It is better to be clear than to write 'Clearly, ____________.'
Similarly with 'surely,' 'plainly,' 'obviously,' 'undoubtedly,' and others.
What should we call such words? Asseveratives? Assuratives?
I know a guy who, if you preface a remark with 'surely,' you receive in response, "Don't call me 'Shirley.'"
1: an English Roman Catholic of the time from about 1570 to 1791 who refused to attend services of the Church of England and thereby committed a statutory offense.
2: one who refuses to accept or obey established authority.
So, like atheists in a theocracy, or recusants in Elizabethan England, we go underground. We are a secret society — brave rebels against the epidemiocracy.
Well, every publication has to have some quality or other. You must mean high quality. Friendly suggestion: say what you mean. (And mean what you say.)
This is a re-post from 21 September 2011. I dust it off in dedication to my friend Dr. Vito Caiati, historian and old-school scholar who is excessively worried about typographical errors in his missives to me.
Don't get me wrong: love and respect for our alma mater, the English language, our dear mother, mistress and muse, demands that we try to avoid errors typographical and otherwise. But let's not obsess over them.
Transmission of sense is the name of the game, and if that has occurred, then communication has taken place.
…………………………..
An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:
I trust that you ahve emelreis of going pacles with your presnts in cars before the days when the shapr devide came and deliniated clearly the music that our presnts like and the stuff that was aethetically unreachabable to many of thier generation. That was a haunting melody, The Waywared Wind, and it spoke of an experiencethat was really more coon to a ahlf generation away from the WWII generation. It was actually a toad bod for its time. Same year bourght us Fale Storms come Donw From YOur Ivorty Towe, the great pretender, and other romantic and innocent songs. But it also brought Hound Dog, which shocked the blazes out of my parents and all of their peers. It was even sexual. It was just animal. And, no it was not specificailly Negrol; it was worse it was p;oor white trash with side burns on a motocycle. It woldn't matterif the B Side of every platter ahd been one of those great gospel tunes those guys did; that stuff was not urban, mainline, Protestant stuff, but anekly backwoods stuff where there are stills and 13-year-olf brides, that the Northern boys had heard about in the WWII barracks and hoped that they would never have hear about again as they went back to either their Main Line P:rotestant or Catholic urban llive, whether they belonged to a country het or not or woudl have to wait a while, say until their GI Bill college educations started enabling them to play golf. But that was still a good summer of rthe last of the sweet songs that memebers of several gneratons could enjoy together
Talk about spontaneous prose! No grammatical or spelling hang-ups here. My friend is an old Kerouac aficionado too, and this is one of the more entertaining of his missives. Is it the approach of October that frees and inspires his pen? My friend's a strange bird, and the above just came straight out of his febrile pate; he didn't compose it that way to prove that typographical errors are compatible with transmission of sense.
A curious watershed era it was in which the sweet and tender was found cheek-by-jowl with the explicitly referenced raw hydraulics of sexual intercourse. Take Little Richard, perhaps the chief exponent, worse than old Swivel Hips, of the devil's music. "Good Golly Miss Molly," he screamed, "she sure likes to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin' can't you hear yo mama call." That was actually played on the radio in the '50s. To ball is to have sex, and 'rock and roll' means the same thing. And so there were Southern rednecks who wanted the stuff banned claiming that R & R music was "was bringing the white man down to the level of the nigger."
I maintain that the best R & R manages to marry the Dionysian thrust with the tender embrace, the animalic with the sweetly romantic. The prime example? Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman. One thing I love about Orbison is that instead of saying 'Fuck!,' like some crude rap punk, he says, 'Mercy!' Another little indicator of how right my friend is in his analysis above.
I've seen the bearer of the name several times on Tucker Carlson's show, and I am impressed. He talks sense and his head is screwed on Right. His appearance is odd with his pompadour and his thick and possibly cosmetically enhanced eyebrows. But we conservatives 'celebrate diversity' too. And not just the politically correct variety.
Could 'Rantz' be his real name? Is this a case of nomen est omen?
Nominative determinism anyone?
Journalists, for example.
'Litmus test.' 'Laundry list.' 'Sticker shock.' And their ilk.
You know what my rant will be.
I'll grant you that it is if you grant me that leftism is a deadly virus and that leftists, 'liberals,' 'progressives,' and members of the Democrat Party in the USA knowingly and willingly carry and transmit it.
Do we have a deal? But if 'Wuhan Virus' is racist, then then so are the following:
If the bulleted entries are not racist expressions, then neither is 'Wuhan Virus.'
Class dismissed. Above list found here.
"Warren gets particularly exorcised in the more recent book when talking about President Donald Trump."
One could only hope for the exorcism of the hysterical intersectional demons in the fake Indian.
It is a good post-mortem, though, of a very capable woman whose lust for power drove her to suicide by political correctness.
One gets the sense that Bernie Sanders doesn’t know any better. He’s not thoughtful enough to understand how much he overstates government’s ability, disciplined enough to lay out the costs of his grand proposals, or self-reflective enough to catch the irony of his own capitalistic practices. But based on her first book, it is patently clear that ElizabethWarren does understand. And that’s probably more troubling. Ignorance with self-righteousness is one thing. Knowing better and then arguing otherwise is a different sort of evil.
