Category: Language Matters
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On Climate ‘Theology’
and the secularization of religious terminology. Top o' the Stack
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The Difference between Posing and Begging a Question
I found the nifty graphic below over at Flood's place. It is a pithy and pictorial presentation of a point I have been hammering away at online for the last twenty years. Here is a Substack hammer-job. Some say we should give up the fight and let the forces of linguistic decadence obliterate the distinction…
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Lee’s Lunar Lunacy
Another example of a dumb-as-dirt Dem. No Sheila dear, the Moon is not a planet, but a natural satellite of the Earth, the only one in fact. Its singularity is why, in correct orthography, we write 'the Moon' and not 'the moon.' Jupiter has a number of moons, whereas the Earth has exactly one. Our…
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‘Progressive’ and ‘Conservative’
In their contemporary usages these terms are mainly misnomers. If progress is change for the good, there is little progressive about contemporary 'progressives.' They are more accurately referred to as regressives. Or do you think that allowing biological males to compete in women's sporting events is a change for the good? It is obviously not,…
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False Abstraction
Surely one of the idiocies of the age is the oft-repeated, "Diversity is our strength." Anyone who repeats this bit of thoughtless group-speak wears his folly like a scarlet letter. I'll leave it to the reader to work out why the falsehood is false and how it illustrates the fallacy of false abstraction. Why do…
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Is Trump a Racist?
This morning at The New Yorker: At this point, we know everything there is to know about Donald Trump. His diehard admirers—not all seventy-four million people who voted for him in the 2020 election but his immovable base, maybe thirty per cent of Republicans—admire him still, now more than ever. Is he a racist? Sure,…
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Two Termites: Bergoglio and Biden
I sometimes refer to the current pope as Bergoglio the Termite to underscore the destructive effect he is having on a once-great institution. Early this morning it occurred to me that I might write a post comparing the various termites undermining our institutions. Of course 'President' Joe Biden immediately came to mind. Just now, an…
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No Person is Illegal!
That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was? 'Woke' knuckleheads of the sort who recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal' regularly give something like the following lame argument: 1) No person is illegal. 2) If any person is justifiably labelled an…
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What Leftists Mean by ‘Democracy’
They mean woke globalist plutocracy, or something in the semantic vicinity thereof. This is why the enemies of the people see nothing contradictory in using 'lawfare' to keep Donald Trump off the ballot. We the people, however, understand 'democracy' to mean rule by the people. On this understanding of the word, it makes no logical…
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Suggestibility and the Language Lemming
The language lemming hears a word or phrase, thinks it 'cool,' and just has to use it whether or not it makes sense. 'Demo' below is being used as an abbreviation of 'demolish.' Now there is something dubious about the excessive use of abbreviations these days, but let that pass. The point I want to…
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Leftists Regularly Abuse Language
Example du jour: 'Gun Buy Back' Top o' the Stack.
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He Who Hesitates is Lost
Sometimes, however, it is better to look before you leap. Note this curious philo-lang point: 'he' above, though grammatically classifiable as a pronoun, does not function logically as a pronoun: it has no antecedent. It functions as a sex-neutral universal quantifier, or rather, it functions as an individual variable bound by a universal quantifier. Thus…
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Two-Tiered System of Justice?
I know what conservatives such as Sean Hannity mean when they employ the above expression, but the expression is inept. There cannot be two tiers of justice, one for the rulers and the other for the ruled, or one for Democrats and the other for Republicans, for the simple reason that justice in Anglo-American law…
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Open Borders?
I'm not totally opposed . . . Top o' the Stack. I strive for one Substack upload per day, no more. Why only one? Out of consideration for my readers. In these hyper-kinetic and hyper-connected times, an excess of 'incoming' can be annoying.
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Word of the Day: Perseveration
Leftists want to limit your vocabulary so as to limit your thought and make you easier to control. They want total control. David Horowitz says it well on his masthead, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out." (When a transgressive calls herself 'progressive,' you know there's a cesspool of mendacity up ahead.)…