A Word I Totally Misread as a Kid

We've seen a lot of memes and blog prompts about the song lyrics we mis-heard as children. Did I miss the ones about the words we misread?

A lot of people misread "misled" as "mizzled"; this may even be the origin of the word "mizzle," meaning to slip away quietly, as in "They still went to church, but now they sat in the back row through the song service and mizzled out before the collection was taken up." 

What popped into mind this morning was "rendezvous." It came in one of the horse stories I liked as a child; the older man who was helping the boy hero train his horse referred to a meeting as a rendezvous. 

I sounded it out. I figured it had to be the same sort of word as "nervous." What would "rendezve" mean? Maybe it was an adjective, "rendezive"? What would that mean? I asked an adult who, of course, had no idea what I was talking about, but eventually I showed the adult the book. All was made clear.

My after-school sessions with French language records started that autumn.

I still can't claim to speak French. I do, however, read books in French.

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.

Glimmers, Anchors, Triggers, Whatever

When I think of "a glimmer" I think of a faint gleam of light, or understanding, insight. "The first glimmer of dawn appeared in the sky." 

A different idea is the "mood anchor," which does not necessarily mean a trigger for a pleasant mood, although that's usually the idea. A mood anchor is a trigger you intentionally create for yourself, your students, clients, etc. Better results are usually obtained by using anchors to pleasant moods--restful or energetic, family affection or romance, solemnity or laughter, etc.--but battle cries and fear triggers also work.

The literature of popular psychology overflows with unnecessary, often awkward neologisms created by people who hadn't read enough of their colleagues' work to know when the word they wanted already existed. So somebody now wants to use "glimmer" to mean a trigger for a pleasant mood.

This word usage does not work for me, but everybody always likes the idea.

This kitten. This attitude, when she weighed less than two pounds. My big strong Queen Cat Serena was the sole survivor of a litter of kittens who were born prematurely when their mother was reacting to glyphosate poisoning. It was such a pleasant surprise, so many days in her early life, just to see that she was still breathing. The face became a mood anchor for me. Still is. Her purrsonality is still too spicy for most people, but I love this cat.

Like one of the poets who accepted the challenge to write a poem about "glimmers," I live in a place full of pleasant mood anchors. Every flower in the not-a-lawn links to pleasant memories. I grew up mostly in the house where I now live, and mine was a mostly happy childhood. 

If you recognize a friend's mood anchors (or set up a new one) you can give the person a little mood boost on a bad day. The more of these tiny acts of friendship a person can keep track of, and use without embarrassing the friends person wants to cheer and comfort, the more person is likely to be remembered as having "a well educated heart."

One might even indulge a friend in this strange new use of “glimmer.”

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." 

Who's a Eunuch? Is That a Bad Word?

We don't use the word "eunuch" much any more, so perhaps it's not surprising to see the word being thrown around on some "conservative" sites as if it were an insult.

It's discouraging, though, because the word is not an insult; it's just a little more personal than we usually like public discourse to be. Like "virgin" or "gay" or "stating your pronouns," it gives Too Much Information. It means a man who is sterile, whether due to heredity, illness, initiation into some ancient religious cults, desire to be promoted to certain jobs in ancient feudal systems, or love and public spirit.

There are scholars who believe the biblical prophet Daniel was a eunuch. There are also scholars who believe the book of Daniel is a novel written to transmit some sort of coded message beyond the obvious "trust God and stay Jewish" message, and the prophet Daniel's fantastic adventures indicate that he was a symbol rather than a real person, but let's not get into that today. What the Bible tells us is that Daniel was selected for service to the king, and there's no record of his having a wife or child. That does not necessarily mean he was a eunuch. He might have been. Courtiers who were sterilized were usually the men appointed to guard the kings' wives and children. (It was accepted that a woman who was one of 500 legal "royal wives" was likely to amuse herself with a eunuch, but at least she wouldn't give birth to a child who looked like him.) That was the sort of thing that went on in feudal societies. The Bible does not mention Daniel's duties having anything to do with women and children. He was more of a piece of exotica, a foreigner brought in to give the king a connection to every possible "god." But some ancient kings demanded that all their courtiers be eunuchs anyway.

