Logy

Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day pointed out that methodology means the study of methods. It should not be used as a substitute for method. Since few people talk about the study of methods, this may be a lost cause, but in general you can’t go wrong by going for the simpler word.

This, That, and the Other

>>> In a recent news story a reporter called something “heart-rendering” which suggests something that happens at a meat-processing plant (should be “rending” though that’s not much more delicate); and something else was “legally actionable”, a rare instance of “actionable” being used correctly. So he or she was one for one. (A year ago “heart-rendering” cropped up in a different news story and I wrote about it in PO. Somebody didn’t get the memo.)

>>> Advertisement: “There are both men and women t-shirts.” Now that would be a bargain at twice the price; unfortunately they meant “men’s and women’s t-shirts”. This is one case where you cannot use a noun as an adjective (as in “dog collar”).

>>> I’ve heard “man up” a couple of times lately, as in “I manned up”. It sounds like it might mean to gather a crew, but it actually means to act like a man as opposed to a child.

>>> Ad for fancy padded toilet seat: “designed for comfort and creativity”. OK, I get the comfort. But just because the lid has a little floral design on it, that doesn’t make it designed for creativity. That would require at least some sort of small electrical shock delivered to the backs of the thighs.

>>> We’ve all heard “in the clink” meaning in jail. When I read “in the Clink” (capital C ) in a book by Germaine Greer, I looked it up and found that the Clink was a notorious English prison from the 12th to the 18th century. It sounds like jail, though, doesn’t it: you can hear the clinking and clanking of steel bars and keys.

>>> Message from a doctor’s office: “This is to remind you that an exclusive appointment has been reserved for you at…” As compared to the non-exclusive, group appointments?

Mr. Language Person

Check out this treat from Dave Barry, a Mr. Language Person column vintage 2004.

Tea Party

I avoided listening to most news stories about the recent Tea Parties, especially after I heard actress Janeane Garofolo say, “Let’s be honest, it’s all about people hating a black man.” Let’s do be honest, some of the protesters voted for Obama. It’s their money they’re worried about, among other things.

I can report directly that I know two people who went to the Cincinnati event and they are quite sensible and conscientious people, principled and civil in all respects. Second-hand reporting: a YouTube singer I like called Bear Wa11ace (note two numeral ones instead of two Ls in his name) joined the Tea Party where he lives in California and reported on it on YouTube, and he seems like a reasonable person: blues singer and surfer, what more could you want?

I haven’t worked as a journalist per se though from time to time I’ve written on varied subjects for papers and magazines. I did not take journalism classes in school. A lot of current journalists seem have the kind of training and mindset I observed when I worked at a large university in the publications department, where I took a phone call from a journalism student who asked suspiciously what we (the communications/PR department) would do if the university needed money. He made it sound like a gotcha question, as if it would be a shameful development that the news office would try to obfuscate with misleading press releases. I explained that the communications office and the fund-raising office of universities are always one and the same, and they’re always trolling for money for both general and specific expenses. Then there was the young girl reporter who wrote in the school paper (same school) that her trip to London disappointed her; she’d expected great fanfare and tickertape parades (though not for herself, I suppose). A British reader pointed out that tickertape parades are a New York phenomenon. You might say that these students were, after all, young, but even the ones who are permanently bone ignorant are often more enamored of themselves as reporters than they are of the truth, which they think they know before they see the news they’re reporting on.

A Few Choice Words

Language changes constantly so the effort to grasp and pin down a word as it’s changing can seem like a pointless academic exercise. Nevertheless, if we want to attach any coherence to our ideas, we have to agree on most meanings mid-stream. Take the word “choice”. It has a fairly simple meaning: you get to pick one thing out of a group of things. Contained in it are the ideas of “more than one” and “freedom”.

The word has also become attached to a political idea, that of abortion. Pro-choice means in favor of legal abortion. In this context the basic meaning of “choice” (multiplicity and freedom) seems to be eroding. Some think that Obama will push for laws to prevent doctors from choosing to follow their own moral convictions. That is, doctors or Catholic hospitals to whom abortion is wrong will not be free to refuse to perform that procedure (as we now call an operation or an abortion). Catholic hospitals could shut down.

If this law is enacted, the word “choice” will have lost its meaning, and this isn’t just about language drift. There are plenty of people who don’t really believe in choice — or diversity, which word features in similar imbroglios — and will bully anyone who doesn’t agree with them. You might even call this a state-imposed religious belief.

