This is of interest to me because my mother's third career, after she dropped medicine to raise a family, (her choice, or so she said) was as in college level academic text edtitorial production and publishing for Prentice Hall. This was some time ago but I heard more than I ever wanted to know about the field. Weird business. I think it bears further inquiry. I want to do a little research around here and in Texas. I will e-mail you.

Thank you

Don't you know white males are a persecuted class in the United States, Dr. Orbitboy. Just look at poor Don Imus. Where did you go to med school? Grenada?

...almost forgot to congratulate my white male readers for their astounding successes in the face of unprecedented oppression.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_04_15_atrios_archive.html#117674748460610844

I just discovered this book the other day. I intend to read it as soon as possible.

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2004/SO/BR/gill.htm

Are you insinuating that Democrat administrations don't have litmus tests? Of course they do.

If there was a litmus test for competence, a GOP hack couldn't pass that test with a bold font, oversized type crib sheet printed on his bib.

Jeff Smith,

You say Glenn is "idealizing the past". Perhaps we all have a tendency to do that, some more than others and I suppose it increases as we get older. OTOH, perhaps he is just not ignoring the changes that have taken place slowly over time and viewing the current state or our press with a critical and analytical eye in an effort to improve it. You suggest things have always been this way. Do you honestly think they can't get worse or that there is no point in trying to improve them?

If Glenn wants to "verbify" backlash, who's going to stop him?

You and some army of grammarians?

Excellent post, Glenn. You can "foreign policy" quite well.

I invite any and all to submit anything they think I lied about, and I will be happy to set them straight.

My favorite has to be: "Max Cleland got his arm blown off reaching for a beer".

Glad to help.

You people are having way too much pun in here.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n.

A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"

And lexicographers arose, a swarm!

Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,

And catalogued each garment in a book.

Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:

"Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise

And scan the list, and say without compassion:

"Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion."

Sigismund Smith

This is one of the main reasons the right objects to all national health care models proposed.

One down.

About the health care argument.

Hi, Introvertgirl. ;-)

I think you are referring to Sybil Edmonds, FBI.

Like most "Bush conservatives" remaining, Tiberius has no idea what "conservatism" meant, or any idea what it stands for today. He has never known anything other than a grossly distorted caricature of what "liberalism" is. He has contorted himself into an politcal pretzel and painted himself into an ideological corner and flails about wildly trying to stave off the inevitable result of a shameless pursuit of political power and advantage through use of the most inflammatory and divisive hyperbole and rhetoric available: Utter humiliation upon the realization that it was all for naught. In due course, the dictionary entry for "anti-climatic" will include a picture of the late modern GOP, that while touting it's superior virtues, spanned the latter half of the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st, and then unceremoniuosly tripped over it's own feet and fell on it's face, in public.

Now you may point and laugh.

*That's "anti-climactic".

What makes you think most of the population isn't already on some form of psychoactive medication?

If you look into it, you will find the numbers are quite high. Most people have one time bouts of situational depression, or other affective disorders, at one time in their lives. Some more frequent and multiple episodes, and some have chronic problems.

It is more prevalent than you realize and yours may be right around the corner.