Category: Language Matters

Who Put the ‘Man’ in ‘Manufacture’?

A congresswoman asked the question recently. It is a  question from a fem-Dem that exposes her ignorance.

There is no 'man' in 'manufacture' in the way there is a 'bomp' in the "bomp bah bomp bah bomp" and a 'ram' in the "rama lama  ding dong."  

'Manufacture' is built out of two Latin words, manus, manus (fourth declension, feminine) meaning hand, and the verb facere, meaning to make.  Etymologically, to manufacture something it to make it by hand, which is something women can do and often do better than men.

It is also interesting to note that manus, manus (the singular and the plural are the same except that the 'u' is  short in the singular, long in the plural) is one of the few Latin nouns that is both feminine and ends in -us. Herewith, another reason why there is no 'man' in 'manufacture.'

I could easily go on, and you hope I won't.

But it does raise a question: why are Dems so ignorant? The person in question is a "white, educated female" like so many Never- and Anti-Trumpers. Educated?  Here is another word currently badly misused. Graduating with a degree from a leftist seminary doesn't make one educated in  any serious sense of the term.  We live in a time of inflation and not just of the monetary variety.

Why do Dems and 'liberals' generally have such low standards?  It is almost as if they have never met a standard they did not want  to erase, erode, eviscerate, eradicate.  

I have a lot to say on this topic, but it is time to get to work on more serious writing.  There is more to life than sanitizing the spaces befouled by leftists.  'Sanitize' in the sense of cleaning and making sane. 

MASA! Make America sane again! 

Enforcement of Borders is neither ‘Draconian’ nor ‘Xenophobic’

I just heard a Democrat politician refer to the The Trump-Homan border crackdown as 'draconian' and 'xenophobic.' It is neither.

It is not cruel or severe. Although you may think that 'severe' is  etymologically related to 'sever,' it is not. To witness a penology that includes beheading and limb amputation you will have to take a trip to the Middle East. Iran and Saudi Arabia are go-to locales for draconian punishments. If there are any draconian punishments in the USA at the present time, they are inflicted by leftists. J-6 trespassers and abortion protesters are good examples of inflictees. 

As for 'xenophobic,' it it is the adjectival form of 'xenophobia.'  Now a phobia is an irrational fear.  But we who stand for the rule of law, have no irrational fear of foreigners or of things foreign.  If we did, why would we freely travel abroad and indeed freely live for extended periods in foreign lands? ('Freely' as opposed to 'by military order.') I myself have lived two and a half years abroad: six months in Salzburg, Austria, a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and a year in Ankara, Turkey, and I have intensively studied the native languages, cultures, religions, and histories of these countries.

What's more, I entered legally, did not overstay my visa, obeyed the local laws, ate their food, observed their customs, and dressed appropriately. I did not, for example, walk around Turkey Arizona-style in short pants. I showed respect for Muslim ways. I entered legally in the way my ancestors entered the USA, legally. And like them, I studied the native languages and did my best to assimilate.  

You can always count on a leftist to misuse language. Language abuse is as it were inscribed into their DNA.  Show me a leftist and I'll show you a linguistic hijacker.  The scumbaggery of our subversive political enemies has many sources, but the mother of them all, and the mother of all subversion,  straight from the pit of hell and the Father of Lies, is the subversion of language.

Bergoglio on Borders

What a hypocrite this guy is! You can 'migrate' anywhere, just not into the Vatican.

Don't you love that word 'migrate'? Its use manages to elide two important distinctions in one fell swoop: the distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and that between immigration and emigration.  A worthy addition to the lexicon of the Left.

The Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable

I have been using the title phrase for some time now to refer to Trump-supporting conservatives. But what makes us sane and reasonable? Victor Davis Hanson compiles a list in The Trump Counterrevolution is a Return to Sanity.

In an earlier post I referred to the take-back of our country as a National Sanitation Project, opining  that it might take a generation or two.  But what does sanity have to do with sanitation? The words are in fact connected etymologically, sharing as they do a common root in the Latin sanus,  meaning healthy or sane or sound, as in the Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano, "a sound mind in a sound body." We Trumpians are of sound mind, and some of us inhabit sound bodies.

We need to return the nation to health by draining swamps, enforcing laws, erecting barriers both territorial and  moral, and by fumigating institutions. Leftists want to tear down our institutions; we of sound mind want to fumigate them, removing therefrom the termites who presently infest them. 

You need to get with the program and do your bit. Don't be  slacker, a defeatist, an ingrate. But if you are on the wrong side of this struggle, understand that we consider you enemies.

