Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Merriam-Webster: "the scientific study of elections." "Psephology is from the Greek word psēphos, meaning 'pebble.'"
Necro-psephology is a growing field of inquiry in the Chicago area. For in those precincts there is a sizable turnout at elections of the dearly departed.
If you have a large vocabulary you will love my blog; if you don't, you need it.
Merriam-Webster: "continuation of something (such as repetition of a word) usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."
Now the media and other anti-Trump partisans are going to perseverate on whether or not Trump obstructed justice during the Mueller probe. They should leave this alone. Having bet so heavily on the collusion narrative, and lost, nobody wants to listen to them bang on about collusion for two more years.
Filed under: Vocabulary
Removal to a distance, withdrawal.
Eloignment has fallen into desuetude, as has 'desuetude.' Archaic. Quite useless for communication with deplorables, or with anyone except me and Dave Bagwill who hipped me to the word.
If 'insulate' is a word, from the Latin insula, insulae, island, then why not 'peninsulate,' v. i. meaning to insulate partially? Example featuring an adjectival cognate:
His is a peninsular life, a balanced life, neither continental not insular. While connected to the mainland of the traditional, the quotidian, and the commonsensical, a part of him stretches out into the oceanic Apeiron.
Does your mother look askance at your new boyfriend? Perhaps the above sentence will take the edge off her disapprobation.
a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition) : DOWNFALL
Example from Why I Left by Jim Holt:
I will now confess to the obvious: the foregoing account of my spiritual dégringolade, while true in every detail, is a caricature. My alienation from the Catholic Church was not mainly intellectual. It was moral, even emotional.
1: legal possession of land as one's own
2: manorial land actually possessed by the lord and not held by tenants
4: REALM sense 2, DOMAIN
How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays. The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use. Use 'em or lose 'em.
If you think you know the meaning of a word, you are well-advised to check your understanding. Even if you really do know the meaning of a word, you probably don't know all of its shades and variants.
If you work steadily at this, then perhaps someday you will have a vocabulary half as extensive as that of your humble correspondent.
1a: affected with constipation
b: causing constipation
2: slow in action or expression
3: not generous : STINGY
Where did I find it? In a fine analysis of the concept of charm by Joseph Epstein. Here is a taste that features the word under definition:
Some people I talked with thought charm was synonymous with “cool.” In fact, the two, charm and cool, are all but opposed. Cool aims for detachment, distance; charm is social, bordering on the intimate. Cool is icy; charm warm. Cool is costive; charm often ebullient. Cool doesn’t require approval; charm hopes to win it. Cool began life in jazz under the great saxophonist Lester Young, who first used the term, but it soon descended to the argot of drugs. Cool gave way to hip and hep. In Dave Frishberg’s song “I’m Hip,” the singer proclaims that he watches “arty French flicks with [his] shades on” and is so hip “I call my girlfriend ‘Man.’ ” Miles Davis was cool, Louis Armstrong charming.
How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays. The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use. Use 'em or lose 'em.
Here:
I picked up a new piece of invective from Mark Steyn.
I believe he intends 'wankerati' to be coextensive with 'left-wing commentariat.' Read his The Turning Point and see if you don't agree. The brilliant polemicist offers up other choice phrases such as "malign carbuncles on the body politic." That's a reference to Di Fi (Dianne Feinstein), et al. And there's "a chamber full of posturing tosspots."
'Tosspot' is a general term of abuse that conjures up drunkard and sot. It puts me in mind of pot-valiant. One is correctly so described if one's courage derives from the consumption of spirits.
There is a use for abuse. It is a mistake to think that verbal abuse ought never to be employed.
Hands are best employed in caressing and blessing. But sometimes they need to be balled into fists and rudely applied to the faces of miscreants.
If one resorts to verbal abuse and invective one does not always thereby betray a paucity of careful thought informed by fact. Verbal abuse has a legitimate use in application to the self-enstupidated, the willfully ignorant, and those out for power alone regardless of truth and morality.
It is not reasonable to think that all are amenable to the dulcet tones of sweet reason; some need to be countered with the hard fist of unreason.
On the other side of the question, one should never resort to invective if one is trying to persuade a reasonable person. One should proceed as calmly as possible. Any resort to billingsgate will cause the interlocutor to assume that one lacks good reasons.
……………….
If you studied the above properly you will probably have learned three or four new words.
