Autochthonous on the 4th of July

I’ve written before about “Native American” meaning “Indian” (everything ought to be in quotes, I guess). I’m a native American since I was born here. Indians I’ve known preferred to be known by their tribal names: Pojoaque, Seneca, etc. Bryan Garner’s Daily Usage Tips provides some history:

The term "Native American" proliferated in the 1970s to denote groups served by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs: American Indians as well as the Eskimos and Aleuts of Alaska. Later, the term was interpreted as including Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and it fell into disfavor among some Indian and Alaskan groups, who came to prefer "American Indian" and "Alaska Native." Yet views are unpredictable: some consider "Native American" more respectful than "American Indian."
            As an equivalent to "American Indian," the phrase "Native American" was long thought to be a 20th-century innovation. In fact, the phrase dates back to at least 1737 in this sense. And it made literal sense then, since most people who had been born in the New World were indigenous — not of European descent.
            By the 19th century, when the term "Native American" was fairly common, it had become ambiguous, since it often referred to any person born in the United States, whether of indigenous or of European descent. …

            The phrase "indigenous American," which is more logically and etymologically correct, does have some support. …

            Meanwhile, the synonymous phrase "autochthonous American" hasn't ever caught on. No surprise there.

After looking up the roots of “indigenous” I can’t see that it’s logically or etymologically superior to “native” since they mean pretty much the same thing, as does “autochtonous”, as well as aboriginal or any other substitutes for “Indian”. The question is really, how many generations back did your ancestors arrive in America? Even the people called Indians are presumed to have migrated long ago over the Bering Strait or in boats from the South Pacific or even Asia, or possibly even from Europe. Maybe someone has a theory about South Americans coming from Africa. But I was born here under this government, and any Indians alive now were also born here in this era in this nation. There are only native Americans and immigrants. Unless you want to talk about “race”. Redskins, anyone?

Self Esteem + Relativism + Fake Diversity = Why Bother

Dave DaBee and I both choked on this Daily Writing Tips entry:

Why Bother About Correctness?

I often receive emails from readers who profess to see no reason to worry about standard forms of spelling or usage. I say “profess” because if they are reading DWT posts, they must care a little.

Here’s a recent comment:

does it really matter b/c everyone has their own way of speaking, writing, and thinking and the languages and “right” ways of spelling our only set up and there… truely their is no wrong or right way to spell because everyhitng was just though up by someone eles… such as books are thoughup by theirs writers…

On the face of it, this comment suggests that the writer does not assign much meaning to language or to thought. And there’s no reason that he/she should. According to some thinkers, the only meaning life has is the meaning we choose to give it. So no, in the grand scheme of the universe, it doesn’t matter if you spell truly with an e. The stars are not going to fall because of it.

Stars may not fall but other things will, both material and abstract, depending on the students’ courses of study. I’m not sure if Mr. Daily Writing Tips really thinks there’s no reason to assign meaning to language or thought, let alone spelling. If he’s being sarcastic, he’s not good at sarcasm.

            This idea that there is no right or wrong in language — or anything else — has become an educational principle in latter decades, and many of the newer teachers who got their degrees in this intellectual climate agree with the barely literate philosophy above, and their skills may be little better than that writer’s, who clearly is swollen with self-esteem.

[|||]  In Ak-Ron a couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with a former comrade in teaching arms who stuck it out a few years longer than I did. She said one of the last straws was when she intended to flunk a bright student who missed 27 classes and didn’t do the work. (Another straw was when the university wouldn’t allow the temp instructors to use the library between semesters.) The department passed the student anyway, without the instructor’s signature. That was about money; they were afraid the student would quit rather than re-take the class. I wonder what that student is doing now. My friend is still picking last straws out of her hair.

[|||]  Walter E. Williams wrote about the disaster of placing “diversity” above academics. You’d think Asian students would fill diversity quotas in universities, wouldn’t you? But no. They study too much, and if schools give priority to good students, they’ll have too many Asians. They’re not looking to diversify their athletic teams, though. I think there should be more 100-pound Asians in college football.

Obama’s Dreams

Jack Cashill has written further about his theories on the authorship of Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father.

            Mike Sykes, by the way, thought he detected a hint of snideness in my reference to Obama’s remarks on “vigorous debate” in Iran. It is true that he may have said that before the election and ensuing riots and killing, in which case I was being prematurely snide. Obama was merely suffering from premature congratulation.

            This week, O’ seems to have sided with the likes of Hugo Chavez and Castro in condemning a “coup” in Honduras, but it was not a coup, as a trained lawyer ought to know. The elected president was ousted by military, true, but they replaced him with someone from the same party, acting on the orders of the Supreme Court, because the president was attempting to subvert their constitutionally prescribed single-term limit and pull off a Castro/Chavez leader-for-life deal.

            Also in the O’news, Congress contemplates a law that would require people who choose not to buy health insurance to pay a hefty fine, say $1,000. I don’t know if that would be a repeating fine, due monthly, perhaps, until the finee pays up. People who can’t afford the fine will have it paid by the gov’t (taxes), but you’d think the gov’t would arrange for everyone’s health insurance to be paid automatically from the get-go to avoid the mess.

Out of the Surf

Kara DeFrias, bless her heart, has written an Ode to the Serial Comma, patterned after Shakespeare:

Part 1 (a la Romeo and Juliet)
‘Tis but thy serial comma that is my enemy;
Thou art punctuation, though not an agreed upon one.
What’s agreed? It is nor placement, nor style,
Nor usage, nor style guide, nor any other part
Belonging to a keyboard. O, be some other keystroke!
What’s in a name? That which we call a comma
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Writer would, were he not Writer call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Writer, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all thy commas.

Part 2 (Much Ado About Nothing)
He that uses a serial comma is more than a youth
And he that uses no serial comma is less than a man.

From this blog I also discovered Talk Like Shakespeare Day.

Bulwer-Lytton

Once again the results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest are in. I may have previously expressed my disappointment at not having won long ago with an entry having to do with an albino. But I can always try again, and you can too. The current winners are a bit formulaic. My favorite is one of the Dishonorable Mentions:

No man is an island, so they say, although the small crustaceans and the bird which sat impassively on Dirk Manhope's chest as he floated lazily in the pool would probably disagree.

Glen Robins
Brighton, East Sussex, U.K.

That’s Personal Information

I got an e-mail advertisement from Amazon that started out: “As someone who has shown an interest in footwear…”

            That would be me, because I bought a pair of shoes from Amazon last year. But they make it sound so … creepy.

90

Writer’s Digest is celebrating 90 years of publication of articles like “Writing for the Talkies” (1931), “Writing Comedy for Jackie Gleason” (1966), and “Writing Light Verse Is Heavy” (1972). Check it out if you’re interested in type fonts and older styles of graphic art.

______________________________________________

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. Most of these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

      The Man from Scratch is about cloning, escort services, murder, and restaurants in Akron, Ohio, featuring Roxy Barbarino, writer for Adventuress Magazine. Novel.