Because sterilization was associated with well paid positions, the Bible writers use "eunuch" as almost an honorific. It implied someone talented, influential, and very dedicated to his job. 

The first non-Jewish Christian noted in the Bible was an influential eunuch at the court of the Candace of Ethiopia. "Candace" was a title, like "Pharaoh," used by a dynasty of ruling queens.  Naturally these ladies' courtiers were eunuchs. 

There were even Jewish men who had themselves sterilized "for the kingdom of God's sake," according to Matthew 19:12. Judaism has generally been pro-parenthood, but these men may have wanted to avoid temptations to sexual sin, or having more children than they could afford to rear. Jesus spoke of these men with respect and good will.

The celiac gene guarantees problem pregnancies or no pregnancies at all, so though the word sounded odd and oldfashioned, it didn't bother me a bit when one of the three men with whom I've had long-term relationships said, "I'm a eunuch--you know, like the prophet Daniel." A woman who felt that only a baby who'd formed inside her own body could be her baby might have been put off. I'd always wanted to adopt children I'd fostered and found congenial, so I thought this man's sterility was a plus point. Actually all three of those men were sterile. The one who claimed the biblical word "eunuch" had made that choice for a Christian reason--to spare his first wife from further pregnancies that were becoming increasingly dangerous to her. 

Men who fear that sterility will destroy the greatest pleasure the poor slobs know have spoken and written scornfully of eunuchs, but Jesus, who knew the joys of work and worship, felt no need to do so. (And here I stand to testify that sterility does not affect a man's ability to share carnal pleasure with a woman, if that woman doesn't want babies.) In fact most men become postsexual sooner or later in life, and women who don't have a medical need for estrogen treatments reach a state of peace in which we can still love postsexual men as friends, if they are our friends. 

The late gentleman known to cyberspace as my Significant Other was youthful and energetic when we met, driving out to meet me almost every day. He had black hair, smooth skin, a symmetrical face, and strong wiry muscles. He loved heavy labor. I suspected my late father might have liked him. Then he became one of the first few people in our part of the world to get Lyme Disease, was not properly diagnosed and treated in time, and the relationship became more a matter of phone calls. But I'd reached the age of liberation from hormone cycles, and he was a friend, and decent people don't "ghost" away when their friends develop tedious diseases. The last few times I saw him he was gaunt, with white hair and the lopsided "dropped" face some people with Lyme Disease get. He walked with a limp and forgot things that had happened between flares of the chronic disease. He gradually lost skills and abilities, even the ability to drive. It didn't make much difference. He was still a friend who could teach me things by working in synergy, and I still love that quality, in men or women, and always will. 

Most long-term relationships are about loyalty more than passion. I don't say these things to condemn passion, which is one of God's great gifts to humankind, in its place. What I don't like is the idea that passion should be allowed to control human lives. We are meant to be the masters of all our passions. When passion helps couples bond, or produce the babies they want, it's a very good thing. When it beckons us towards doomed relationships with unsuitable people, it should be ground under our feet. Passion literally means suffering and, for religious people, that can mean a few years of suffering through unwanted celibacy, on account of our passion for following God's directions, until we come to the proper time and place to enjoy the lesser passion for sex. 

Not that sexual passion can't be literally mind-blowing--brain scans show that it can shut down activity in the rational, logical, verbal parts of some women's brains--but it is still a lesser passion, because it depends on that ever-changing balance of hormones rather than on reason. It's great while it lasts but it doesn't last long. The creative passion we feel for the work we're meant to do lasts all through life. The spiritual passion we feel for God, we are told, lasts through eternity.  