So what happened to Warren? My best guess—and, I think, the most gracious interpretation of her hypocritical flips—is that “the fight” became everything. And so principles, wisdom, and insight became the casualties. The ends slowly began to justify the means. Maybe losing the “bankruptcy war” to Hillary and the lobbyists embittered her. Or maybe “subsidizing the wrong people”—through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and banks that were “too big to fail”—sent her over the edge. In any case, the cause made it acceptable to strive for power.
Clarity will be served if we distinguish at least the following senses of 'absurd.' The word is from the Latin surdus, meaning deaf, silent, or stupid. But etymology can take one only so far and is no substitute for close analysis. And beware the Dictionary Fallacy.
1) Logico-mathematical. The absurd is the logically contradictory or self-contradictory or that which entails a logical contradiction. Absurdity in this sense attaches to propositions or sets of propositions. A reductio ad absurdum proof, for example, is a reduction to a contradiction. It is a way of indirectly proving a proposition. One assumes its negation and then derives a logical contradiction thereby proving the proposition.
2) Semantic. The absurd as the linguistically meaningless. Meaningful words can be strung together in meaningless ways, or meaningless words can be strung together. Example of the first: "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination." (Russell) Example of the second: "The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." (Lewis Carroll). There is nothing syntactically or logically wrong with these sentences.
3) Existential. The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible. The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Sartre's and Roquentin's nausea. The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.
4) Ordinary. The absurd as the manifestly false. To be precise, 'absurd' as it is mostly used in standard English by non-philosophers refers to that which is both factually false and manifestly false. "Pelosi's assertion that there is no border crisis is absurd!" In other words, Pelosi's assertion is factually false, and plainly so. What is manifestly false as a matter of fact needn't be logically or semantically objectionable.
Item for further rumination: In Christianity construed along Kierkegardian lines, the apparent absurdity of human existence is redeemed by the Higher Absurdity of the God-Man on the cross.
Cultural note: the hipster depicted below is a parody of the beatniks of the late 'fifties and early 'sixties. It is what Joe Average imagined an 'existentialist' must look like: a goateed cat with a beret, dressed in black, smoking a cigarette, preferably a Gitane or an unfiltered Gaulois.
Autobiographical addendum: Things didn't work out with an early girlfriend. She complained that I was an 'existentialist' who was "down all the time." I did read a lot of Camus and Sartre in those days, but my favorite existentialists were the Dane, Kierkegaard, and the Russian, Nicholas Berdyaev. Lev Shestov came later. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger are only loosely classifiable as existentialists.
More linguistic chicanery from the Left. Obviously, a fetus that was born is no longer a fetus. To refer to a fetus that was born as a fetus aids and abets the next murderous move: the sanctioning of infanticide as just another form of abortion, post-natal abortion. The 'reasoning' might go like this: The killing of human fetuses is morally acceptable; a human neonate is a human fetus; ergo, the killing of human neonates is morally acceptable.
But I must also lodge a protest against certain conservative extremists who think 'fetus' a dirty word. They think that the use of this perfectly good word somehow denigrates pre-natal humans or strips them of their right to life. It does no such thing.
Language matters! It is the foolish conservative who allows the leftist to hijack the terms of the debate.
'Facially' is seeing a lot of use recently. I take it to be an English equivalent of prima facie. Some say that we should avoid Latinisms. I say instead: use them sparingly.
To use 'educate' in place of 'inform' shows a lack of education.
Internet abbreviation: over-the-top.
Abbreviations divide into acronyms, initialisms, and truncations. Or so say I.
See Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations and Acronyms, Initialisms and Truncations: Another Look
Since [Kamala] Harris is now on her way to the political oubliette, however, Schweizer’s discussion of her depredations is of less exigent interest than his discussion of other figures, especially Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, all, remarkably enough, leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for president.
I think I've been inside an oubliette, thought I didn't know what it was called at the time. It was quite unsettling. My brother, his son, and I were driving in southern Spain when we saw a ruined castle at the top of a hill. There was no sign or anything, but that's not unusual in Spain, so we hiked to the top of the hill and explored the ruins.The only sign of modern habitation was a fairly recent steel ladder going down into a sort of pit, about twenty feet deep and cylindrical with a diameter of about thirty feet, mostly covered, and with a round opening somewhat larger than a manhole. We couldn't figure out what the pit was, so my nephew climbed down the ladder to look around, then my brother followed.I asked one of them to come back up because it didn't seem safe for all of us to be down there (in case the ladder broke or something). My nephew came back up and I climbed down to look around. It was only moderately creepy until my nephew came back down and all three of us were down there together. No way could we have made a cell phone call from that location, and I had a sudden image of being stuck down in that hole with no way out.For just a moment, I imagine I felt what it would be like to be dropped into such a horrifying prison. It was one of those shocking moments when you really grasp viscerally how evil man can be to man.
Regards,David Gudeman
Said of a woman. Having a full, shapely figure. Voluptuous. Plump and vigorous. Rubenesque. A Yiddish word. Supposedly from the German saftig, juicy. More here. Trigger Warning! Snowflakes of the distaff persuasion will be offended.
Time was when 'female persuasion' and the like were used figuratively as a kind of joke; after all, one cannot be persuaded to be female or male. Or recruited. One does not join the female club. Nor can one be assigned one's sex at birth. Being female is something biological, not political or social like a party affiliation. But the times they have a'changed. Nowadays everything is a social construction and a matter of arbitrary identification. So, being female is like being a Democrat!
Nowadays there is no sex, only gender. How then can anything be sexist? And if, in reality, there are no races — race being a mere social construct — how can there be racism? Inquiring minds want to know.