      A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

Scot Tartans: T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

T-Shirts & mug: FRESH  PICT, with two ancient Pictish designs

BUMPER STICKER: FRESH  PICT, white on blue, with 10th Century Pict-Scot Merman Cross (blue on white also available)

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

NEW: FRESH  PICT items

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper), title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I

BUMPER STICKER: Dulce, Utile, et Decorum

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

______________________________________________

Look Who Tipped Up

New reader from England, Charlie F., found part of the PO discussion of “Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy” which inevitably led to numerous e-mails running off in all four directions, but I’ll just pass on two. He sent this from Time’s online archive:

Authors of The Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy, Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart, do not know themselves what the words mean. Said Slim: "We were sort of talking a new language." The dance they had vaguely in mind was to be done flatfoot. "When we put the floy floy on it, that was extra business. You got the whole dance right there; you're
swinging. See what I mean?"

            Actually I was searching for a clip of the number because someone on the BBC 'Word of Mouth' message board had randomly queried what a floozy was. Being somewhat gobsmacked that anyone should need to ask what a floozy is or was, I thought I might just just muddy the water further, by virtually singing a chorus of the 'flat-foot floozy with the floy floy'. I googled for a youtube clip or the lyrics and discovered my error. Not floozy but floogie!
             So I thought, what's a floogie? Come to that, what's a floy floy? So I tipped up at your site, as well as Time Magazine's archives, via the OED (where floogie doesn't rate a mention) and floy as your British chum found has no bearing on the song.
            Note the new (to me) expression: tipped up. I guessed it might be a boating term but it’s not. Charlie wrote, “Over here you can rock up and slope off too,” and then sent “tip up” usages from the OED: something like “tiptoe”.

            As for “floogy”, listening to the song by Slim Gaillard on YouTube, I discovered that the G in “floogie” is pronounced like J in jam, not G in good, making it a bit closer to the sound of “floozy”. I can’t find etymology for that word either, though yourdictionary.com links it to “flossy” — kind of fluffy and light.

            Then on to “mad”. Charlie used the phrase “mad keen cyclist”. I said “mad” has been taken up rather recently as slang (often in Overheard in New York), used as an adjectival intensifier. “Madly” should be the adverb in “mad keen cyclist” and the adjective in something like “mad drunk” (very drunk), but it’s an adverb: very keen, very drunk. Charlie’s example from 1487 shows the basic meaning of crazy or angry, in an adverbial position (modifying the adjective):

Dronkenes maketh men to be somme mery dronken and somme mad dronken. (Skelton 1487)

Euphemism, Miscue, and Oxymoron

From Bryan Garner's Usage Tip of the Day:

Minor woman — an odd combination of euphemism, miscue, and oxymoron — displaces a more natural wording such as "girl," "female minor," or, if the sex of the person is obvious, "minor." E.g.: "His reference to a 'mature' woman means he does not favor the right of a minor woman [read 'minor'] to choose to have an abortion without parental or judicial consent." Susan Yoachum, "Wilson Campaign Sticks to Familiar Topics," S.F. Chron., 2 Nov. 1990, at A21.

            I get that “minor woman” is both a miscue and oxymoron, but why is it a euphemism? A euphemism is a word that softens a harsh reality, like “pass on” for “die” or “schnockered” for “mad drunk”. But what’s indelicate about an underage female, and why would “minor woman” be a softer term? Is there a word for calling something normal or neutral by a harsher name?

            During the crest of the feminist reworking of language, we started saying woman instead of girl or young lady. The word woman demanded more respect, though to my ears it sounded strange for a long time, less polite, too sexual, too coarse, or even vaguely insulting. I’m glad the word was reclaimed. I didn’t want to be a [little] girl forever and I didn’t always feel ladylike. Woman worked.

            But the more radical feminists also called females under 18 women. The thinking was that young girls ought to be able to “decide what to do with their bodies”, as if teenagers have very good sense about making life-altering decisions. I know I didn’t. People don’t automatically become adults (women and men) just because they’re legally allowed to drink. We don’t use “woman” to refer to a girl who’s just entered physical puberty, even if she gets pregnant at the age of 13.

            If I had a minor daughter, I’d be suspicious of anyone who referred to her as a woman. The purpose seems to be to kick the children up to the level of adult autonomy as well as premature independence from their parents. Adults who want children to be legally able to do everything adults do often have questionable motives.

The 4-H Club

2-H: Harry H. asked about the origins of human speech, but I haven’t studied that and don’t have a good guess. The secular or scientific view, which is what he’s wondering about, is that the brain has a built-in language capacity, but that doesn’t explain how or why it kicked in with the very first human word. As Harry pointed out, occasionally children have been found who’ve grown up in the wild, or in solitude, and they didn’t develop language on their own. Some animals can supposedly be taught words or symbols, but they don’t do this independently. So what was the first word? (Or logos?) Ancient writing has been found, but no prehistoric audio record. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll be able to pick up and identify sound waves from the first speaking humans, beamed back to us from outer space.

            Harry also told me about a program to teach your baby to read.

2-H: Herb H. wrote:

I thought last week that you were not exactly complete in your remark about pronunciation of cou-pay and coop.  Radio announcers in the 1940s always seemed to say cou-pay, and we were taught in school that radio announcers were good authority on pronunciation. … The voices that carried forward the story lines in the detective shows would say that the mysterious blonde was picked up by a gray cou-pay and we heard the engine as it drove away, winding up through the gears, voooooooooom, um, voooom, um, vooooooo* . . . Always two shifts.  And you might remember in Bonnie and Clyde, when the pair encountered young WC working in the gasoline station.  Bonnie asked WC if he knew what kind of car they were in.  He said sure, it was a nineteen thirty-two Ford cou-pay.  Bonnie so no, it was a STOLEN nineteen thirty-two Ford cou-pay. 

            But it seemed to me that in America, car name pronunciation was determined and promulgated by car dealers.  And car dealers assiduously pursued an air of ignorance.  Gradually I came to understand they were about making the prospective customer comfortable.  Chev-row-lay was kind of hard to say.  Any attempt to deal literally in the American tongue with the word spelled "Chevrolet" would be even worse.  Dinah Shore could sing, "See the USA in your Chev-row-lay," but without exception, dealers and their salesmen said "Chev - o - lay."  Well, in the same way, far as I ever heard, every one of them said "coop."  More commonly, because a lot more of them were made, it was "club coop." 

            Many decades ago in Columbus, a Chev-o-lay dealership up on the north edge of town was named for the two owners.  It was Mahlon - Maxton Chevrolet.  Mahlon was turble embarrassed about such a tongue-unfriendly name spelling.  They advertised every morning on AM radio, but still the public hesitated over that "Mahlon."  In time, the two owners terminated their partnership. Maxton took over the business and continued the advertising with the slogan, "Jack Maxton, what a great, great guy," and always said Jack Maxton Chev-o-lay. Mahlon wanted his own dealership.  I don't think they had focus groups in those days, but he wanted a better business name and he didn't want a total divorce from his old family name, so he became Bobby Layman Chev-o-lay, out on the west edge of town. And NOBODY sounded more ignorant in a radio commercial than Bobby Layman.