A threat? No, a warning. Are you wise enough to heed a warning? I can't resist yet another reference to 'Biblical Bob':

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Homophobia and Carniphobia

Meat phobia triggerOne of the purposes of this weblog is to resist the debasement of language and thought, and to recruit a few others to this worthy cause. The term ‘homophobia’ is an excellent example of such debasement. Worse than a question-begging epithet, it is a question-burying epithet. That is, its aim is to obliterate or at least occlude the very question of the morality of homosexual practices. For the term implies that any opposition to such practices can only arise from an irrational fear, which is what a phobia is. 'Homophobia' implies that there can be no rationally-based opposition to homosexual practices.

My point is not that homosexual practices are immoral, or the opposite. My point is one that should strike any rational person as entirely uncontroversial, namely, that there is a genuine moral issue here, an issue that no one has the right to legislate out of existence by a merely verbal maneuver.

Suppose a bunch of meat-eaters band together to advance their cause. Instead of mustering whatever arguments they can for the moral permissibility of meat-eating, or rebutting the arguments against its moral permissibility, they hurl the epithet ‘carniphobe’ at their vegetarian opponents. Then they try to get laws passed banning ‘carniphobia.’ Clearly, their aim is to obliterate the very question of the morality of meat-eating and to suggest that there cannot be any rationally-based opposition to it. My point is not that meat-eating is immoral, or the opposite. My point is that there is a genuine moral issue here, just as there is a genuine moral issue regarding homosexual practices.

But how many who can be convinced that ‘carniphobia’ is a term to be resisted, are clear-headed and honest enough to see that the same goes for ‘homophobia’?  

Not to mention 'Islamophobia.'

Thanks to Catacomb Joe for supplying the above 'trigger image' as he call it.

Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers

I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of  the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable,  I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side.  And then I stumbled upon this  article:

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

I agree with that completely. I am rather less enthusiastic about the following:

So how to fight the language virus? According to Burroughs, language can also be used to liberate. He believed that if words were cut into pieces and rearranged, you could break free from what he called the Control. Burroughs used rearranged texts, “found sound,” and tape-splicing—techniques still used by artists today—to defy the establishment. Burroughs used the method of cutting up sentences and rearranging them in famous countercultural books like Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. 

My generation took a more direct approach to using language to dismantle Control: punk rock. Not for nothing was Burroughs known as “the Godfather of Punk.” The writer was lionized by people like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and bands like U2, Nirvana, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. In his book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin describes meeting Burroughs in San Francisco in the 1970s.

I will leave it for you to decide whether the way to combat the leftist language virus is via Old Bull Lee and punk rock.

Of the Beat triumvirate, "sweet gone Jack," alone moves me, supreme screw-up that he was, and surely no role model.  

One month to go, and then then it is October, Kerouac month in my literary liturgy. 

Kerouac mountain

Melum ut in pluribus

I am having trouble understanding the above Latin expression. I encountered it in Theodor Haecker, Kierkegaard the Cripple (tr. C. Van O. Bruyn, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950) in the passage:

Not only for Augustine, but also for that Christian whose teaching is most perfectly harmonious, Thomas Aquinas, the evil in the world was always in the majority. Melum ut in pluribus. This must never be forgotten, nor was it in Kierkegaard's judgment. (pp. 29-30)

My first question: why melum and not malum?

Second question: where in Thomas can we find melum ut in pluribus?

Wiktionary informs us:

Borrowed from Ancient Greek μῆλον (mêlon). Doublet of mālum, from dialectal Ancient Greek μᾶλον (mâlon). First attested in Petronius.

Now mēlum n (genitive mēlī) means apple, and malum, mali means evil, adversity, torment, misery, punishment, etc.  This answers my first question but gives rise to a third: Is there some connection here with the Adam and Eve story in the Garden? 

Fourth question: I don't recall ever seeing the word 'apple' in my English versions of Genesis. Is there in the original text of Genesis a word that translates as 'apple'?  

Fifth question:  I don't understand ut in this context.  Wiktionary says it can be used as an adverb or as a conjunction. But it doesn't seem to be used in either way in melum ut in pluribus.

Here are some other Latin phrases most of which my astute readers already know. 

Sub-distinguishing the lie?