This seems to be a good spot for this from John Locke (thanks to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day):

"Men take the words they find in use among their neighbors, and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for, use them confidently without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning . . . it being all one to draw these men out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a Vagrant of his habitation, who has no settled abode. This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself or others whether it be so or not." John Locke (as quoted in I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism 223 (1925)).

And another quote by a modern thinker, economist Walter E. Williams:

“In addition to an abhorrence of democracy, and the recognition that government posed the gravest threat to liberty, our founders harbored a deep distrust and suspicion of Congress. This suspicion and distrust is exemplified by the phraseology used throughout the Constitution, particularly our Bill of Rights, containing phrases such as Congress shall not: abridge, infringe, deny, disparage or violate.”

These words all indicate that the rights already exist, the government does not give them to us, thus the language in the Bill of Rights is about Congress not being able to infringe, etc., on them; the Bill of Rights does not list rights that Congress gives us.

Make a Tree

Modern art can engage our interest visually, but if modern artists were creating the world, not only couldn't they make a flowering tree, they probably wouldn't if they could, because it's not only beautiful, it's too pretty. A writer named Mark Gauvreau Judge makes this clear in Modern Art Masterpiece.

Prettiness is an artistic sin. I’ve had to explain to my Chinese student the distinction between the two; he is very astute in detecting shades of meaning. Looking at his vacation photos, I remarked that his wife is beautiful, and he said, “Maybe she is beautiful, but she is not pretty.”

ONLINE PUBS

I’m publishing for the Kindle digital reader with Amazon and now also on Lulu.com for download to computer and for printing. I mistakenly thought that the Kindle books could be downloaded to computer but they can’t. So now these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland last fall, with photos.

The Wish Book, a novella, is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues.

Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is a short story about a young gambler who finds himself upright in a cornfield in Kansas with his feet encased in a tub of concrete; how would you get out of a spot like that?

Still Ridge is a short story about a young woman who moves from Boston to Appalachia and finds there are two kinds of moonshine, the good kind and the kind that can kill you.

Whither Spooning? asks whether synchronized spooning can be admitted to the 2010 Winter Olympics.

______________________________________________

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. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

His’n

Herb H. sent a really interesting query about the beautiful theme song from the movie High Noon, as sung by Tex Ritter (his voice was rather weak in this 1970 live version on the Dick Cavett show; the movie soundtrack from 20 years earlier is on YouTube also). One verse goes:

"He made a vow while in State Prison

Vowed it'll be my life or his’n,

I'm not afraid to die but oh

What will I do if you leave me?"

Herb says in some transcriptions the lyrics have been been changed to “my life or his, And I’m not afraid to die.” He writes:

I have the impression this language structure has been with the southern Appalachian, yet universally recognized and understood by Americans, at least.

For example, a joke from decades back, about an Appalachian GI who's a new arrival in Germany, dining in a big restaurant. He needs a particular facility that he cannot find, and he asks the headwaiter, who points emphatically to the sign on a nearby door, which reads, "Herren." "Yes, I saw that Herren," says the Kentucky GI, "but I'm a-looking for ‘His'n’."

Well, I was reading yesterday about how High Noon was one of the great western movies. Came to be reading that because I was interested in the theme song from the movie and wondering about its surprising musical complexity — at least the fact that accomplished guitar entertainers have considerable difficulty with a request for that song and can't really reconstruct the melody entirely from memory. I think the lyrics don't provide enough memorability to hang the melody on — they're maybe too complex.

… It was a western, and this has been suggested to be generalizable, in which the men were the adults and the women the unrealistic children. Grace Kelly just opposes violence in any form and rejects any action by Coop to uphold not only his honor as a man but the oaths he has sworn to protect his town of which he is the sheriff. He's the one who knows what the choice is.

And I think Americans were always comfortable with the language they partly remember… . "His'n" is manly speak, at least when it comes out of the mouth of Tex Ritter as we look at the visage of Gary Cooper.

… Now after all these years, I see that some heard or remembered the lyrics differently, with no "his'n." How is that possible?

It’s possible because you really can’t hear the difference in the singing and I think younger people transcribing the lyrics would be unfamiliar with “his’n”. I guess I’ve heard people say “his’n” and “her’n” and “your’n” and even “our’n” and “their’n” as possessives (as well as “you’ns” as a plural), and read them used on “hillbilly” type kitsch. I didn’t think of it as specifically manly, but as country, indicating a class difference between Cooper and Kelly in the movie. She was a Quaker, maybe from a city, maybe better educated. (As an actress, Kelly was considered unsuitable for the role; she was too young and refined.) The Quaker/sheriff roles represent the pacifist vs. the one who must actively face down evil, which would fit her youth and his maturity as well as her femininity and his masculinity.