* Shouldn’t that be “vrooooooooom”? I guess people who say “Che-vo-lay” have cars that go vooooom.

Vigorous Twit

President O said the Iranian election has led to “vigorous debate”. I’m not sure how many people so far have been vigorously debated with by bullet or axe.

            Dave DaBee wrote, “Somebody put out a perfect tweet Monday: Tienanmen + Twitter = Tehran. Perfect because of the sharp-eyed message, the alliteration, the terseness, and that random soul's ability to get it heard (and retweeted).”

______________________________________________

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. Most of these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

      The Man from Scratch is about cloning, escort services, murder, and restaurants in Akron, Ohio, featuring Roxy Barbarino, writer for Adventuress Magazine. Novel.

      A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

Scot Tartans: T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

T-Shirts & mug: FRESH  PICT, with two ancient Pictish designs

BUMPER STICKER: FRESH  PICT, white on blue, with 10th Century Pict-Scot Merman Cross (blue on white also available)

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

NEW: FRESH  PICT items

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper), title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I

BUMPER STICKER: Dulce, Utile, et Decorum

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Who is Larcenia? what is she, that all our pols commend her?

Larcenia Bullard is a Democratic Florida state senator. Perhaps her choice of career was a foregone conclusion; her name directed her thataway. (Note: A Google search turns up other people named Larcenia. Why?)

            However, her having been raised in a vocabulary-impaired home is throwing additional stumbling blocks in the path of the Florida legislature as they wrestle with the terms of a new anti-bestiality law. Larcenia thought animal husbandry had something to do with human-animal marriage.

            “So that maybe was the reason the lady was so upset about that monkey?” she asked, referring to a tragic chimpanzee-killing in Connecticut.

            Perhaps it won’t be long before marriage will be redefined to include human-beast marriage. As I mentioned last week in the context of pet cemeteries, many people already think of their pets as their babies. Just carry the logic a little further.

            But I’m not going any further than the marriage of true minds.

Coupe

Dave DaBee says, “fwiw, My dad, lover of classic cars, always said coop not coopay.” Fred also says he never heard coopay. I know I’ve heard coopay but maybe it was meant to be a joke. However, I really don’t remember hearing coop for coupe, but that means nothing.

            The French have a lot to answer for.

I Get It

I’m not the earliest adopter of new technology though I don’t drag my feet forever. So when Dave DaBee jumped from blogging to Twitter, I thought that’s OK for him because he has the nervous system of a hummingbird, but I can’t work within 140 characters. But I decided I should at least know what Twitter is, so I signed up and decided to use it to announce new editions of Parvum Opus and my Amazon Kindle publications.

            Monday, Twitter changed my mind about the value of this nervous little addition to our suite of communication streams. On Monday afternoon I happened to notice that the election in Iran and its subsequent riots were being reported, as far as I could tell, only via Twitter. Obviously no Western journalists were permitted to cover the news. Very little appeared on TV except for Obama’s reluctant response. Just as newspapers lag behind TV and radio, TV and radio necessarily lag behind the Internet.

            People in Iran were sending out messages via Twitter and trying to keep ahead of government attempts to cut communications. They reported names of people who were shot and other news items, briefly, to be sure.   

            Messages were coming in the #IranElection category at the rate of about 2,000 per hour, it seemed, although many of them were from Americans and others outside Iran conveying support and information about how the Iranians could circumvent the closing of web portals.

            Twitter had been scheduled to shut down that night for 90 minutes of maintenance and upgrade, but users (including me) begged them to postpone it so that the Iranians could maintain some contact with the outside world — and Twitter (and its service provider) delayed maintenance! Hooray for them!

She Got It

From Overheard in New York:

Old woman with husband, reminiscing: When I was younger I had an art degree from Cooper Union, had a fantastic graphic design job. I had a great career going for myself. And then guess what happened.
20-something girl: You got married?
Old woman, shocked: No! How old do you think I am? That we're from the 1800s? (pause) Computers. That's what happened.

They Didn’t Get It

It’s not easy keeping up with technology, so you can say almost anything if it’s said with enough assurance.

            Once Fred and I drove from Boston to Cincinnati in separate vehicles, with me in the lead. Fred got pulled over by a trooper who said in New York State you can’t drive in the middle lane (huh?), plus you’re not allowed to use cell phones while driving. They discussed the lane issue but Fred was a bit vague about the phone (we talked to each other at times while driving) and somehow the trooper got the idea that we had walkie-talkies, which he thought was a good idea. Cell phone bad, walkie-talkie good. Go figure.

            More recently, Fred caught some flak from a woman in the building where he works who complained that he should have opened the door for her instead of standing around sending text messages. He said, “That’s not my job, and I wasn’t texting, I was checking e-mail.” Somehow that mollified her.

They’ll Get You

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports China's announcement that personal computers sold from July 1 must carry Internet-filtering software pre-installed by the manufacturer. Presumably hackers can find ways around this software, but most people don’t have those skills.

            In the mainstream media here, the pretty young women journalists who get arrested get the most media notice, such as Roxana Saberi, Laura Ling, and Euna Lee, but CPJ reports on the many journalists imprisoned and killed all over the world. Here’s CPJ's list of "10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger":

Burma

Iran

Syria

Cuba (http://desdecuba.com/)

Saudi Arabia

Vietnam

Tunisia

China

Turkmenistan

Egypt

Sometimes bloggers can publish via external blog sites (such as desdecuba, “from Cuba”).

Dave Says Ugh

Dave DaBee discovered a hideous new portmanteau word, “vigariously”, reported in Trouble with “Vigorously” and “Vicariously” in Daily Writing Tips. The portmanteau word was named by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. Portmanteau is an old-fashioned word for suitcase, and a portmanteau word packs more than one meaning in a word. It seems that vigariously is getting popular among bloggers but whether it’s from ignorance or intention is not clear, since it’s used incorrectly to mean either “vigorously” or “vicariously”, not both. The meanings of “vigorous” and “vicarious” are not even close (so it’s not truly a portmanteau word; I just wanted to bring that up). DWT says “vagariously” (with an A) is a word, meaning marked by vagaries, but it’s rare (I’ve never seen it) and isn’t the cause of this confusion. Probably one person used a word incorrectly and someone else liked the sound of it and it spread. Like a virus. Ugh.

So, You Want to Be a Writer? Movie Director? River?