In today's world that spiritual passion is probably the primary reason why men choose to be eunuchs. Chemical pollution is probably the primary reason why men become not only eunuchs but "transgender," and many of them are obviously miserable about that. Those men are victims who inspire pity. But a man who has chosen to be sterile to protect his wife's health or avoid raising children in poverty has done something righteous, of which he can properly feel proud. The man who told me he was a eunuch was obviously not ashamed. Why would he be? His sterility was a star in his heavenly crown. He had given his first wife two beautiful children before deciding that was enough. He knew he was still attractive, still free to choose to remarry or not, and still able to satisfy anyone he did marry.

So when I see certain Republican writers calling left-wingers "eunuchs," I know their purpose is to use a metaphor for "unable to think of better ideas than these due to a kind of sterility of mind," which may be accurate, but I'm not favorably impressed. I think those Rs may actually be as clueless as the Ds are continually calling them.

Verbs with Double Past Participles

A funny thing is happening to some verbs in English. Verbs like get, forget, beget, and like prove and like burn and like wake, are acquiring two past participle forms instead of the usual one. That is to say, individual native speakers of English are using both of two forms, not the one that’s typical of a generation or a geographical area, but each one of the two—with a slight difference in meaning.

Prior to about 1970, English teachers who noticed things like this were expected to attach themselves to an opinion that one pattern of usage was “right” and the other was “wrong,” based on prejudice and snobbery. (Often the prejudice and snobbery were blatant. Sometimes they were based on “insider” understandings that the choice, usage, or pronunciation of a word had become a shibboleth—a subtle identifier of which side the speaker was on; for example, people who say “Seventh-Day Ad-VEN-tists” usually don’t belong to that church, and people who say “Appa-LAY-chia” usually don’t live there. Church members in good standing are AD-ventists and residents of the mining town live in Appa-LATCH-ia.) Since the mid-twentieth century there’s been a growing feeling that English teachers’ comments should be “more descriptive than prescriptive.” Today’s audience are now presumably asking, “So who’s using these verbs in this way, where, when, and why?”

I don’t have a full-sized linguistic study for you. Sorry. I’ve seen some studies of “get” and “prove” usage, but they tended to be on the prescriptive side. However, I invite readers to take a quick informal poll. If you choose to share where you live, where you grew up, where you went to college/university, and in which decade you were born, that will help linguists who may want to do full-sized studies. If you live in a small town and want to be private, feel free to identify your home county rather than town. For each numbered sentence below, pick the verb form that feels right to you.

What about people learning English as a foreign language? What should they do? Probably they should learn the forms their teachers and classmates use, since those will at least be the choices of reasonably educated native speakers in the part of the English-speaking world where they are. 

1. I’ve (got, gotten) to go to the bank this afternoon.

2. He had (got, gotten) half of the baby tomato plants in place when the storm hit.

3. So far I’ve (got, gotten) 19 of the 25 plants I ordered from the nursery.

4. The father said, “I have (got, gotten) a son.”

5. The mother said, “I have (got, gotten) a son, two years old.”

6. I’ve (got, gotten) a headache.

7. Have you (got, gotten) a pain?

8. Have you (got, gotten) a hammer?

9. He’s (got, gotten) a pair of boots like the ones we saw at the mall.

10. She’s (got, gotten) a tough job ahead of her.

11. A jar stood (forgot, forgotten) on the counter.

12. She’d (forgot, forgotten) the name of her fifth grade teacher.

13. The antique store suggests vague memories of times long (forgot, forgotten).

14. This day will never be (forgot, forgotten).

15. Studies have (proved, proven) that glyphosate can promote the formation and growth of cancer.

16. Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot be (proved, proven) by scientific methods.