Be that as it may, I found two good Web entries on this form. First, from Barry Popik, whoever he is:

A classic little saying about short selling on Wall Street is: “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to prison.” The origin of the saying is unknown, but by 1898 it was attributed to financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879).
And:
An older English couplet (dating from the 1830s) and supposedly written by a 14-year-old criminal in chalk on a prison wall is: “Him as prigs wot isn’t his’n, Ven he’s cotch’d, wil go to pris’n.”

There’s a suggestion that “his’n” goes back very far to “his one” as an old English possessive.

But H. L. Mencken is quite thorough about it in The American Language, pointing out that the form is retained in standard English in the archaic “thine” but also in “mine”. Why the other forms have faded out of standard English I don’t know, but some old English usages did remain in Appalachia for at least a couple of centuries after the great migrations from Scotland, Ireland, and England. Speaking of which…

I endow'd thy purposes

With words that made them known.

Rich Lederer sent along his “disquisition on the Bard's contribution to our English language” from The Miracle of Language. (He also recommended Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: the World as Stage.)

First, Lederer asks what these phrases have in common:

Has Will a peer, I ask me.

I swear he's like a lamp.

We all make his praise.

Wise male. Ah, I sparkle!

Hear me, as I will speak.

Ah, I speak a swell rime.

Got it? They’re all anagrams of William Shakespeare. But Rich is really writing about the many words Shakespeare introduced to the language. At least, there’s no written evidence of the following words being used before him. Anyone can make up words, but so many of Shakespeare’s new words still live. Here are a very few:

hurry, impartial, laughable, bedroom

bump, misplaced, countless, obscene

courtship, critic, critical, pious

dwindle, reliance, eventful , road

exposure, fitful, frugal, sneak

generous, gloomy, submerge, useless

I do not now have access to the Oxford English Dictionary, so I’m not looking up the etymology of these words. It’s easy to see how a writer might invent a word such as “gloomy” by adding “y” to the root word, and his audience would understand it. Likewise “bedroom” would be comprehensible even if it were a new compound. Anyone with “a little Latin and less Greek” could form words from Latin and Greek roots. And we can understand how an invented phrase like “cold comfort” could be understood, and repeated, for centuries. But “road” and “sneak”? How could single syllable words be understood if they were brand new? Shakespeare is an enduring mystery.

Same Man

Dave DaBee sent along a selection from Daily Writing Tips about the two homos:

One commonly known Latin word is homo (”man”). Many Bible translations quote Pilate’s comment about Jesus in Latin: “Ecce Homo!” (”Behold the Man”).

And of course, anyone who has ever had a basic science course has learned the name of the modern human species: homo sapiens (”Man the Wise”).

The first time I heard the word homosexual and learned its meaning, I assumed that the prefix homo- meant “man” since the word refers to a relationship between men. Only later did I learn the difference between Latin homo (”man”) and a Greek homo (>homos “same”). NOTE: “Man” in Greek is anthropos.

The word homosexual entered English via a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis. The second part of the word, sexual, is from a Late Latin word. Mixing Latin and Greek elements in this way annoyed another student of human sexuality:

” ‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.” –H. Havelock Ellis, “Studies in Psychology,” 1897

Of course Latin and Greek are quite different languages, but if both languages came from Sanskrit, considering how geographically close they were, why should the same word have two quite different meanings? I know, I know, geography means nothing. You can’t understand the folks across the sea or on the other side of the mountain.

Susan Boyle

If you’re the one person remaining in the world who hasn’t yet heard Scotswoman Susan Boyle sing on Britain’s Got Talent, be sure and listen (and look for Simon Cowell with a sweet expression on his face).

ONLINE PUBS

I’m publishing for the Kindle digital reader with Amazon and now also on Lulu.com for download to computer and for printing. I mistakenly thought that the Kindle books could be downloaded to computer but they can’t. So now these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland last fall, with photos.

The Wish Book, a novella, is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues.

Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is a short story about a young gambler who finds himself upright in a cornfield in Kansas with his feet encased in a tub of concrete; how would you get out of a spot like that?

Still Ridge is a short story about a young woman who moves from Boston to Appalachia and finds there are two kinds of moonshine, the good kind and the kind that can kill you.