Another conversation from Overheard in New York, in a coffee shop:

Guy #1: May I presuppose what I think you're trying to articulate, which is, that the core universality of your character's arc needs to be explicitly emphasized in the color palate?
Guy #2: I think that's fair, but I'm not sure you can go there with an audience.
Guy #1: But isn't the whole narrative journey bringing them there?
Guy #2: Yes and no. Essentially we can't bring them there, because we can't get there ourselves.
Guy #1: Hmmm, I'm not sure if I agree with that.
Guy #2: We can't get there. Our protagonist can't get there, he can't bring us there with him.
Guy #1: Where?
Guy #2: The river.
Guy #1: Why is he going to the river?
Guy #2: Because that's — that's — that's the thing. That's the thing he has to do. It's like, he is that river, and that's why we go to a wide-shot there.
Guy #1: I do see the wide-shot there, but I think we need more exposition for the catharsis to work.

Reminds me of the Nicolas Cage characters, twin brothers who were very different kinds of script writers, in the movie The Orchid Thief (which was quite different from the book). I’d agree that you need a whole lot more exposition to make a character be a river. Nicolas Cage 1 might say if he can be the river, the audience can be the river. Nicolas Cage 2 might say, throw him in the river with some alligators and see what happens.

Road Trip

Heading out on the  highway for a few days, to Ak-Ron. See you next week at the old stand, as usual.

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. Most of these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

      The Man from Scratch is about cloning, escort services, murder, and restaurants in Akron, Ohio, featuring Roxy Barbarino, writer for Adventuress Magazine. Novel.

      A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

Scot Tartans: T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

T-Shirts & mug: FRESH  PICT, with two ancient Pictish designs

BUMPER STICKER: FRESH  PICT, white on blue, with 10th Century Pict-Scot Merman Cross (blue on white also available)

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

NEW: FRESH  PICT items

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper), title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I

BUMPER STICKER: Dulce, Utile, et Decorum

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Fun, Fun, Fun

Good stuff from the car songs.

            Mike Sykes noticed that in “Little Deuce Coupe”, coupe rhymes with soup. True. But in general conversation it’s Chevrolay coo-pay in the USA.

            Harry H. wrote:

Lotta Moxie, the name of one of the Rubber City Roller Girls. My cousin and I went in April to their first match at John S. Knight Center, downtown. Lotta Moxie was his favorite. Barbonic Plague was mine. There was also Harriet Beacher A ss and other assorted team member names. . . .
            Also, my cousin was really into cars. But not the normal kind. He worked as a mechanic with Akron's Art Arfons and on his Green Monster. Traveled to Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah with Art.
            Electric car by Tesla Motors. Now we need a song about this 0 to 60 in 3.9 second electric (marvel) car that goes around 300 miles on a single charge (I believe there is a clip of Arnold Swartzennnnhopperer driving one). [Note: I want one as soon as they reduce the price 90%.]

            Herb H:

Did you sell Grit? I did. Might've been the only one who ever did that in Fairfax, about eighth grade. They printed little coupons in comic books, for kids to send in. It was the tabloid newspaper size in the early 50s, no color in it anywhere that I recall.

            Perhaps you'll get a ton of responses on the hot rod vocab, and if so there'll almost certainly be a fair portion of them that are incorrect. . . . I'll only touch what seem to me the more esoteric.

            "Souped up!" Doesn't that seem odd? There was never a time when people threw soup on their engines. A fair guess might be that "souped up" was about adding some goodies to the fuel one is burning, to get more power. Later on, beginning in the 50s, dragsters commonly burned "nitro," in the "fuel" classes. In that case the engines were set up to burn methanol (wood alcohol), so that they could mix in liberal additions of nitromethane for a lot more power. Hotrodders who were constrained by having to burn gasoline could also add "nitro" in the form of nitrobenzene — not as successful and not broadly popular. Nitromethane was not miscible with gasoline, but was with alcohol. Nitrobenzene was miscible with gasoline, but there was only one nitro group on a pretty big benzene molecule.

            But that's not the origin of "souped up," anyway. "Souped up" refers to electrical modification, electricity being "soup" or "juice" in the early days. As the pioneers set about making their Model T Fords go faster than the other feller's, the ignition system was a severe limitation — producing a hundred or more hot sparks per second was a real challenge.

            Other versions of "Hot Rod Lincoln" said it had twelve cylinders, rather than eight. Originally, that was probably the point of the "Lincoln." Like Packard and Cadillac, some models of Lincoln had V-12 engines. They didn't make good hot rod engines to put into a Model A, though — way too heavy.

            "With 4.11 gears you can relly get lost" is terminology that street rodders would understand. Getting lost was running away from a police patrolman so that he couldn't find you. The 4.11 gears would help to accelerate very fast, not to go fast on the open road. The way to get lost was in the city making many turns and rapid accelerations, gaining a little bit more with each maneuver until the pursuer no longer could tell which way you went. . . . Around 1959 there was a kid named John Render who lived in Madeira, whose father loved hot rods and indulged the son — limitlessly it seemed. They were commonly encountered at the drag strips. John had a Deuce Coupe and that was okay, but a really nifty Deuce Roadster became available in the area and John Sr bought that also for John Jr. Jr "modified" it in an afternoon by taking off all the fenders and the top — it already had the go-fast mods — then went out fast driving. Jr knew he could get lost from a cop, but I guess he didn't know they had radios and lots of "backup." The police reported they had 21 road blocks set up at one time. They caught him. 

            The number 4.11 is the gear ratio in the "rear end," or differential, the most important factor in whether you were geared to accelerate fast or to go faster at top speed after you got through accelerating. A 4.11 rear end had 9 teeth on the pinion gear and 37 teeth on the ring gear. 37 divided by nine gives 4.11. Driving around with a 4.11 meant that when you did get out on the open road, your engine was beating itself apart at a very high engine speed for just a fairly high road speed. The cure was an overdrive unit, which reduced the overall gear ratio and let the engine turn slower at highway speed.

            In Little Deuce Coupe, my guess is the term "till the Lake Pipes roar. . . " will wrinkle some brows. The term has some history. Drag racing at drag strips grew slowly to enormous proportions by the late 1950s. There had always been drag racing on the roads since Model T days, but the hot rodding competition that got the most press in the 40s and perhaps earlier was high speed racing off the road. Across the country there was very little opportunity to do that. But in southern California, there were dry lake beds, big flat areas where prehistoric lakes had been, dried hard and smooth. One group built racing cars especially for the purpose of going as fast as they could against a clock, out on these dry lake beds. Those cars were called "lakesters." Many of them didn't actually have a car body, but had a fabricated body made from big aircraft fuel tanks and the like, as streamlined as anything the hot rodders might imagine. A driver might actually drive in a prone position with just rudimentary controls.

            But a larger number of hot rodders wanted to test their cars against similar cars in slower "classes." They wanted to drive out to the lake beds, compete there, then drive home. One of many adaptations was in the exhaust system. The most powerful arrangement, least power-losing configuration, was a straight exhaust pipe with no muffler of any kind. These competitors soon made exhaust pipes that went straight out the sides and back with no mufflers, but had caps that could be bolted onto them. Additional piping was provided to take the exhaust gases from those short straight pipes when the ends of the pipes had been capped off, passing the gases through mufflers that would quiet them enough to be street legal. Those were called "lake pipes." And the name survived long after the dry lake beds were made off limits to hot rodders. (I think Edwards Air Force Base incorporated the dry lake bed land.)

