BRIXISH

Malcolm Pollack goes Dennis Prager one better.  BRIXISH is indeed superior to SIXHIRB for Malcolm's reasons below, but also because it is in the vicinity of BREXIT.  After all, the BRIXISH would tend to support BREXIT.  Here's Malcolm:

Saw an unfamiliar acronym over at Maverick Philosopher the the other day: “SIXHIRB”. I had to look it up. It’s a coinage of Dennis Prager’s, and it stands for Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted: the “basket” of cudgels routinely applied to anyone to the right of the Vox editorial staff.

I’d have preferred “BRIXISH”: it sounds more like an adjective, and carries a faint echo of America’s founding people and culture (i.e., the usual target). But it’s still handy to have a linguistic shortcut for these reflexive and ubiquitous slurs, so here’s a nod to Mr. Prager.

I am slightly surprised that Malcolm did not instantly recognize the Pragerian provenience of SIXHIRB inasmuch as every other time I have used it I have credited Prager.  I didn't this time to save keystrokes, figuring that everyone knew by now that it is Prager's coinage. 

Now for a pedantic punctilio.  SIXHIRB and BRIXISH are clearly acronyms by any reasonable definition, including the one I offer in Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations: Another Look:

An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from either the initial letters of two or more words, or from contiguous letters of two or more words.  For example, 'laser' is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of the following words: light, amplification, stimulated, emission, radiation. And Gestapo is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of the following words: geheime, Staats, Polizei.

But what about BREXIT?  It is not an initialism or a truncation as I define these terms:

An initialism is a string of contiguous letters, unpronounceable as a word or else not in use as a word, but pronounceable as a list of letters, formed from the initial letters of two or more words.  For example, 'PBS' is an initialism that abbreviates 'Public Broadcasting System.'  'PBS' cannot be pronounced as a word, but it can be pronounced as a series of letters: Pee, Bee, Ess. 'IT' is an initialism that abbreviates "information technology.'  In this case 'IT' is pronounceable as a word, but is not in use as a word.  You can say, 'Mary works in Eye-Tee,' but not, 'Mary works in IT.' The same goes for 'ASU' which abbreviates 'Arizona State University.'

A truncation is a term formed from a single word by shortening it.  'App,' for example is a truncation of 'application,' and 'ho' is presumably a truncation of 'whore' (in black idiom).  'Auto' is a truncation of 'automobile,' and 'blog' (noun) of 'weblog.'

So I book BREXIT under acronym despite its difference from the other two.  BREXIT fits my definition of 'acronym' inasmuch as it is a pronounceable word formed from contiguous letters of two or more words, in this case, 'Britain' and 'exit.'  The fact that all of the letters of 'exit' are packed into BREXIT does not stop the latter from being an acronym.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin’ and Gamblin’

Liam Clancy, Ramblin', Gamblin' Willie. Lonely Heartstring version. Dylan's version.  Dylan borrowed the melody from Brennan on the Moor.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Barrett Strong, Money.  Flying Lizards' parody.

Allman Bros., Ramblin' Man

B. B. King, Gambler's Blues

Blood, Sweat and Tears, Go Down Gambling

Buckwheat Zydeco, Jackpot

Ry Cooder, I Got Mine.  Frank Stokes' 1928 version.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler. A later version from his Kerouac's Last Dream album.

Dolly Parton, Silver Dagger.  Great version, but then so is Joan Baez's.

John Cohen/Down Hill Strugglers, The Roving Gambler

Tex Ritter, The Deck of Cards, 1948. They don't make 'em like this anymore.

Judging Trump

Should we judge the man by his tweets or his picks?  By what he says or what he does?  Judging by their content, his tweets are injudicious; his appointments so far are outstanding and show good judgment. Here are Trump's choices for cabinet and administrative slots.

Mike Valle at Big Sticks

Mike Valle and I got together the other day at the premier cigar lounge in the East Valley, Big Sticks, to discuss Grundlagen des Marxismus-Leninismus, chapter 1, Der Philosophische Materialismus.  Mike has read the entire stomping 800+ page tome.  It is an outstanding manual of Soviet scholasticism.   Originally written in Russian and published in 1960, near the height of the Cold War, it appeared in German in the same year in Dietz Verlag, Berlin.  Mike acquired two copies and kindly gave me one.

I had him pose with the cigar store Indian for the following shot.  No day without political incorrectness, as I always say.  And that reminds me of the  Seinfeld "Cigar Store Indian" episode. TRIGGER WARNING!  This smokin' excerpt may cause snowflake meltdown.

IMG_0152

Searle on Religion

For some religion is too good to be true. For others it would be awful if true.  And then there are the indifferent for whom religion is simply not an issue.  Among the latter are those who consider talk of religion to be in bad taste in polite society.  

In Mind, Language and Society, John R. Searle writes:

In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion. [. . .] Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

What has happened? [. . .] I believe that something much more radical than a decline in religious belief has taken place. For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified. . . . we no longer take the mysteries we see in the world as expressions of supernatural meaning. We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to the point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations. (pp. 34-35)

My commentary on this Searle-y passage here.