The CafePress shop is down for repairs.

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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. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Gulp

I have The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome by Joseph Pearce from the library. So far it’s pretty interesting, but a previous borrower who’s more excitable than I am left penciled notes throughout, lots of underlining and checkmarks and also lots of marginal comments. A few of them are word definitions, but mostly they’re: OK, Hmm, OKKK (meaning Okaaay), Gulp, Burp, Thank You, Ramble, OOO-H, Loosing it (Losing it), O-Ho, Com-on, !!!, augh, Yulp, nice but-, Aha, Gasp, Yeow. (I don’t get Burp and Yulp.) Some pages have no comments but quite a few have four or more O-ho’s and Gulps etc. Fred said at least he was engaged with the text.

Witness

I read the 800-page autobiography of Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952) (though I did skip over a lot of the transcripts of the hearings, and lists of names.) Chambers was a fine writer and must have been a reliable recorder of his own history; after practically ruining his life by testifying, he’d have little motive to lie in the book. He became a member of the Communist Party in his youth, and then a spy, committing what he called “the treason of ideas”, but later had a change of mind and heart and eventually felt he had to testify against another spy and former friend, Alger Hiss. Recently someone remarked on the fact that no movie has been made of this story. But you can figure out why.

On page 793, he wrote:

“No feature of the Hiss Case is more obvious, or more troubling as history, than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those who affected to act, think and speak for them. It was, not invariably, but in general, the ‘best people’ who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to almost any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.”

On page 741:

“The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades…. It is a statement of fact that need startle no one who has voted for that revolution in whole or in part.”

On page 473:

“For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism.”

The Chambers hearings were pre-McCarthy. If you have, as I did, an automatic response, a knee-jerk reaction, when you hear HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), blacklisting, Red-baiting, witch hunt, etc., if these have become memes for which you have little or no solid information, as I did — read this book. And consider this quote (for which I do not have the page number):

“Other ages have had their individual traitors — men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by the million in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.”

Kiss Miasma

It’s been three months since the election. At the book store last week a quick count turned up only 20 magazines with Obama covers, down somewhat from pre-election levels. At least his halo has disappeared from the photos.

It turns out the iPod that Obama gave to Queen Elizabeth was loaded with his own speeches, among other things. I think he also gave an iPod to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, but while he greeted the Queen correctly with a head nod, he bowed deeply to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, giving us a photographer’s-eye view of his obeisant miasma.

Obama also apologized to Europe for the United States. He doesn’t have to do that for me, or for my dad and uncles who were in WWII. What have we actually done to Europe, setting aside WWI, WWII, the Marshall Plan, and the Cold War? Compared to what they’ve done to each other and themselves?

Cuban Art

For those who want government-subsidized art, read “Cuba Now” by Kelly Crow in the 3/27/09 Wall Street Journal:

“The fact that Ms. Ceballos [independent art gallery owner] has never been shut down is a source of great intrigue for Cuba-watchers around the world. Some say it signals a new tolerance by Raul Castro, who has enacted a few reforms — allowing cell phones, for example[!] (Exclamation point mine.)

“In a country where the biggest art patron is the Cuban government, alternative art spaces that aren’t on the state payroll are nearly nonexistent. Artists who want to exhibit here typically attend government art schools before vying for a coveted slot in Havana’s handful of sanctioned galleries…. Gallery owners and biennial curators say they are free to show whatever they like, but they tend to sidestep pieces that directly criticize the ruling Castro family or their policies.”

This has been true everywhere that the government pays for and controls art. All governments purchase public art, but subsidies for artists are different. Government-subsidized art does not mean art from or for “the people”. It’s the individuals in the government who make decisions. They are people too. Maybe “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is always descriptive, not proscriptive.

Anyway, remember the state-controlled “social realist” art from Russia and China? I used to have a book of Chinese propaganda posters, where even the infants were exploding with health and forward-looking fervor. For a funny take on China’s state art, see The Thoughts of Chairman Miaow by Frank Hopkinson: “Let's sing a new song about bank nationalization and rabbit flavor chunks!”

Quack?

“Confucius famously said that the first thing he would do to reform and rectify the state was to make sure that things were called by their right names. For if you don’t call things by their right names, how can you hope to maintain morality and probity?”

Once again this famous dictum of Confucius is summoned in aid of clarity. In his article “In Praise of Precision”, Theodore Dalrymple writes about the misuse of the word “liberation” in a news story. If it does not talk like a duck and quack like a duck, maybe it’s not a duck.