            "Shut you down!" From drag racing in classes, class eliminations. The loser is through racing for the day. He's shut down. The term spread, probably in microseconds, to apply to losing any race anywhere any time. From "Little Old Lady From Pasadena":

"All the guys want to race her from miles around

But she'll give 'em a length and she'll shut 'em down."

Adjunctivitis

You might be able to catch a movie called Flunked, about the dismal state of education, but it’s not playing around here. In fact nothing is playing within 5 or 10 miles since the nearest movie theater, in the upscale mall near us, just closed. I thought they might rebuild with stadium seating, but no; it will be replaced by a clothing store, which is OK, but every once in a while we need the big screen.

            One Party Classroom by David Horowitz is worth at least a quick perusal.

            Although the situation hasn’t helped me personally, it struck me that a possible good may come from the universities’ hiring so many “adjuncts”, i.e. temporary teachers, rather than professors on the tenure track with steady jobs and benefits. It’s almost impossible to get rid of a tenured professor who turns out to be an idiot, a liar, a plagiarist, and a scholarly no-show, such as Ward Churchill. I almost said an embarrassment, but the university that hired and promoted him is not embarrassed by him. The academic system and the ACLU make it almost impossible to fire a bad professor, even if he got in on false pretenses. Years ago I taught and took graduate courses at a university that was rumored to be home to a tenured professor who was a Nazi. But disposa-profs are not a problem. That’s not the university motivation for this policy, it’s all about money, but it’s an ill wind etc.

Papyrus

Dave DaBee twittered this cartoon about and for typography geeks. I’m one of those who likes the Papyrus font, however.

The Measure of a Man

I’m happy to report that “the rule of thumb” is not about how big a stick you can use to beat your wife. It most likely refers to the length of the first joint of the thumb rather than thickness: about an inch. (Do you think the first joint is from the thumbnail up or from the hand down?)

Sentences We Didn’t Finish

To paraphrase The Weekly Standard, here’s an Amazon book blurb I didn’t care to finish reading:

This book compiles the most lively expressions of nonduality, which are the understanding that existence is one undivided whole and that the daily distinctions we make within this unity are useful, but not ultimately . . .

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. Most of these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

      The Man from Scratch is about cloning, escort services, murder, and restaurants in Akron, Ohio, featuring Roxy Barbarino, writer for Adventuress Magazine. Novel.

      A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

Scot Tartans: T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

T-Shirts & mug: FRESH PICT, with two ancient Pictish designs

BUMPER STICKER: FRESH PICT, white on blue, with 10th Century Pict-Scot Merman Cross (blue on white also available)

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

NEW: FRESH PICT items

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper), title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I

BUMPER STICKER: Dulce, Utile, et Decorum

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Grit

Grit Magazine has been published continuously since 1882. They don’t know where the name came from, but grit of course means moxie, which is what we need more of now. This is my Grit issue. Like Grit Magazine, it’s cheerful.

Engrish Revisited

Tom S. sent me back to Engrish.com. I couldn’t tell you why this sign from Malaysia particularly caught his eye. I liked a coaster found at 100-yen shop, which must be like a dollar store.

Happy tomorrow comes

aims at happiness

Even what that extends

the leaf fast thinking

of tomorrow is not

prevented and either it

expands fast fast

Used

Mike Sykes responded to “the priest does use to come very much to John Fortescue’s house”, pointing out that —

We might, however, say "he is used to coming", with a slightly different shade of meaning, better illustrated by "my family are quite used to my beard".

Mike does have a beard. And he’s English, which is why he uses “family” as a plural noun. Anyway, here “used” has the -d on the end so the form as well as the meaning is a bit different.

A Toast to Cuba Libres

The first grown-up drink I ever ordered was in Monterrey, Mexico. I was 17 and went with my Spanish high school teacher, the late and much appreciated Ellen Rowe, and five other students to stay for a month with various families. Our hosts took us to a club in the city and someone suggested I order a Cuba Libre — rum and coke — “Free Cuba” (“free” being an adjective). In those days I drank a lot of Coke so I ordered it and it was good. (Does that sound Hemingwayesque? I thought not.)

            Yesterday Henrique from Peru told me that now, when you go to Puerto Rico, if you ask for a Menterita they give you a Cuba Libre. “Menterita” means “little lie”.

            Here are the Andrews Sisters singing “Rum and Coca Cola”, a cheery song about corruption in old Cuba. If you think the situation has changed, you are mistaken.

Nite Lite

One of those familiar complaints about English is why we say we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway. Someone wrote in to an advice column in CinWeekly explaining those words very well. I paraphrase: A driveway is a private roadway from the street through private property to a building that allows you to drive up instead of having to walk up. A parkway is a road through a green area, i.e. park. See?

            Not quite the same, nevertheless this reminded me of a place I worked long ago, the gorgeous but now defunct Peninsula Nite Club in Peninsula, Ohio. It had three rooms, a dining room (fancy), peanut room (a bar and an old clawfoot bathtub full of peanuts and shells on the floor), and ball room (disco ball, bandstand). A great place. The rule was no peanuts were allowed in the ballroom and no balling was allowed in the peanut room.

No Soap

What we call poor in the U.S. is usually meaningless. I don’t have much money but I live in a way that kings couldn’t conjure up in the past. Except for the fact that they had servants, I live better. I can travel long distances affordably in my car. We have fantastic electronic equipment. We have electricity and good plumbing, and I lately I’ve been showering with scented shampoo and three different soaps, for a total of four different perfumes, all quite cheap.

            According to Wikipedia, “the Latin word sapo simply means "soap"; it was borrowed from a Celtic or Germanic language” (usually the borrowing goes the other way). It’s inexplicable to me how humans first discovered mixing lye (from water and wood ash) with fat to make soap; imagine coming up with that product accidentally and then deciding to apply it to your skin.

My Baby, My Doggy

On the radio this week, Michael Schaffer, author of One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food, talked about changes in pet cemeteries. In the Victorian era, markers were likely to say something like “Faithful Servant”. In the 1950s, they were more likely to say “My Best Friend”. Today, many markers say “My Baby” or “My Little Boy” or “My Little Girl”. This is not progress.

            Regarding the 19th century faithful servants, I don’t care if you think pethood is degrading to the animal and call your cat Foofy your “animal companion”. We may be servants to our pets at times. Our interdependence often rises to friendship.

            And pets definitely are not substitutes for children. I am not my kitty’s mommy.  Years ago I took in a cat whose owners, a young married couple, had to give it up because they were moving into an apartment that did not allow pets. They were crushed, they said; kitty Christa was like their child. Wrong. I never considered giving away my sons because an apartment wouldn’t take children.

