PARVUM
OPUS
Number
275
______________________________________________
Easy Virtue
Regarding the April
21 Time magazine cover using the famous photo of Marines raising the
flag at Iwo Jima, with a tree standing in for the flag (you know which flag I
mean), do you think they will be handing out Purple Hearts to people for buying
carbon credits? Greenness has already been turned into a religious practice;
remember the English cleric who heard people's recycling confessions? Now it's
also a substitute for patriotism, heroism, and sacrifice. People used to call
certain women, "women of easy virtue". Easy virtue takes on a new meaning now.
In honor of Earth Day, which was Tuesday, April 22, I'm
calling our cat Earthy Kitt. Sometimes he (or she, we're not sure and have too
much delicacy to do a thorough examination) comes in smelling like what I
remember a barn smells like, but most likely he's been under the porch. It's
been many years since I was in my grandfather's barn in Calhoun County, West
Virginia, but I remember the smell: old wood, straw, cows, tobacco twists hung
up to dry. There used to be an old hardware store in Lawrence, Kansas, that had
an old-store smell very hard to find today: old wood floor, dust, paint, and,
well, hardware. It was there just ten years ago or so, don't know if it is
still.
Earth Day
makes me think not so much of recycling paper and bottles, but of being
physically closer to the earth, as I was when I was a kid. Although those old
wood buildings aren't the earth itself, they smelled closer to it than the new
stores.
For a large
part of my childhood, I spent a lot of time at the beach on the Gulf Coast of
Florida. Is there anyone who doesn't know what the ocean smells like?
When I was
really little, I was rolling around in the grass, looking at bugs, tasting
selected weeds, drawing in the dirt.
If I could
hang my laundry outside to dry, I would, because it makes everything smell so
good. One of the few household chores I really enjoy. I think I'll celebrate
Earth Day by seeing if it's possible to get this town to allow people to hang
their clothes on clotheslines. I'm writing to the mayor; maybe I'll draw up a
petition ~ I've signed a few in my life but never originated one ~ and if you
like hanging your clothes outside, maybe you can do it in your town too.
As for
Earthy Kitt, its previous owner, who abandoned it in favor of a new puppy, said
its name was Jack. We can't find any clinical evidence of either Jack or Jackie
attributes, so we think Jack was neutered. But there's no reason he can't have more
than one name, as T. S. Eliot taught us in Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which inspired the Broadway musical Cats.
Anyway, one way Earthy Kitt pays for his keep is by bringing the outdoors in.
Powerlines
Released just is Powerlines:
Words That Sell Brands, Grip Fans, and Sometimes Change History by
Steve Cone, on successful sales and political slogans. Dennis Miller interviewed him. I
haven't heard any really good slogans in this political campaign, although
everyone has had time and money enough to come up with something.
Questions
||| If you don't like Noam
Chomsky's linguistic theories, are you anti-semantic? (Can't remember where I
heard that one.)
||| Considering recent
murders there, is it time for us to pull out of Chicago? (Dennis Miller)
||| Some super-vegetarians
say they refuse to eat anything that has a face. Would this be an edible
complex? (Mine)
Buzz Words
My old friend and English class veteran Pat Geiger sent
this:
Here is the Beacon
Journal's latest ~ story on the
front page about some barber in Barberton (where else?!!). The writer of the
story said that two of the children in the shop "need rescued from their
mother's attempted buzz cut"!!! I
wrote them an email ~ said the writer ought to think about the fact that she
"needs tutored in grammar"!!!
Glad she's carrying on the fight. To be honest, I think I
have used that construction. But if so, I was wrong, and I found an explanation
in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, p. 656:
In its function as an auxiliary it does not inflect and
is followed by the bare infinitive without to: "No pressure group need
apply." (Harry S. Truman). The finite verb does inflect; when followed by an
infinitive, it requires to: "The church bells needed to ring three
times." (Virginia Black) It can also be followed by a gerund: "The facts are
too well known to need repeating here." (Tip O'Neill)
The offending sentence should have been, as Pat told the
journalist, "need to be rescued" or possibly "need rescuing".
Ee, Ive, Ful
Rich Lederer wrote about "attendee" and
like formations:
Suffixes, like words themselves,
often carry more than one meaning, as in English / reddish and spinster /
dumpster. Although -ee usually signifies "one who receives action,"
the meaning "one who acts" has been around a long time in words other
than attendee (1937). Witness conferee (1771), escapee (1866), absentee (1605),
and patentee (15th century).
I should have at least
remembered escapee and absentee, though the others are strangers
to me.
Unrelated note: I heard somebody say "restive" instead of
"restful", but "restive" does not mean "restful" though both suffixes can mean
having the quality of or being in a state of.
DaBee
Dave DaBee sent miscellaneous comments:
||| My daughter Lindsey did indeed learn to write
letters in elementary school, but that was ~15 years ago, just as email was
coming on the scene. She's a
surprisingly articulate writer ~ as I may have told you, once I did a (covert)
paid plagiarism search on one of her first biology papers because I'd never
seen her do science writing and it was startlingly clear and concise. (Perhaps
a B/B+ for sophistication of composition, but solid A on most scales, and
probably better than B for a 9th-10th grader.)
||| Red-eye at Starbucks is coffee with a shot of
espresso, as something to wake you up when you're still red-eyed. (A black-eye
is two shots of espresso.) Sometimes,
like today on the NJ Turnpike, I forget and use the synonym used at Caribou
Coffee in Minnesota: a depth charge.
||| My impression (personally) is that assertions
about bitter poor people apply equally to blacks and whites. Note: I did not
just say anything about non-bitter poor people. Has anyone observed, btw, the
parallel between Obama's words and Marx's "opiate of the masses"?
Yes, others noticed that Marxian echo. I think
Obama's remarks about poor white people's guns and religion are projection on
his part, considering his own church and considering the gun culture of
Chicago. Jeremiah Wright, by the way, has inspired our local anonymous writer
of political fliers, which he sticks into the windows of newspaper boxes; this
week's was something about "Why should God bless America?", based on bad
statistics on hunger in the U.S. If you accept Wright's premises (and Michelle
Obama's), what must it be like not to have a country to love? If I examine my
own conscience, I do not ask God to damn me for my flaws; no more would I damn
my country.
______________________________________________
Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing,
and reckoning ~ Parvum
Opus
discusses language, education,
journalism, culture, and more. Parvum
Opus
by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps
/ Opus Publishing Services. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and
English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to e-mail
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