New Book

I'm in the middle of a book called Death Sentences by Don Watson. The thesis of the book is that the English public language (not so much the language used in day-to-day conversation, but the kind published by government, corporations, and other institutions) is slowly being choked to death by the cliches, buzzwords, and heavy tongue machinations that are spewed out to us. It can be summed up like this (here I'm quoting from the book).

Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, famously amended [the] Gettysburg [Address] in the way a team of Washington advisers might have. Virtually nothing remained of the poetry or the substance--nothing, at least, to live beyond the next day's news. Today's advisors, well trained in quality management and perhaps even Neurolinguistice Programming, might turn Gettysburg into something like this:

"Eighty-seven years ago our great-grandfathers and -grandmothers built a capacity for the implementation of a new nation [partnering God] with a commitment to harnessing synergies for enhanced outcomes for all stakeholders going forward. Today we are confronting the challenge of seeing whether hopefully a country with these commitments and these synergies will still be there at the end of the day."

Nice. As they say, never use a large word when a diminutive one will do. Go buy the book and give it to your company's marketing director as an anonymous gift.

In Which I Introduce a New Pronoun to English

One of the many gaping holes in the lexicon is English's lack of a pronoun to represent a gender-neutral person. We use he, his, him for males, and we use she, her, her for females, but we don't have anything for a single hypothetical gender-unknown person. For multiple such people, we use they, their, them. I've seen people just default to he in such situations, and I've also seen people awkwardly try to be politically correct and default to she occasionally. Either way, it doesn't quite work. The pronoun it doesn't really fit the bill either, since it has an implication of sexless objects. In technical writing, we tend to end-run around the problem and use second-person, so you end up doing things, instead of the hypothetical user.

Clearly, we need a new pronoun to do the job right, so here it is: Ne.

The subjective case of the pronoun is ne (prounounced "nee"), the possessive is nis ("niz"), and the objective case is nim ("nim"). Use it whenever you're speaking hypothetically about someone to whom either gender could apply. For example:

When a customer asks you to make change for a dollar, ne will usually expect four quarters. Take nis dollar and give nim dimes instead.

Didn't that just roll off the tongue? Expect this word to take off in usage and make it into Webster's any day now.

My Wife is Cool

Check this out.

Back in Town

I've been out of town for a while. Took some of the youth in our church to Charleston, SC for a mission trip. It was a great week, but I'm plumb tuckered out now. Didn't get any sleep (well, maybe a half hour) the first night since we were driving all night, and the sleep situation improved only marginally from there on out. We got back on Friday, after which I slept 11 hours. Took a 3 hour nap on Saturday, and then slept another 9 hours that night. Almost back on track.

On Flags

Mike has recently blogged on the recent re-emergence of the perennial attempt to ratify a flag-burning amendment. This time, it might actually make it to the states.

This thing is like a Whack-a-Mole game. Knock one attempt down and another springs up somewhere else. I did a search on a Congressional search engine, and there have been 6 attempts so far this year to get this thing passed.

Mike's analysis knocks it right out of the park. Go read it. This amendment is a ridiculous and pointless measure that will cost millions of dollars in campaigning and publicity that could much better be spent elsewhere, like buying armor for military Humvees. And as a former Boy Scout, it is indeed part of the recommended guidelines on flag care and maintenance to burn it at the end of its life. Take that.

CNN.com - Police: Lions free kidnapped girl - Jun 21, 2005

CNN.com - Police: Lions free kidnapped girl - Jun 21, 2005

The girl's name wasn't Lucy, by any chance?

In Which I Abandon Old Views

When I was growing up, whenever my parents would go to vote, the net result on the elections would be identical to if they had both stayed home and cleaned the refrigerator instead, except that we would still have a dirty refrigerator. Dad would vote Republican, and Mom would vote Democrat. The exceptions to this were school board elections, in which Mom, a public educator, had veto power over Dad's vote, and the biannual congressional election. Every two years, my parents would form an electoral truce and gang up in another futile attempt to vote Tom Delay out of office.

When I turned 18 and became the third voting member of my family, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on a daily basis. His vitriol and malice had temporarily pickled my brain, and so for a few years, Mom was on the losing side of the family. Then I got a job delivering pizzas for a summer. The way my shifts worked out, I tended to be in the car at the same time the Roger Gray Show was on. Gray is a member of a very rare breed: a moderate talk radio host. Eventually, he was drummed off the air.

I think what turned the tide for me was a caller who phoned into Gray's show one day when I was delivering two large pepperonis and a two-liter of Coke. I don't remember the details, but it dealt with welfare.

Caller: Here's some nonsensical rhetoric about big government that will be completely forgotten in about two minutes.
Gray: Right, and didn't you call about the homeless?
Caller: It's costing too much to support these people. Maybe it would be best just to let them all die.
Gray: No! We're a better country than that.
Caller:

Apparently, people actually thought that way. That was pretty frightening to me, and was the initial push down the long slow slide to the left. I'm not a part of Delay's district anymore, so I can't vote against him. But my brain is freshly rinsed and squeegied, and I don't listen to talk radio anymore.