Do You Know Where Your Geography Teacher Is?

From Overheard in New York:

Teen girl #1: It's really hard to understand my biology teacher because he's from Vietnam.
Teen girl #2: What?
Teen girl #1: My biology teacher is Vietnamese.
Teen girl #2: Oh, I thought you said he was from Vietnam!
Teen girl #1: Yeah, he is.
Teen girl #2: The planet?

Deal

If you buy a book from them, you can get a year’s free subscription to The Vocabula Review.

Car Songs

Car songs are not the same as driving songs, such as Ventura Highway, Willin’, Mustang Sally (Ride Sally Ride), Freeway of Love (Pink Cadillac), etc. In classic car songs, driving is involved, but car songs which were big in the golden age of cars muscle cars and hotrods had a specialized argot about street racing or drag racing or dirt racing, and about the engines. Here are lyrics from a few of the best. Listen to them on YouTube, but maybe you shouldn’t play them in the car. You’ll be inclined to tap that accelerator in time to the music. I’m marking specialized terms but won’t explain them (except deuce coupe). A few of them even I understand. If you’re into cars, you probably know them all. If not, it doesn’t matter, or you can look them up. Keep in mind that hot rod culture and the lingo aren’t what they were because the cars have changed.

Hot Rod Lincoln, Charlie Ryan

Have you heard this story of the Hot Rod Race

When Fords and Lincolns was settin' the pace

That story is true, I'm here to say

I was drivin' that Model A

It's got a Lincoln motor and it's really souped up

That Model A body makes it look like a pup

It's got eight cylinders, uses them all

It's got overdrive, just won't stall

With a 4-barrel carb and a dual exhaust

With 4.11 gears you can really get lost

It's got safety tubes, but I ain't scared

The brakes are good, tires fair

Now the fellas was ribbin' me for bein' behind

So I thought I'd make the Lincoln unwind

Took my foot off the gas and man alive

I shoved it on down into overdrive

Wound it up to a hundred-and-ten

My speedometer said that I hit top end

My foot was glued like lead to the floor

That's all there is and there ain't no more

Now the boys all thought I'd lost my sense

And telephone poles looked like a picket fence

They said, "Slow down! I see spots!

The lines on the road just look like dots"

We had flames comin' from out of the side

Feel the tension, man, what a ride!

I said, "Look out, boys, I've got a license to fly"

And that Caddy pulled over and let us by

Now all of a sudden she started to knockin'

And down in the dips she started to rockin'

I looked in my mirror; a red light was blinkin'

The cops was after my Hot Rod Lincoln

They arrested me and they put me in jail

And called my pappy to throw my bail

And he said, "Son, you're gonna' drive me to drinkin'

If you don't stop drivin' that Hot Rod Lincoln!"

Little Deuce Coupe, Beach Boys

Per Fred, whose brother-in-law was into drag and dirt track racing: A deuce coupe was a 1932 Ford, much prized because it was easy to modify.

…You don’t know what I got.

Little deuce coupe
Just a little deuce coupe with a flat head mill
But she'll walk a Thunderbird like it's standin' still
She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored.
She'll do a hundred and forty in the top end floored
She's my little deuce coupe
You don't know what I got

She's got a competition clutch with the four on the floor
And she purrs like a kitten till the Lake Pipes roar
And if that aint enough to make you flip your lid
There's one more thing, I got the pink slip, Daddy

And comin' off the line when the light turns green
Well she blows 'em outta the water like you never seen
I get pushed out of shape and it's hard to steer
When I get rubber in all four gears

409, Beach Boys

Shes real fine my 409…

Well I saved my pennies and I saved my dimes
(giddy up giddy up 409)
For I knew there would be a time
When I would buy a brand new 409

Nothing can catch her
Nothing can touch my 409

When I take her to the track she really shines
She always turns in the fastest times
My four speed dual quad posi-traction 409

Note: Posi-traction figures into the plot of the  movie My Cousin Vinny.

Shut Down, Beach Boys

Tach it up, tach it up
Buddy gonna shut you down

It happened on the strip where the road is wide
(Rev it up, now)
Two cool sharks standin' side by side
Yeah, my fuel injected Stingray and a four-thirteen
Were revvin' up our engines and it sounds real mean

Declinin' numbers at an even rate
At the count of one we both accelerate
My Stingray is light the slicks are startin' to spin
But the four-thirteen's really diggin' in

Gotta be cool now power shift here we go

Superstock Dodge is winding out in low
But my fuel injected Stingray's really startin' to go
To get the traction I'm ridin' the clutch
My pressure plate's burnin' my machine's too much

Pedal's to the floor hear his dual quads drink
And now the four-thirteen's lead is startin' to shrink
He's hot with ram induction but it's understood
I got a fuel injected engine sittin' under my hood

Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down

______________________________________________

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. Most of these titles are available in both locations. Search for Rhonda Keith on Amazon.com Kindle store and Lulu.com.

      The Man from Scratch is a novel about cloning, escort services, murder, and restaurants in Akron, Ohio, featuring Roxy Barbarino, writer for Adventuress Magazine.

      A Walk Around Stonehaven is a travel article on my trip to Scotland. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

Scot Tartans: T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

T-Shirts & mug: FRESH  PICT, with two ancient Pictish designs

BUMPER STICKER: FRESH  PICT, white on blue, with 10th Century Pict-Scot Merman Cross (blue on white also available)

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

NEW: FRESH  PICT items

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper), title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I

BUMPER STICKER: Dulce, Utile, et Decorum

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Ghost Writers in the Sky

There’s no shame in using a ghostwriter. Many celebrities do. They may not be very good writers, which doesn’t necessarily correlate with intelligence. The craft of writing takes time to learn to do well, and it even takes a lot of time to do it poorly. Thus there’s no reason to beat up Sarah Palin for having a ghost writer for her upcoming book.

            Years ago I read two books by Tom Brown, Jr., a tracker in New Jersey, of all places. They were written in the first person, as I recall, though “as told to” two different writers, one of which was much better than the other. Now I don’t remember which was which; fortunately his story was stronger than the writing. Brown has produced more books since then.

            Jack Cashill wrote Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture (which I haven’t read yet), and also “Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters” (which I did read) about Obama’s autobiographies. His literary detective work led him to believe that Obama did not write his books. Cashill’s evidence is the number of statistically unusual words, phrases, and images in Obama’s books that appear in the work of another writer, that writer being Bill Ayers. I find Cashill’s arguments pretty convincing though there’s no solid proof and Ayers, of course, denies it. It would be interesting to read Ayers’ work along with Obama’s books. However, even when I was intensely interested in learning more about him during the campaign, I started one of Obama’s books, but couldn’t finish. Sometimes it’s hard to focus on the self-preoccupation of young men.