17. He has a (proved, proven) record of success in debugging computers.

18. She had (proved, proven) herself as a web site builder.

19. The Olympic team are all (proved, proven) athletes.

20. We’ve (burned, burnt) all the hedge trimmings.

21. The other organization had (burned, burnt) the fundraisers’ turf.

22. When the company’s “updates” destroyed half of my smartphone’s apps, did I ever feel (burned, burnt)!

23. I’m not buying another smartphone: once (burned, burnt) twice shy.

24. The wildfire had (burned, burnt) the entire city block.

25. Often he’d (awakened, waked, woke, woken) up at night when the train passed.

26. She was (awakened, waked, woke, woken) by the hotel’s automatic wake-up call service.

27. His feminist consciousness was (awakened, waked, woke, woken) when his wife moved out.

28. Some editors want to show that they’re (awakened, waked, woke, woken) to the complaints of these groups.

29. The students’ sense of poetry had been (awakened, waked, woke, woken) as they studied Millay and Benet.

30. Did I ever ask to be (awakened, waked, woke, woken)?

 

What Is Tacky? Photo Essay

Warning: This post contains many "fair use" pictures and may overburden some devices.

This post is a long (and visual) answer to the question Pbird raised at https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2022/10/does-anybody-really-know-what-time-it.html: What does "tacky" mean to Americans?

It has two meanings. Literally, it describes things that are in the process of drying or setting, but are still sticky and unstable, like paint or glue. This is an objective meaning with proper translations, pegajoso in Spanish, collant in French, Google says klebrig in German, etc.

Figuratively, it's a subjective word describing a value judgment. Things that are "tacky" in this sense are second-rate, downscale, or unflattering. Voluntary acts that are "tacky" might be merely tasteless, or might be worse: nasty, mean, vulgar. Describing a person as tacky is a fairly harsh judgment. Anybody might acquire tacky belongings, and even wear them with pride if they were gifts from a loved one, but being a tacky person implies more selfishness and refusal to consider others. There's a song at the blog post linked that describes a person whose tacky clothes and car match his tacky character. He has forty-three bumper stickers, wears orange pants, and also takes off his shirt while waiting in line at the bank. How often this happens in real life, I don't want to know. 

One reader at the blog post linked said that in Mexican Spanish, which borrows English words freely, the translation for "tacky" is tacky. For other dialects of Spanish Google suggests vulgar and cursi, neither of which completely includes all the possible meanings of "tacky." French has lots of words that can express one figurative sense of "tacky" or another; Google recommends moche. For German Google recommends billig, with the warning that billig really means something closer to "cheap" and can describe a good bargain as well as a bad one.

One should not assume that a person whose clothes, car, or furniture are tacky is necessarily a tacky person, because everyone makes fashion mistakes now and then. It's almost as if little eddies of tackiness were swirling around in the atmosphere, waiting to settle on someone who usually either has good taste, or consults friends who do.

Consider our First Ladies. Though the First Lady's qualifications to set the standards of taste and style aren't supposed to be taken into consideration in evaluating the President's qualifications to serve as Chief Executive, the men selected as presidential material have almost always been married to women who were so qualified. 

It's even perceived as a barrier to the election of a woman President: we don't have a clear idea of exactly what the First Gentleman would do; he could hardly be a model of style and etiquette for women. As a vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro really had a chance at the feminist vote in 1984, until her husband publicly confessed to white-collar crimes that were perceived as tacky. Hillary Rodham Clinton, likewise...despite the qualifications she had in abundance, and before she pled brain damage a second time and thus basically told me she's ready to retire, her biggest problem is a husband who is not a gentleman. Bill Clinton is so tacky as to border on being trashy. It's not the totally hollow "friendly" manner, or even the philandering, tacky as those things are; it's the way he always took credit for the few successes he achieved with other people's help, and always blamed the other person for the majority of bad ideas he developed with other people's help. Considering the Obama Administration, it would take a lot of nerve (and border on being tacky) for Michelle Obama to run, but one asset she would have is that, whatever mistakes he made as a Chief Executive, Barack Obama did manage to act like a gentleman. 

But if our First Ladies were not naturally good examples of etiquette and fashion, they all had abundant help to present themselves as such. 

Nevertheless. This visual documentation of their fashion mistakes begins in the 1940s because that was when reliable photographs became available. 

Was that really a pet rat perched on Eleanor Roosevelt's shoulder? We all knew she was from New York, but....

