Category: Substack

On ‘Stuff’ and ‘Ass’

A Substack language rant. Excerpt:

'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)

Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence

Substack latest.

Wherein I analyze the Objectivist battle cry, "Existence exists!"

Ayn Rand is worth reading, mainly on political and economic topics: she is a corrective to the destructive lunacy of the collectivists. I am not suggesting that she is wholly correct, but that she is useful as a corrective, especially now, to the extremism of the clowns in control of the pathocratic Biden (mal)administration.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

Substack latest.

You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.'  It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes offense at standard English takes offense inappropriately.