Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Language Matters

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Homophobia and Carniphobia

    One 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…

  • Is Trump a Threat to Democracy?

    He most certainly is on the Orwellian subversive's understanding of 'democracy.' For what they mean by it  is elite-globalist oligarchy.

  • ‘Broken’ and Other Examples of First-Grade English

    Stack topper.

  • 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…

  • The Left’s Verbal Theft

    A Substack warning to foolish conservatives.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Novus Ordo?

    Giving a  Latin name to the destruction of the ancient Latin rite smacks of mockery.

  • ‘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…

  • Trads on Offense

    I especially liked the section on the Boomer nuns of Benedictine College who were not happy with the Butker speech and are described as crotchety farbissinas. A farbissina, I take it, is  a person who is farbissiner, a Yiddish word that means sullen, mean, embittered, of a sour disposition.

  • 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,…

  • Bad and Good Self-Censorship

    'Censorship' and 'self-censorship' are not dirty words.  There are good and bad forms of each. Bad self-censorship The spreading virus of wokeness has transformed not only publishing but the entire information economy. At every level of it from school lectures to movies to Substack blogs, participants are vulnerable to having their careers ruined by a…