It was actually fashionable in the 1940s to drape not only the coats, but the actual stuffed bodies, of small furry animals around one's neck. The animals' eyes were usually replaced by beads and the carcasses were treated in ways that made them smell more of chemicals, some now banned as carcinogens, rather than carrion. 

For a close-up view of what may have been Mrs. Roosevelt's worst documented fashion mistake, plus a selection of her best quotes, visit https://www.scarymommy.com/eleanor-roosevelt-quotes .Most of these pictures come from photo archives, but the one above comes from a page worth reading.

Bess Truman was usually known for dressing well, and when this photo was taken she'd lived long enough to know that that neckline was too low. Sometimes there just isn't time to correct a mismatch between underwear and dress fit...

Mamie Eisenhower modelled the "New Look" version of long full skirts, fitted waists, hats, gloves, and trimmings. Most of the time she did it beautifully. What went wrong here was only partly the 1950s idea of seeking "balance" by wearing warm-toned colors if you had a cool-toned complexion. The hairstyle was pretty bad, too. It takes `a long time to grow enough hair to make that Jane Eyre hairdo work.

Jackie Kennedy could get away with almost anything. Some say the tackiest thing she was ever seen with was her second husband. Nevertheless, some fashions did nothing good for anybody.

At least it wasn't a miniskirt, but Time disclosed no valid reason why Lady Bird Johnson appeared to be wearing a tent. The stiff, curtain-like material that matched the curtains so well may be an explanation. Did she want to hide? From a husband who picked up dogs by their ears?

White was not Pat Nixon's color, and nobody believed it meant what an all-white dress was said to mean. She had such glamorous children.

Even as her hair faded, Betty Ford was still an Autumn who could make yellowish tan look good. And she was thin enough to get away with horizontal stripes. However, nothing could make the sagging of a no-waist dress look good. (And what about being seen with Tony Orlando? No comment!)

While she was First Lady, Rosalynn Carter was generally well advised, at least about clothes. (About causes and people...well, she had said nice things about Jim Jones.) Afterward, she showed the world that although it's possible for a fading redhead to look good in red, it's not possible for a fading redhead to look good in black.

Nancy Reagan generally dressed nicely, so why...? One possible reason: bad advice. To my eyes, everything about this outfit--the shiny yellow leopard print, the tight fit, the skimpy skirt, the button right over the bustline, the hooker heels--looks tacky as tacky can be. Nevertheless, the source from which I ganked this photo featured this dress on a list of Mrs. Reagan's best looks. 

If you ask Google, "Barbara Bush's fashion mistakes" were all made by the young one. The First Lady always looked like the perfect archetypal grandmother. As this unfortunate jacket shows, part of the archetypal grandmother's look can include sagging.

Most of Hillary Rodham Clinton's pantsuits were at least flattering to her bottom-heavy figure. Most, not all.

Laura Bush's image was so nicely nice that I find myself wondering whether she wore this outfit to avoid looking better than someone else. Lessons learned: A horizontal line right across the wide part of the hips, and another one right across the knees, will make anyone look short and fat (Mrs. Bush was neither); and with a skirt as skimpy as that one, you need flat heels.

A whole web site was dedicated to chronicling Michelle Obama's fashion mistakes. Actually, despite being much bigger and taller than the average woman, most of the time she looked pretty good. Then there were days like this one.

Graffiti is tacky. A graffiti-print raincoat is on the tacky side. A raincoat with a printed message that says "I don't care & neither do U" worn at the beach or for a stroll in the park, might be merely whimsical, but on the way to publicize weather disaster relief, this raincoat looked profoundly tacky. Even on Melania Trump.

No use hiding behind the big glasses, Jill Biden. You're old enough to know that a ruched, clingy bodice with an off-the-shoulder neckline looks tacky on any body...even if the way it looked on yours is the sort of wardrobe malfunction to which most of us older women can relate all too well. 

Finding these published images is easy. Type each First Lady's name in sequence, plus "fashion images," into a search engine, and up they pop. Each of these fashion mistakes leaped out from a page of classic, charming outfits. Each of these women was surrounded by people competing to supply her with perfectly fitted clothes in which she looked good; most of the time each of them did look good. And even so...tackiness happens.