Obama has another spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jim Wallis, former president of SDS, who’s quoted as saying about the Vietnamese boat people who fled after the U.S. pulled out that they left Vietnam "to support their consumer habits in other lands". I’ve never heard that explanation. Whatever can he mean? My aged Marxist friend always comments on the economic advantage or disadvantage of any situation: Your son’s getting married? It must be for the tax advantages.

What to do with old books

I don’t really like the idea of destroying books, but sometimes we do accumulate more than we can re-read or sell at a yard sale or afford to mail to book-deprived people. Here are some amusing ideas for using those piles of books in the basement.

Does size matter?

Many papers went to a narrower format years ago. The Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati’s only remaining major newspaper (the Post folded last year), also got thinner early this year, cutting a large percentage of pages. This week it got narrower again; it’s only 11 inches wide. I don’t know why they don’t just go to tabloid, like their weekly events calendar freebie. Of course the economy is killing ad revenues, but newspapers are really being wiped out by the Internet. Television couldn’t do it, but Web news and blogs will. It’s too bad. But I guess I’m (perhaps prematurely) nostalgic for the physical format, not for news itself, which will always be with us. I kind of wish I’d worked on a newspaper, and now it’s not likely that I ever will, or that I’ll have a syndicated column, an old dream of mine. But I’ve got Kindle.

By the way, I was mistaken when I said that Kindle publications can be downloaded to computer. They can only be downloaded to Kindles and to Kindle for iPhone.

Logic

"So long as we have any doubt about the truth of the major premise, the conclusion cannot be trusted." Percy Marks, "Logic" (1945), in Think Before You Write 235, 237 (William G. Leary & James Steel Smith eds., 1951).

KINDLE PUBS

Search for Rhonda Keith, or for these titles, on Amazon.com in the Kindle Store:

The Wish Book, a novella, is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues.

Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is a short story about a young gambler who finds himself upright in a cornfield in Kansas with his feet encased in a tub of concrete. How would you get out of a spot like that?

Still Ridge is a short story about a young woman who moves from Boston to Appalachia and learns there are two kinds of moonshine, the good kind and the kind that can kill you. Or someone else.

More detailed plot summaries are on Amazon.com.

______________________________________________

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. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

When Adam Delved and Eve Span,

Who Was Then a Gentleman?

Germaine Greer’s new book, Shakespeare’s Wife, seeks to restore the reputation of Anne Hathaway, who has a bad name among Shakespeare scholars for no real reason. Yet right off the bat Greer resorts to the same kind of speculation that others are guilty of: “it may have been” — “we can imagine” — “very possibly” and so on — in order to denigrate Shakespeare’s mother, of all things. If the largely male literary critics and historians allowed their sloppy research and prejudices to construct an imaginary Anne Hathaway, what’s Greer’s reason for inventing, then resenting, a bad mother who taught the “brilliant boy” his first syllables?

She also sneers at another scholar whose research indicates that Shakespeare was Catholic, or “more Catholic than the Pope” in Greer’s words, but that’s just typical academic sniping.

While she did copious historical research, and no doubt examined original documents, much of her historical verification consists of presenting songs and literature of the period to show how people commonly thought, since she didn’t have new original source material regarding the Shakespeares. I’d like to see the book printed in three parallel columns: (1) history, (2) literature, (3) speculation.

Knowing what I do of Greer’s own life, it’s easy to guess about her own motives for spinning history, and I’d have more foundation than she does for some of her insinuations (they can’t be called conclusions).

The book isn’t really so much about Anne Hathaway after all. It’s worthwhile if you want to learn more about that period, but I was disappointed and didn’t finish the reading it.

It’s the Thought That Counts

According to Facebook, Obama is my fourth cousin once removed. I believe Facebook implicitly, so as family, it’s time for me to speak out about his gift-giving to important people in England. First, he returned a bust of Churchill that had been a gift to the White House. Then a couple of weeks ago he gave the Prime Minister a box of DVDs (which didn’t work with the British system). The PM gave him a pen holder made from the timbers of the 1878 ship HMS Gannet, once called HMS President, which patrolled the Mediterranean and Red Sea against Islamic slavers; furthermore, “oak from the Gannet’s sister ship, HMS Resolute, was carved to make a desk that has sat in the Oval Office in the White House since 1880. Mr. Brown also handed over a framed commission for HMS Resolute and a first edition of the seven-volume biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert.” The Obamas’ children received dresses from a nice English shop, plus some books. Mrs. O gave Mr. Brown’s children plastic helicopters.