What does "sub-distinguishing the lie" mean in the following passage from A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB, 2001, p. 73):

He [Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. 'Baron Corvo'] was wont to condemn the alleged laxity of the Roman Communion in the matter of truthfulness, and its sub-distinguishing the lie. He himself, brought up a strict Anglican, had all the Anglican horror of lying and equivocation of every description. He seemed to be quite serious about it, which surprised us, as he was universally regarded as about the biggest liar that we had ever met.

What I want to know is what it means to sub-distinguish a lie, and I need examples of this alleged laxity of the Roman Communion in the matter of truthfulness.

Paging Dave Lull.  And a tip of the hat to reader Hector C.  for recommending Symons' intriguing book.

……………..

Addendum (8/2/24): Dave Lull to the rescue.  Mr. Lull writes, "I wonder whether the author means the distinguishing of the lie from “mental reservation.”  That's it, I think; bang on the link and see if you don't agree. 

The philosophy of lying is especially germane these days inasmuch as the Biden administration is composed from top to bottom of  serial, brazen liars, bullshitters, and prevaricators of every conceivable stripe, not to mention Orwellian language subverters.  (The Orwellian 180, as I like to call it, goes well beyond lying as I will explain later, and is far more pernicious.) A first-rate example of language subversion was provided by Alejandro Mayorkas, head of — wait for it — Homeland Security (sic!), when he said that the border is secure "as we define secure."  Alright buddy, but then you are literally a horse's ass as I define horse's ass. What's your game, pal? Are you the head honcho of the Reconquista?

Now who is this Dave Lull fellow? Here is a tribute of mine from 2011, with links to tributes from others:

Who is Dave Lull?

If you are a blogger, then perhaps you too have been the recipient of his terse emails informing one of this or that blogworthy tidbit.  Who is this Dave Lull guy anyway?  Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence provides an answer:

As Pascal said of God (no blasphemy intended) Dave is the circle whose center is everywhere in the blogosphere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is a blogless unmoved mover. He is the lubricant that greases the machinery of half the online universe worth reading. He is copy editor, auxiliary conscience and friend. He is, in short, the OWL – Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian.

For other tributes to the ever-helpful Lull see here.  Live long, Dave, and grease on!

‘Arguable’: a Near-Contronym

'Arguable' is a word that a careful writer, one who strives for clarity of expression, should probably avoid.  I have always used it to mean: it may be plausibly argued that.  But then I noticed that some use it to mean: open to dispute, questionable.  These two meanings, though not polar opposites, are inconsistent.  

The two meanings of  the verb 'cleave,' however, are polar opposites: to stick together (intransitive) and to split apart (transitive).  Merriam-Webster:

Cleave is part of an exclusive lexical club whose members are known as contronyms: words that have two meanings that contradict one another. In the case of cleave the two meanings belong to two etymologically distinct words. One cleave means “to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly,” as in “a family that cleaves to tradition”; it comes from the Old English verb clifian, meaning “to adhere.” The cleave with meanings relating to splitting and dividing comes from a different Old English word, clēofan, meaning “to split.” So although one might assume the two were once cleaved to one another only to become cloven over time, such is not the case!

One is never done learning the mother tongue. Mine is English. I fancy myself a worthy son who honors his mother, a mother who is also a mistress whom I will never master. 

Just the other day, my assiduous editor, Tony Flood, pointed out that my use of 'enjoin' in a manuscript he is helping me prepare for publication, though a correct use, was ambiguous in the manner of 'cleave.'  Now I have a keen nose for ambiguity, both syntactic  and semantic, but this ambiguity had escaped me all these years. The verb 'enjoin' can mean  either "to direct or impose by authoritative order or with urgent admonition" or "forbid, prohibit." I had been laboring under the misapprehension that it carried only the first meaning.

All hail to the mistress we will never master, our alma mater, the matrix of our musings, the sacred enabler of our thoughts.

This is why, to keep with the maternal metaphor, the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

Word of the Day: Anfractuous

Merriam-Webster:
: full of windings and intricate turnings : TORTUOUS
 
The Unbreakable Anfractuous

Plots and paths can be anfractuous. They twist and turn but do not break. Never mind that the English word comes ultimately from the Latin verb frangere, meaning "to break." (Frangere is also the source of fracture, fraction, fragment, and frail.) But one of the steps between frangere and anfractuous is Latin anfractus, meaning "coil, bend." The prefix an- here means "around." At first, anfractuous was all about ears and the auditory canal's anfractuosity, that is, its being curved rather than straight. Anfractuous has been around for centuries, without a break, giving it plenty of time to wind its way into other applications; e.g., there can be an anfractuous thought process or an anfractuous shoreline.