            While there’s nothing wrong with using a ghost writer, there is something wrong with not acknowledging it. Obama was not yet a huge celebrity when these books came out. He was, however, hugely ambitious, and maybe he (and someone else) thought his skills weren’t up to the job. Why not? And why publish the books at all, whether or not he wrote them himself?

            Martin Luther King said “I have a dream.” Obama has said “I have a gift” and he meant an oral rhetorical gift, which is not the same as writing talent. He has the gift of making people think he believes what they believe.

Welcome to the Rorschach Arms

While I’m into the Obama hagiography, let us turn to Michelle Obama’s arms. No discussion of lovely arms is complete without attention to hers (to paraphrase S. J. Perelman). Sally Quinn waxed rapturous about them in the Washington Post. Michelle Obama’s bare arms are now “a transformational cultural symbol”. She’s young, tall, and slim and her arms don’t flap, so she looks good in sleeveless dresses, which makes her a great Earth mother and also threatening to certain men (probably only Republicans).

            By the way, did you ever wonder why apartment buildings are called “Arms”? The best explanation I found is that it’s derivative of English pub names like The Something Arms with a noble family’s coat of arms on the sign.

Shakespeare

Joseph Pearce, author of Quest for Shakespeare, in his TV program on the same material, quoted a source from 1591: “…the priest does use to come very much to John Fortescue’s house…” We have retained the verb “use” in this sense only in the past tense: “he used to come.” This sounds exactly like “use to” so it’s easy to see here why the present tense requires the auxiliary verb “does”, though I wonder if anyone ever said or wrote “he uses to come”. I don’t know why we lost the present tense. Now we have to say something like “he comes often” or “he usually comes” or “he’s in the habit of coming”.

From a web site of Shakespeare sonnets in Latin, here’s one of the more familiar sonnets:

XXIX

Fortunae fugiens iras oculosque virorum
Sicubi desertum me miserumque fleo;
Sive deûm irrito frustra clamoribus aures,
Meque tuens fatis imprecor omne malum;
Vellem ubi me natum spe cu m meliore fuisse.
Huius amicitiis, illius ore, parem,
Artemve alterius vel idonea tempora natum,
Quoque meum magis est hoc minus omne placet;
Tum, per eas idem curas me paene perosus,
Forte tui memini, laetaque cuncta reor;
Ac feror in cantus ut inerte a caespite surgens
Mane novo ad caeli cantat alauda fores.
Ditat enim sic ipse tui me sensus amoris
Vt mihi tum regum despiciantur opes.

XXIX
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Language Bits

[|]  Writer’s Digest uses this example in discussing the use of “who” and “whom”:

            You asked whom to the dance?

This is correct, but unidiomatic. I’d say “You asked who to the dance?” It doesn’t mean the same thing as “Who (or whom) did you ask to the dance?” It’s more of an incredulous reaction to information received. This is the kind of question and situation that calls for the colloquial. Formal speech or writing demands correctness.

[|]  Dennis Miller got a caller on his radio show (May 20) who introduced himself by saying he’d had a stroke a couple of years before and his speech might still be a little rough. Miller pointed out an interesting fact, that when the man recovered his speech, he also recovered his Boston accent. You might think that if you have to relearn speech, you’d start with no accent. This would be hard to test. Presumably the man was surrounded by people with the Boston accent.

[|]  I read the charming children’s book When Molly Was Six (Eliza Orne White, 1894) as a girl, rather more recently than 1894. In one chapter, Molly has been given a pencil and pink paper to keep her occupied during the long church service, which she used to copy out passages from the Bible. More than a century after Molly was published, I saw a little girl with what looked like a small DVD player in church. She wasn’t trained to be able to sit quietly for half an hour and look around at her environment. After a while she lay down on her stomach and stared at the screen and tapped her little feet on the back of the seat. She was quiet until the foot tapping started, but instead of electronic entertainment should have had paper and pencil and practiced her writing. So I say.

[|]  Bob O. turned me on to a web site of good things, which reminds me of Grit magazine, to which my parents subscribed. Grit is aimed at rural audiences, and it’s all good news. The cheaper women’s supermarket magazines (not the gossip mags) tend to be very bright and colorful and upbeat too. We need to feed ourselves more simple goodness. Years ago, I had a friend who’d spent a year in prison for possession of marijuana, and he said it’s very important to be careful what you read when you’re locked up, to keep your head straight.

Don’t Shut Up

“Tell Cheney to shut the hell up” is the name of a group on Facebook to which a couple of my Facebook friends subscribe. I haven’t followed what Cheney has been saying, but I gather he’s been criticizing the current regime. “Tell Cheney to shut the hell up” isn’t merely rhetorical hyperbole. Some people would shut him up if they could, and presumably anyone who agrees with him or disagrees with them. It keeps coming up: shut him/them up, take away his/their mic, etc. Discussion of issues is not what’s going on here. The fundamental American value of free speech is losing a lot of ground, and that ground is to your left; watch your step.

            Moving across the political and moral ground over the years as I have, I’ve found over and over again that a lot of people will not discuss differences of opinion or changes of opinion, or nuances, if you will. They tune out, make personal attacks, walk away, in person and in writing. The same thing has happened to Fred, in his correspondence with friends and family.   The ones who wouldn’t continue a conversation with Fred on serious issues — ones they brought up in the first place —have been (1) the pastor of a certain fundamentalist church, and (2) what I will call Marxist fundamentalists. Actually, I think it’s because none of them can keep up with Fred’s erudition, but in my own less erudite experience, with my Marxist friends it’s definitely a one-sided conversation.

            Personal disclosure: When I used to be of a strongly secular persuasion, I could not tolerate certain kinds of religious e-mails from friends. In fact it made me angry. I couldn’t bear to read anything from anyone who was against abortion, for instance. Granted, I tended to get big chunks of unannotated scripture or over-simplified, bumper-sticker kinds of messages, again without careful discussion but with lots of assumptions that didn’t take my assumptions into account, but I recognize the tendency to shut out what you don’t want to think through thoroughly. As my positions change or get more complex than the knee-jerk liberal-to-left-to-radical ideas of my college years, I’m much more willing to talk them over because I really do see both sides, having been on both sides, or three or four sides, of many issues.

            So to all of you who’ve continued to read PO over the years, even while disagreeing with me, and especially you who will jump into the fray in a civil manner, you get my intellectual integrity award.

______________________________________________

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. Most of 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. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper: title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I)

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Ghost Writers in the Sky

There’s no shame in using a ghostwriter. Many celebrities do. They may not be very good writers, which doesn’t necessarily correlate with intelligence. The craft of writing takes time to learn to do well, and it even takes a lot of time to do it poorly. Thus there’s no reason to beat up Sarah Palin for having a ghost writer for her upcoming book.

            Years ago I read two books by Tom Brown, Jr., a tracker in New Jersey, of all places. They were written in the first person, as I recall, though “as told to” two different writers, one of which was much better than the other. Now I don’t remember which was which; fortunately his story was stronger than the writing. Brown has produced more books since then.