The O’s didn’t learn from this embarrassing exchange. This week, “Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II an engraved iPod during his visit to Buckingham Palace … with headphones and already loaded with songs. The president and first lady also gave the Queen a rare book of songs signed by The King and I composer Richard Rodgers.” Bet her toes are tapping now. She already had an iPod? Oh.

Some of the best gifts I ever received cost little or nothing, but thought went into them. Don’t they have People in the White House to take care of protocol, or did they fire everyone who knew how to do things?

My apologies to my English friends.

I hardly know where to begin to comment on Obama’s actual work so far, all of which demonstrates the same kind of care and intelligence he’s put into gift-giving. Shape up, cuz.

(By the way, I love Daniel Hannan. He’s a real straight shooter.)

Shame on Us

We can always count on a classroom horror story to bring out Anne DaBee:

At least the student wrote "he WAS the man...". I remember arguing about this sort of "English", whether spoken or written, back in 1974. … I've already told you about the language arts teacher (black) who instructed her 8th grade students that, no matter how they spoke at home or among themselves, she expected correct English in her class, again whether spoken or written. The black students interpreted "correct English" to mean "white English", and rebelled. The teacher was reprimanded. Possibly the student quoted in Carey Harrison's piece was a relative of one of our 1974 8th graders... God help us all, if educators are still being forced to accept substandard language, whether spoken or written.

(I’ve told adult students that what I was teaching was standard English, and knowing standard English is a survival skill. If they wanted to study slang or dialect, that's not my specialty.)

I also remember that, when I was a classroom aide in an elementary school a few years earlier, I wasn't to lower a student's grade for incorrect spelling unless the paper was a spelling test. So a student writing about the planets could refer to "Uriness" without penalty. I could circle the "bad" word, but not lower the grade, even if the bad spelling appeared several weeks in a row, as it usually did. AARGH. And we called ourselves "teachers"?

(Here I must repeat the story about a student who complained to me that “it’s not fair that some students get better grades just because they write better” — in an English class.)

Self esteem, the magic goal for which all standards have been compromised, from the rules of grammar to the scoring of SATs. What about those who scored a perfect 1600 way back when, while today's 1600 (if it happens) is the equivalent of perhaps a 1200 back then? Nothing wrong with 1200, as long as it's not allowed to masquerade as "perfect".

… When a freshman requirement at a highly rated local Community College is remedial English, doesn't it make you wonder what goes on in HS English classes? And why do you suppose so many colleges are no longer considering SAT scores when considering students for admission?

Colleges rely on keeping students for income, but what’s the excuse for public schools?

No. 1

Once again I got HBO just to watch a particular series. Last time it was the excellent series on John Adams. Now it’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I’m a fan of Alexander McCall’s Smith’s novels, and even he thinks this production, filmed in Botswana, is a good rendition of his stories.

In the books people address each other as Mma (female) and Rra (male). I always wondered how to pronounce those titles, and if they’re abbreviations or words. At least now I know how they sound: pretty much as they’re spelled.

Smith had this to say in an HBO interview:

HBO: In the series, the characters speak with a certain distinction, is that reflective of African English?

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Yes. It's very correct. When one considers the awful things that are happening to the English language in various parts of the world, where it's becoming debased and unduly simplified... where a lot of the richness is going. It's very nice to hear English used correctly and to hear people speaking in sentences, which one certainly finds in the English speaking countries in Africa.

Do watch this series (and read the books): charming, sweet, sometimes serious.

Little Miss What?

Michael Galanes is the founder and director of the Little Miss Perfect pageant, which is featured in a WE reality TV series just now. If you can call that reality. It’s a beauty pageant for little girls. In an interview, Galanes said:

“They perform on Little Miss Perfect so they can perform in real life as a doctor or a lawyer or [ a Native American ] chief.”

Note the brackets, which indicate that what he actually said has been corrected or replaced. He must have been using the old children’s counting rhyme and the editor thought “Indian chief” was offensive, or thought he was supposed to think it was offensive.

What Galanes said on TV about the “Wow wear” part of the contest, which stands in the place of talent competition, was not edited. Galanes explained that the little girls try to “wow” the judges by extra cute or extravagant clothing … “you might see a cowgirl or a gymnast or a nurse or a doctor who just came from the best little whorehouse in Texas.”

Aww, isn’t that cute? The children are our future.

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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. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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