Sign seen in a front yard

“Educators that sealcoat.”

I see why they’re moonlighting. But then, maybe educators really aren’t human.

Word police and Oxford children’s dictionaries

Via Breda, news that Oxford University Press has changed their children’s dictionaries in some alarming ways.

I’m actually of two minds of this. If a word is part of most people’s experience, you don’t have to explain it. What child doesn’t know what a blog is, or voicemail? But if Britain is truly multi-culti and post-Christian, then the church words become even more important, because they aren’t part of everyday experience for many youth, and they are such a part of the literary heritage. Is “fortnight” in there? (Made famous by Robinson Crusoe…and as a child I never understood what a “Popish prayer book” was…maybe “pop-ish”, like a missalette.)

As for the “country words”, plants and animals are hard to define. You can figure out by context that a buttercup is a flower, but if you’ve never seen one, it’s hard to get the picture. It’s a lack of nature literacy we’re discussing here, not one of words. Likewise, with all due respect to Breda’s sacred food, you know bacon, or you don’t. Is “fetayer” in there, or “kibbeh”? Just checking.

In short, this is more a symptom than a cause of Britain going downhill.

We are so scrod

There’s a fine piece here on the lamentable state of community college writing. What is even more appalling than the examples given are some of the comments:

“Unless the students gave permission for him to publish this material, isn’t this plagiarism. Additionally, it is unethical to release without permission any materials submitted for a course even when the author is not identified.”

Are you asking or telling me? In any case, no, it is not; plagiarism is when you use other’s writing as your own. And screw your ethics. Your word for today is “scrupulosity”.

“I’m a senior in high school, and I’m even amazed how bad the students in my class write. I was doing a peer review in my english class of an essay on a novel, and the girl who wrote the paper obviously had no idea of the what she was writing. The assignment was to focus on one aspect of the book to be able to refer it to senior taking the college composition course next year, and she wrote more of a spotty review. Then again, I couldn’t find any commas in the whole paper.”

Use adverbs much? And that’s just for starters.

The pig thing

I was listening to Dennis Prager discussing Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” thing. I think Dennis is right; I don’t think Obama was referring to Palin. It’s a well-known idiom, so one wouldn’t read too much into it, any more than one would assume that “That sucks” is intended as an anti-homosexual slur, or “He gypped me” was intended as an anti-Romany slur (as if your typical American had ever met a Rom.) But listening to the recording, it’s totally obvious that Obama’s listeners made the connection. After all, “lipstick” was one of the first words most Americans heard out of Palin’s mouth. Nor did Obama say anything to dispel the connection.

What we have here is not an attack on Palin but an incredible case of tone-deafness. And to go on the attack and claim that the Pugs are Swift-boating is just nuts. Let’s try another idiom: What if McCain had said, “The difference between the two candidates is as clear as black and white”? Do you think for one moment that McCain would get a pass on that? It would be universally considered to be a racial reference, and universally condemned. Indeed, it would probably lose him the election.

If it was tone-deafness, the best thing for Obama to do is to apologize. Hey, we all screw up without the teleprompter. If he’s not going to cop to that, if he’s going to act as if this tone-deafness was not an issue, then it’s legitimate to ask: If he can’t speak diplomatically to the American citizenry, why should we expect diplomatic speech to foreign leaders? How far is “lipstick on a pig” going to get him in the Moslem world?

UPDATE: But maybe it was deliberate, a line stolen from the groundlings?

UPDATE 8PM: The lovely and talented Ms. Lucas makes precisely the same point as mine, but with more aplomb.

Another academic cheerleader for Endarkenment

The president of the United Kingdom’s Spelling Society is using this week’s society dinner to call for a liberation of the spelling of English words, opining that children are being hindered in their education because they must memorize irregular spellings.

This isn’t anything new.We’ve known English is funky, and there have been calls for reform for years. Usually, though, they take the form of wanting to create some kind of governmental Language Police which will establish new and rational spelling. This appears to be different: a call to admit that spelling doesn’t matter.

The problem is not that there are exceptions in English. There are few exceptions. But there are many cases where slovenly speech has created homonyms that did not originally exist. Actually, English is a perfect vehicle for the main point of education: distinction of concepts. “Its” is not the same concept as “it’s”, “discrete” is not “discreet’. One might even argue that the mental training involved in separating concepts for accurate spelling is what has made Anglophones dominant on the world stage.
But that’s so politically incorrect; we might think ourselves better that the Chinese, who have one letter for each word, and thus none of our confusions.

Dr. Wells needn’t “call” for what’s happening already, or think himself bold or revolutionary. He wont b rememberd 2 many yeers frum now wen we r all equally stupid.

What not to say auf Deutsch

Ich schliesse mich mit der Endlosung der Politischunrichtsgesprächsproblem, einer Selektion entarteter Wörter, dem Wörterbuch der Vergangenheitsbewältigung an.

NICHT

“the less fortunate”

…is a phrase Neal Boortz would like to phase out in 2008:

As for “the less fortunate,” the use of this phrase implies that those without means are victims of bad luck rather than their own laziness, bad work ethic and a dearth of good decisions. To imply that the poor, poor pitiful poor are where they are simply because they weren’t “fortunate” is to suggest that those who find themselves in good financial shape were merely lucky. What a convenient way to denigrate the idea of individual achievement. The left can tell you through this “less fortunate” nonsense that you were merely lucky, and those sad poor people were simply unlucky. The left is only evening the odds when they take your stuff and give it to them.

Well, right he is, but his grumbling won’t end the use of the phrase. Instead, we should take the language seriously. “The less fortunate” are still fortunate. Even the typical American urban outdoorsman is fortunate compared to his counterpart in Mumbai or Harare. And most of America’s “less fortunate” are solidly middle-class or better, in world terms, and fortunate indeed to have a host that can support so many of them without quite dying. So the next time somebody uses the phrase, turn it back on them:

“We have an obligation to support the less fortunate.”

“Why should we support the fortunate, when there is such poverty in the world?”

“Bu–uh–, the less fortunate are poor.”

“No, they’re fortunate. Aren’t you?”

Don’t do this at home; the exploding heads might be hard to clean up.