As ordinary women grow older, it happens much more often. Recently I had one of those life-passage milestone moments of realizing how blessed I've been. Women who don't work in fashion, theatre, or television normally reach a point at which we don't need to spend hours looking at ourselves in the mirror every morning. We've seen our faces before; we know the people with whom we work have learned to live with them too. We looked carefully at what clothes did for us before we bought them, and now it takes us less than five minutes to grab something weather-appropriate out of the closet, throw it on, and rush out of the house. If able to leap right into an air-conditioned car we may arrive at work without sweat having soaked through the clothes yet. 

And then one day we get to work...and it's not just that the undergarment is giving out. It's that the body is giving out. We wash our hands, check the mirror just to make sure nothing went wrong on the way to work, and oh noooes, the shirt that always used to look decent on us now looks like Mrs. Biden's fashion disaster. Even clenching those middle-back muscles up until they cramp won't fix it any more. Even if everything about us, from our given name ("Jill" is derived from a Latin word meaning "baby fluff, a child/animal/chick so young it's not even grown adult-type hair or feathers yet"), through golden-blonde hair and the bone structure that goes with the longevity gene, through always being seen with someone ten years older, has been making us think of ourselves as young...one day, y'know, we're not. 

I'm proud of my white hair, as much of it as I can grow in between glyphosate episodes, but that saggy look is sooo tacky. 

Styles that wouldn't generate a blip on observers' tacky-radar screens when ordinary people wear them, one of Pbird's readers explained, look extra tacky on people who publicly voice tacky, hypocritically self-serving ideas. Tackiness oozes out of certain celebrities, soaking through their clothes. Beard stubble on Richard Nixon is tackier than beard stubble on the pizza guy. Sagging on Jill Biden is worse than sagging on me. 

That's nice, but then there's another theory of tackiness that holds that tackiness on oneself is worse than tackiness on other people. It's not so bad if Al Yankovic prints his resume in Comic Sans, because he's supposed to be a comic, but if the vagaries of the Internet cause my resume to open in Calibri, that's terrible, because I'm not supposed to make mistakes. It might be normal for a body as old as Jill Biden's to lose its shape, but if mine does, that's a disaster, because I'm young enough to be her...illegitimate sister (she was born the summer before my parents' wedding). Because Joe Biden looks so much older at eighty, people tend to forget that his wife is seventy; people of her own generation would like to forget that, if we're not seventy yet, we soon will be.

If you spend enough time trying to compare the relative awfulness of the effects of an eddy of tackiness on you, and the effects of the same eddy on someone else, you realize that spending any serious amount of time trying to compare lapses of personal style is a tacky, second-rate way to use the gift of life.

Tackiness is forgivable, really, except in the area of character. A person who was always considerate of others would be rare and special enough that person could probably start a fad for wearing pink sequined Crocs. (With pink and green plaid trousers and purple and orange striped socks, even.)

Traditionally older people sat around channelling our envy of younger people's health and energy into caustic comments on the tackiness of everything they did. That behavior pattern just might be even tackier than a sagging body is. Especially for a generation that's dominated the commercial media the way mine did. We don't think of our opinions on topics like eyebrow piercing, shaven heads, or miniskirts as judgmental about the younger generation at all, because we remember very well that those were our ways of looking tacky. Apart from the publishers, employers, scholarship committees, etc., who want "diversity" so desperately they'll consider White candidates only if those candidates claim to belong to "sexual minorities," another factor in the increase of reported gender confusion could be that that's about the only fad that's not a rerun of ours. (We didn't have cell phones but we had the urge to call friends every five minutes.) So it's not the opinion that bare navels look tacky that is tacky; that's a settled habit by now. It's the sitting on the sidelines, gossipping about other people, while failing to have lives of our own, that is irredeemably tacky. 

Which means this meditation on tackiness has gone on long enough, and should last me for several weeks.