Category: Language Matters
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Orwellian Bullshit
The POMO prez, Barack Obama, said last night (emphasis added): As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't. Obama is not…
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Contemporary Liberal Doublethink: Welfare = Self-Reliance
First of all, what is doublethink? We turn to George Orwell's 1984 and the following quotation therefrom reproduced in Wikipedia: The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of…
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Misused Expressions
You've heard of the Soup Nazi. I'm the Language Nazi. 1. Toe the line, not: tow the line. 2. Tough row to hoe, not: tough road to hoe. 3. Rack one's brains, not: wrack one's brains. 4. Wrack and ruin, not: rack and ruin. 5. Flout the law, not: flaunt the law. 6. Give advice,…
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Sweat, Perspire, Glow
It was a hot and humid September day, twenty years ago. I was sitting in a restaurant in Wuhan, China. There had been a power outage, so the air conditioning was off. The lady next to me was perspiring profusely. I somewhat crudely drew attention to the fact probably using some such expression as 'sweating bullets.'…
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Arguments Don’t Have Testicles!
Prepared lines come in handy in many of life's situations. They are useful for getting points across in a memorable way and they make for effective on-the-spot rebuttals. A mind well-stocked with prepared lines is a mind less likely to suffer l'esprit d'escalier. Suppose a feminist argues that men have no right to an opinion…
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Dueling Injunctions
"Dont' hide your light under a bushel." "Don't cast your pearls before swine." "Haste makes waste." "He who hesitates is lost." Others escape me at the moment. UPDATE (7 September). Jeff Hodges and Kid Nemesis come to my aid. Jeff contributes: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." "Out of sight, out of mind." Jeff adds, "According…
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Pronouns and Their Antecedents
Here is an interesting tidbit: $100M Calif. mansion has unusual sale requirement. HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. (AP) — As if the $100 million asking price wasn't deterrent enough, the owner of a mansion for sale in a ritzy San Francisco suburb says the buyer can move in only after his death. That is indeed a highly unusual…
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‘Redskin’ Offensive? What About ‘Guinea Pig’?
Apparently, the online magazine Slate will no longer be referring to the Washington Redskins under that name lest some Indians take offense. By the way, I take offense at 'native American.' I am a native Californian, which fact makes me a native American, and I'm not now and never have been an Indian. But what about…
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The Role of Ridicule in Politics
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Conservatives have a tendency to try to win every debate with logic and recitations of facts which, all too often, fail to get the job done because emotions and mockery are often just as effective as reason. The good news is that liberals almost never have logic on their…
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Only Asian Homunculi Would Fit
If 'chink in the armor' is about Asians, then the Asians in question would have to be rather tiny to hang out interstitially in, say, a coat of mail. Now blacks have shown themselves to be absurdly sensitive to the imagined slights embedded in such words and phrases as 'niggardly,' 'black hole,' and 'watermelon.' But Asians…
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On the Misuse of Superlatives (the Brokaw Fallacy) and Two Other Fallacies
Adjectives admit of three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. The first refers to the zero case of comparison: Tom is tall. The second refers to a situation in which two things are compared: Tom is taller than Tim. The third refers to a situation in which a thing is compared to all the…
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Safe Speech
"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.) Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging…
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Black ‘Bash Mobs’ on the Rampage in Southern California
Here is the story from The Los Angeles Times. Nowhere in the article or in the video is it mentioned that the rioters are black. You can see that they are from the video. The liberal media falsely portrayed the Hispanic, George Zimmerman, as white in order to fit him into their 'America is racist'…
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An Addendum on So-Called ‘Racial’ Profiling
One of my persistent themes is that conservatives must not talk like liberals, thereby acquiescing in the linguistic hijacking that liberals routinely practice, and putting themselves at a disadvantage in the process. Conservatives must insist on standard English and refuse to validate the Left's question-begging epithets. Only the foolish conservative repeats such words and phrases as 'homophobe,' 'Islamophobe,'…
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Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?
One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Racial profiling' is an example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it…