If you have a large vocabulary you will love my blog; if you don't, you need it.
Paragraph. Example:
I know y’all are worn out by all my takes on the Catholic abuse scandal, but if you can stand it, Megan McArdle’s column on it is worth reading. This graf jumped out at me:
From the New Statesman:
The founding example of entryism was provided by Leon Trotsky and the “French turn”. In 1934, the Russian revolutionary persuaded his supporters to dissolve the Communist League into the Socialist Party in order to maximise their influence. The term has since been applied to any group that enters a larger organisation with the intention of subverting its policies and objectives.
Labour’s most notable experience of entryism came with the Trotskyist Militant, which won control of the party’s youth wing (Labour Party Young Socialists) and a number of constituency parties. After its proscription by the National Executive Committee in 1982, hundreds of the group’s members were expelled during Neil Kinnock’s leadership, including two MPs (Terry Fields and Dave Nellist). Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, was a Militant supporter though never formally joined.
“Operation Ice Pick” was the name given to Labour’s efforts to prevent entryists from voting in the 2015 leadership election, after the means of assassination used against Trotsky. Those barred included members of the Socialist Party, the successor group to Militant. The pro-Corbyn organisation Momentum has similarly banned outsiders from joining after MPs warned that it could become a vehicle for entryism.
Usage
Responding to charges of infiltration, Jeremy Corbyn said: "The entryism I see is lots of young people who were hitherto not very excited by politics, coming in for the first time."
Ice pick? How many times do I have to explain that it was an ICE AXE, a much nastier implement, that Ramon Mercader drove into the skull of Leon Trotsky on 20 August 1940. Wikipedia: "On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was attacked in his study by Mercader, who used an ice axe as a weapon.[137] "
I just now encountered this strange expression in Graham Oppy's review of Owen Anderson's, The Clarity of God's Existence: The Ethics of Belief after the Enlightenment. The phrase occurs in this passage:
On the one hand, given that Anderson insists that he cannot be satisfied with ‘a sound proof that is extremely difficult to understand and that is knowable by only a few’ (123), it seems clear that his ‘program’ is bound to fail: for surely it is London to a brick that, if his ‘program’ could be successfully carried out, it would yield a proof that is ‘extremely difficult to understand and knowable only by a few’.
The phrase, apparently not in use in the U. K., is Australian and New Zealand slang for 'it is certain.' Explanation here.
Despite the term's largely pejorative connotation, propaganda is not by definition false or misleading or harmful. Propaganda is anything of a verbal or pictorial nature that is propagated to influence behavior. Propaganda can consist of truths or falsehoods, good advice or bad, exhortation to good behavior or subornation of bad. Anti-smoking and anti-drug messaging are propaganda but the messages are salutary. Leftist propaganda is destructive while conservative propaganda inspires ameliorative action.
Here is a very good collection of visual propaganda from yesteryear.
I just came across the following sentence in Charles R. Kesler's Claremont Review of Books article, Thinking about Trump:
It is not entirely clear whether his liberal and conservative critics disapprove of Trump because he violates moral law or because he is infra dig.
The 'infra dig' threw me for a moment until I realized it was a popularization of infra dignitatem, 'beneath (one's) dignity.' According to this source, Sir Water Scott in 1825 was the first to use the abbreviation.
I was taught to italicize foreign expressions, which is precisely what the good professor did not do in the sentence quoted. Where's my red pen?
As for the content of the sentence quoted, it is tolerably clear to me that the Never Trumpers (who are of course conservatives of a sort by definition) despise Trump mainly because the man has no class and is therefore infra dignitatem. He is not one of them. He does not have the manners and breeding of a Bill Kristol or a George Will and the rest of the effete, yap-and-scribble, but do nothing, bow-tie brigade. He is an outsider and an interloper who threatens their privileges and perquisites. Better Hillary and the status quo than a shake-up and take-on of the Deep State and its enablers.
On the other hand, leftists, most of them anyway, don't give a damn about the moral law as it pertains to marital fidelity and sexual behavior with the possible exception of rape. These types don't object to Trump because of locker-room talk and affairs. After all, they tolerate it in themselves and their heroes such as the Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bill Clinton. What they are doing is right out of Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in particular, #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
Nor do Leftists much care that Trimp is infra dig. What leftists object to are his policies and programs, but instead of addressing them, they attack the man for failing to honor values that they themselves do not accept so as to discredit him among his supporters.