A Punctilio Anent the Post Immediately Preceding

I just wrote, quite consciously, "There are expressions whose currency is due to no good reason . . ." Strictly correct would have been, "There are expressions the currency of which is due to no good reason . . . ."   Since 'whose' is the possessive form of the personal pronoun 'who,' it ought not  be used when the antecedent denotes an inaminate referent.  Or at least that is a rule purists will obey.  It is  a trade-off between strict correctness and stiltedness.

In the very next sentence I have "you can be sure" for the strictly correct "one can be sure."  It is a similar trade-off.  Do you want a tone that is formal or familiar?

The main thing, I suppose, is that a good writer writes consciously, aware of the rules, but breaking them when it serves his purpose. Split the infinite, begin with a conjunction, end with a preposition  if  it gives your sentence the flow and feel you desire.

On Being Impacted

There are expressions whose currency is due to no good reason, but simply reflects the suggestibility of people. Let someone prominently placed commit a linguistic howler, and you can be sure that others will fall in line. The perfectly good word ‘affect,’ used as verb, has fallen into desuetude to be replaced by the miserable ‘impact’ used as a verb. Thus, ‘Mary was deeply impacted by her father’s death.’ You mean her sire’s demise induced constipation in the poor girl? Why this barbarism when ‘Mary was deeply affected by her father’s death’ is available? Part of the answer has to be that people are lemmings who uncritically repeat whatever they hear.

'Impactation' is correctly used in this curious medical article dredged up from the bowels of the Internet: Rectal Impactation Following Enema With Concrete Mix.

Why Am I So Hard on Liberals?

A reader comments by e-mail:

I sometimes read your website. I'm generally impressed by (and envy) your clear-headedness and detail when it comes to technical questions, but I find myself turned off by some of the more "poetic" stuff and the political analysis (the former because I hate poetry, more on the latter below).

[. . .]

Why are you so harsh with liberals? I can see why you might be annoyed by the mainstream liberal media . . . but I don't think the mainstream conservative media is any better. [. . .]

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Dunmovin and a Blogger’s Final Post

Dunmovin is a California ghost town, now little more than a wide spot in the road on U. S. 395, one of my favorite highways.  I have driven past it many a time, but never stopped to explore, not that there is much there to explore.  But I thought of it today, did a search and found an interesting post, dated 15 September 2008, The Ghost Town of Dunmovin, California.

After reading the post, I brought up the current page of the Harry Helms Blog and was both surprised and saddened to find that the relatively young Mr. Helms is losing his battle with cancer.  Here is his farewell post. May we all accept our deaths with as much peace and equanimity.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rock Salt and Nails

The best version of this haunting Utah Phillips song is the one by Joan Baez. But it has been removed from YouTube.  Here is Rosalie Sorrel's version.  And here is Dylan's.

If your ladies was blackbirds/And your ladies was thrushes/I'd lie there for hours/In the  chilly cold marshes/If your ladies was squirrels, with high bushy tails/I'd load up my shotgun with rock salt and nails.

Contra Negantem Prima Principia Non Esse Disputandum

"One should not dispute with those who deny first principles." I found this Latin tag in Luther's Tischreden (Table Talks) in a section entitled Unnütze Fragen (Useless Questions), Weimarer Ausgabe, III, 2844. He applied it to those who deny the authority of the Bible. I agree with the maxim but I find that the good doctor has misapplied it. One who is serious about the truth should want to enter into dialogue with intelligent, sincere, civil, and serious people regardless of their point of view, and this includes those who deny the authority of the Bible. How can one care about the truth and not want to study every philosophy, every religion, and every political ideology?  Study everything! How can a serious inquirer not want to know whether what he holds to be true really is true?

But a maxim that can be misapplied can also be correctly applied. There are some principles so fundamental that they cannot be rationally disputed. Among these are the principles that make possible rational discourse. There was a nincompoop of a leftist commenter at the now defunct Right Reason once who opined that truth is a social construction. Anyone who maintains a thesis of such stark absurdity is not one on whom one should waste any words. That truth is absolute, and as such the opposite of a social construction, is a first principle to which Luther's maxim applies.  If you have truth, you have something absolute — which is not to say  that you have truth!

The Diplomat

Not an original aphorism, but a good one nonetheless: A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.

This illustrates the principle that in human affairs it is less what one says than how one says it that matters. Perverse as people are, they ignore or downplay what is primary, the message, to fixate on the 'packaging.'

Environmentalism as Green Socialism and Nature Idolatry

From Jeffrey T. Kuhner, The War on Capitalism:

Environmentalism has very little to do with protecting the environment. It is green socialism. Its objective is to achieve what red communism couldn't: the conquest of capitalism. Instead of central planning and a command economy, we would have a highly regulated, highly taxed bureaucratic corporatism that would stifle economic growth and individual initiative.

Beginning in the 19th century, much of the Western intelligentsia lost faith in God. The 20th century saw numerous attempts – Marxism, fascism, national socialism — to construct a society without God. They failed. Now the West's liberal elites are seeking to infuse the radical secular project with new meaning and purpose — man's salvation through the worship of Gaea, Mother Earth.

The green movement is a form of pantheism. It hopes to sacrifice prosperity, abundance and wealth at the altar of a false god.

Mr. Obama is its prophet of doom. And America is its victim.

Does Deflationism Rule Out Relativism?

This post floats the suggestion that deflationism about truth is inconsistent with relativism about truth.  Not that one should be a deflationist.  But it would be interesting if deflationism entailed the nonrelativity of truth.

There is a sense in which deflationary theories of truth deny the very existence of truth. For what these theories deny is that anything of a unitary and substantial nature corresponds to the predicate 'true' or 'is true.' To get a feel for the issue, start with the platitude that some of the things people say are true and some of the things people say are not true. People who say that Hitler died by his own hand in the Spring of 1945 say something true, while those who say that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz say something that is not true. Given the platitude that there are truths and untruths, classically-inclined philosophers will inquire: What is it that all and only the truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths? What is truth? What is the property of being-true?

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Universal Health Care

I'm for universal health care: I want everyone to have health care. But the issue is not whether it would be good for all to have adequate health care, the issue is how to approach this goal. I can't see that increasing government involvement in health care delivery is the way to go.  We need less government inefficiency and more market discipline.  That will bring prices down while safeguarding liberty, a value liberals, despite their name, seem insufficiently appreciative of.  The so-called 'public option' will lead to no option: you will have no option except to use the government plan because private insurers will most of them have been  driven out of business.  And so only the superrich will get the best care.  The phrase 'public option' is a piece of Orwellian bullshit.  Descriptive accuracy favors 'government takeover health plan' or something like that.

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A Man and a Woman Look into a Mirror

I just heard it on the Dennis Prager show.  "A man looks in the mirror and sees Hercules no matter how he looks.  A woman looks in the mirror and sees a wreck no matter how she looks."  Those aren't Prager's exact words but that's the gist of it.  The first sentence, at least, is verbatim.  Exactly right. Yet another aperçu from the wise and fertile mind of the best of the conservative talk jocks.