Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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Barbarism to neologism to common parlance
[Read the article: Howard Kurtz and the royal Kagans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn and Mona are right about incentivize, but I'm old enough to wish they weren't.
Some of my own geezer pet peeves:
1) Incentivize (of course)
2) Step foot in (instead of set foot in)
3) Tow the line (Instead of toe the line, which actually has an etymology, although no one in the current generation seems to be aware of it.)
4) Probab-LY as a one word reply (with the accent on the last syllable)
5) Going forward (Instead of in the future. It galls me that businessmen are so horrified of not being in control of events that they can't concede that the future will arrive whether they rush to meet it or not, yet they couldn't use the active voice in a sentence dealing with their own reponsibilities if their lives depended on it.)
6) And of course, the old standby, irregardless.
There are others, of course -- lots and lots of others. It's a good thing I'm not a prescriptive grammarian, right?
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Ah, yes....
[Read the article: Howard Kurtz and the royal Kagans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And then there's how fun instead of what fun, which admittedly sounds archaic, even to me, but the fact remains that fun is a noun, not an adjective, a fun thing to the contrary notwithstanding.
Okay, I'm done. Apologies for the OT diatribe.
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Interesting, jojo
[Read the article: Howard Kurtz and the royal Kagans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, barbarisms are one thing, but newspeak, the language of authoritarian euphemism, is quite another. You're right about what empower actually means. Glenn does what it's supposed to mean, Howard Kurtz brandishes it as a justification for doing the opposite. Once we accept language like extraordinary rendition, surge, or compassionate conservative, we're already slaves.
Which, I suppose, makes Glenn the moral descendant of Spartacus. I never thought of him that way, but I confess that it tickles me to think of Glenn in one of those Hollywood toga-epic-style studded leather G-strings -- pace Kirk Douglas -- brandishing a gladius hispaniensis, and chasing the snarling right-wing doughboys off the plain of Mars.
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Arne's shooting party
[Read the article: Howard Kurtz and the royal Kagans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ah, yes...one of my all-time favorites. Like The Dead, regardless of how firmly anchored it is in its own time, it has compelling echoes in our own. If you remember, as I do, your grandfather playing a Bach passacaglia and fugue on a cheesy Presbyterian pipe organ in a moth-eaten late 19th century church in some nameless town in Kentucky, with the windows shut so the neighboring parishioners couldn't hear the devil at work, or remember the drone of propellers filling the skies at Memorial Day parades, you could work yourself up to a far greater number of diatribes than there would ever be time left to commit to paper.
This is a good thing, I think. The young'uns don't need any more distractions than they're already forced to confront.
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Proactive this
[Read the article: Howard Kurtz and the royal Kagans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem with boiling complex concepts down to a single word is that the processes which the word encapsuulates are usually obsured. Read any academic paper, or government document, if you don't believe this.
Meetings go more quickly, but no one at them understands what is actually taking place. Propaganda becomes easier, yet finding out who is responsible for it becomes more difficult. This is how liberal became a curseword, and, as was pointed out earlier, empower came to mean its opposite.
We must have a more proactive approach to addressing the problems of the Middle East probably made the neocon who said it sound both wise and forceful. It also left the people who were actually going to have to be more proactive with no fucking clue what they were being asked to do.
You can see where that got them, or you could, if their masters weren't so busy throwing more cleverly deceitful little conceptual nuggets at you. Surge, anyone?
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The world is awash
[Read the article: Dick Cheney's warped vision of the world]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]in final solutions these days. War is only the most horrific of them. Contempt for civil liberties, demonization of the other, the rhetorical eradication of abstractions such as terrorism, liberalism, atheism, etc. have the attention of everyone.
Perhaps we've out-evolved ourselves. As our ever more refined principles of social and economic organization have led us deeper and deeper into what seems to the least well-equipped of our citizens to be pure, unintelligible chaos, everyone girds his loins....
Excuse me for saying so, but there are no permanent solutions to anything. Dick Cheney represents a failure of nerve; a cowardice so profound that no one even recognizes it as such.
If you're frightened of the future, nuking it may seem awfully seductive. If you're not, the madness of King George is exactly that, madness. We still have to birth babies, till the fields, gossip about our neighbors, bring the crops in and generally do what people, regardless of the state of their frontal lobes, have always done.
The culture of fear is the culture of death. To fall in love with it is to foreclose your own future and that of countless others, perhaps that of the human species itself. If only we could see that the bang and the whimper, the fire and the ice are one.
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Salon indeed
[Read the article: Lying to Congress has become a Republican principle, literally]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paul R, that was about the best thumbnail portrait of Nixon, and assessment of his uniqueness in American political history, that I've ever read -- and that includes book-length material.
Some days it's just pure pleasure to come here, especially after doing something far less engaging. I imagine that folks headed to Madame Roland's or Gertrude Stein's felt the same exhilaration. It doesn't surprise me at all that the MSM has started to sit up and take notice.