vision" or "guidance" showing you a way to accept Jesus as your personal Savior while continuing to be a faithful whatever-else-you-are. (This is why they feel so indignant when anyone suggests suppressing any traditional expression of their beliefs in the name of tolerance of others. The followers of other religions they know are comfortable with the same system of etiquette they are comfortable with.)

* Expect people to be adults and settle their differences like adults. Don't think the United States should be responsible for intervening in other people's disputes. 

* Believe that, if one does start fighting, one has to win. (We didn't withdraw from Vietnam "in peace with honor," in this way of thinking; we lost. So, well, we'd jolly well better not lose in any subsequent wars...which is why the prospect of our getting into a conflict with any nuclear-armed nation is so ghastly.)

May not question, review, or update their beliefs every fifty years, but they're easy people to like, certainly not violent or hostile or even prejudiced in the way Ds like to think.

Ideas This Web Site Classifies as Loony Left: Part 3 of 5

(This post is the part of a series, links to which appear on the right side of the web page, in which we clarify the differences between what we mean by "Left" as distinct from "Loony Left" and "Right" as distinct from "Rabid Right." The Loony Left...)

* Want to let the United Nations rule the world. Do not recognize that the reason that that's what cartoon villains always wanted is that, in order to want to try to rule the world, you have to be thinking like a cartoon villain. 

* Imagine that if socialist government is only fine-tuned in some way or other, rather than leading to a succession of violent takeovers and perpetual chaos until the human population reaches "Golden Age" levels," socialist government might lead to blissful voluntary communism, making the whole world like one big well-run monastery. And every manure pile contains a pony, too.

* Seriously believe mothers (rather than schools) cause emotional problems; think they'd like to live in a world where babies are produced in factories and nobody gives birth, gives milk, or gives full-time attention to the very young. (In their dreams body parts are equally distributed among all people and, because one kind was clearly privileged when socialist theory was laid down as law, nobody has to be a full-time female any more. That's why they're so much more concerned about protecting the emotional sensitivities of "trans folk" than about protecting children from molestation.)

* Want to shut down discourse by quibbling about whether everything anyone says "fairly" represents everyone. In the name of protecting the "feelings" of women and minorities they thus avoid listening to real women and minorities, whose opinions tend to be reality-based rather than politically correct.

* Want censorship. 

* Want to shut down all private enterprise by regulating all productive work to death. Claim to be advocating for poor people while actively working against what poor people most want--opportunities for productive self-employment that stop them being poor.

* Want all food to be mass-produced on centrally planned and regulated factory farms. Ignore the fact that chemicals currently used on thet kind of farms may cause brain damage, which is probably necessary to allow people to cling to this idea.

* Seriously believe that women and minorities would be "happier" if we'd shut up and let rich White men, some of whom feel effeminate, do the thinking for us. 

* Want a big central government to own all the land. Make noise about protecting the "rights" of bears, coyotes, and rattlesnakes, in order to discourage farming so that, after clearing those tiresome little hill farms out of the way, big government can strip-mine the land.

* May seriously believe we'll find another planet we can inhabit, in another solar system, when we've made this one unlivable.

* Don't publicize the fact, but actually like war and want to institute a political system based on endless violent takeovers. Marxist "dialectics" actually mean each totalitarian socialist regime will be violently overthrown until human population is sparse enough that people could, assuming communism were still preached to them as an ideal, live in voluntary communism. 

* Don't understand that other people want to be, and be recognized as, adults since Loony Leftists, themselves, want to be little boys in power. (Power consisting of bossing and bullying, shared or transferred by fighting. Sophisticated though his verbal skills became, Karl Marx's mental age always remained about three.)

* Tend to be aggressive atheists because they hate to be reminded that there is a Higher Power than themselves.

* Tend to come from, and have, broken homes; want to believe that serial divorces and remarriages are normal and having all babies reared in government-run creches would be the ideal.

* Prone to magical thinking about their ability, as little boys in power, to solve everyone's problems--if necessary, just by screaming that the problems have been fixed.

Even if they're women, Loony Lefties think and tend to talk like three-year-old boys.