            Jack Cashill wrote Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture (which I haven’t read yet), and also “Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters” (which I did read) about Obama’s autobiographies. His literary detective work led him to believe that Obama did not write his books. Cashill’s evidence is the number of statistically unusual words, phrases, and images in Obama’s books that appear in the work of another writer, that writer being Bill Ayers. I find Cashill’s arguments pretty convincing though there’s no solid proof and Ayers, of course, denies it. It would be interesting to read Ayers’ work along with Obama’s books. However, even when I was intensely interested in learning more about him during the campaign, I started one of Obama’s books, but couldn’t finish. Sometimes it’s hard to focus on the self-preoccupation of young men.

            While there’s nothing wrong with using a ghost writer, there is something wrong with not acknowledging it. Obama was not yet a huge celebrity when these books came out. He was, however, hugely ambitious, and maybe he (and someone else) thought his skills weren’t up to the job. Why not? And why publish the books at all, whether or not he wrote them himself?

            Martin Luther King said “I have a dream.” Obama has said “I have a gift” and he meant an oral rhetorical gift, which is not the same as writing talent. He has the gift of making people think he believes what they believe.

Welcome to the Rorschach Arms

While I’m into the Obama hagiography, let us turn to Michelle Obama’s arms. No discussion of lovely arms is complete without attention to hers (to paraphrase S. J. Perelman). Sally Quinn waxed rapturous about them in the Washington Post. Michelle Obama’s bare arms are now “a transformational cultural symbol”. She’s young, tall, and slim and her arms don’t flap, so she looks good in sleeveless dresses, which makes her a great Earth mother and also threatening to certain men (probably only Republicans).

            By the way, did you ever wonder why apartment buildings are called “Arms”? The best explanation I found is that it’s derivative of English pub names like The Something Arms with a noble family’s coat of arms on the sign.

Shakespeare

Joseph Pearce, author of Quest for Shakespeare, in his TV program on the same material, quoted a source from 1591: “…the priest does use to come very much to John Fortescue’s house…” We have retained the verb “use” in this sense only in the past tense: “he used to come.” This sounds exactly like “use to” so it’s easy to see here why the present tense requires the auxiliary verb “does”, though I wonder if anyone ever said or wrote “he uses to come”. I don’t know why we lost the present tense. Now we have to say something like “he comes often” or “he usually comes” or “he’s in the habit of coming”.

From a web site of Shakespeare sonnets in Latin, here’s one of the more familiar sonnets:

XXIX

Fortunae fugiens iras oculosque virorum
Sicubi desertum me miserumque fleo;
Sive deûm irrito frustra clamoribus aures,
Meque tuens fatis imprecor omne malum;
Vellem ubi me natum spe cu m meliore fuisse.
Huius amicitiis, illius ore, parem,
Artemve alterius vel idonea tempora natum,
Quoque meum magis est hoc minus omne placet;
Tum, per eas idem curas me paene perosus,
Forte tui memini, laetaque cuncta reor;
Ac feror in cantus ut inerte a caespite surgens
Mane novo ad caeli cantat alauda fores.
Ditat enim sic ipse tui me sensus amoris
Vt mihi tum regum despiciantur opes.

XXIX
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Language Bits

[|]  Writer’s Digest uses this example in discussing the use of “who” and “whom”:

            You asked whom to the dance?

This is correct, but unidiomatic. I’d say “You asked who to the dance?” It doesn’t mean the same thing as “Who (or whom) did you ask to the dance?” It’s more of an incredulous reaction to information received. This is the kind of question and situation that calls for the colloquial. Formal speech or writing demands correctness.

[|]  Dennis Miller got a caller on his radio show (May 20) who introduced himself by saying he’d had a stroke a couple of years before and his speech might still be a little rough. Miller pointed out an interesting fact, that when the man recovered his speech, he also recovered his Boston accent. You might think that if you have to relearn speech, you’d start with no accent. This would be hard to test. Presumably the man was surrounded by people with the Boston accent.

[|]  I read the charming children’s book When Molly Was Six (Eliza Orne White, 1894) as a girl, rather more recently than 1894. In one chapter, Molly has been given a pencil and pink paper to keep her occupied during the long church service, which she used to copy out passages from the Bible. More than a century after Molly was published, I saw a little girl with what looked like a small DVD player in church. She wasn’t trained to be able to sit quietly for half an hour and look around at her environment. After a while she lay down on her stomach and stared at the screen and tapped her little feet on the back of the seat. She was quiet until the foot tapping started, but instead of electronic entertainment should have had paper and pencil and practiced her writing. So I say.

[|]  Bob O. turned me on to a web site of good things, which reminds me of Grit magazine, to which my parents subscribed. Grit is aimed at rural audiences, and it’s all good news. The cheaper women’s supermarket magazines (not the gossip mags) tend to be very bright and colorful and upbeat too. We need to feed ourselves more simple goodness. Years ago, I had a friend who’d spent a year in prison for possession of marijuana, and he said it’s very important to be careful what you read when you’re locked up, to keep your head straight.

Don’t Shut Up

“Tell Cheney to shut the hell up” is the name of a group on Facebook to which a couple of my Facebook friends subscribe. I haven’t followed what Cheney has been saying, but I gather he’s been criticizing the current regime. “Tell Cheney to shut the hell up” isn’t merely rhetorical hyperbole. Some people would shut him up if they could, and presumably anyone who agrees with him or disagrees with them. It keeps coming up: shut him/them up, take away his/their mic, etc. Discussion of issues is not what’s going on here. The fundamental American value of free speech is losing a lot of ground, and that ground is to your left; watch your step.

            Moving across the political and moral ground over the years as I have, I’ve found over and over again that a lot of people will not discuss differences of opinion or changes of opinion, or nuances, if you will. They tune out, make personal attacks, walk away, in person and in writing. The same thing has happened to Fred, in his correspondence with friends and family.   The ones who wouldn’t continue a conversation with Fred on serious issues — ones they brought up in the first place —have been (1) the pastor of a certain fundamentalist church, and (2) what I will call Marxist fundamentalists. Actually, I think it’s because none of them can keep up with Fred’s erudition, but in my own less erudite experience, with my Marxist friends it’s definitely a one-sided conversation.

            Personal disclosure: When I used to be of a strongly secular persuasion, I could not tolerate certain kinds of religious e-mails from friends. In fact it made me angry. I couldn’t bear to read anything from anyone who was against abortion, for instance. Granted, I tended to get big chunks of unannotated scripture or over-simplified, bumper-sticker kinds of messages, again without careful discussion but with lots of assumptions that didn’t take my assumptions into account, but I recognize the tendency to shut out what you don’t want to think through thoroughly. As my positions change or get more complex than the knee-jerk liberal-to-left-to-radical ideas of my college years, I’m much more willing to talk them over because I really do see both sides, having been on both sides, or three or four sides, of many issues.

            So to all of you who’ve continued to read PO over the years, even while disagreeing with me, and especially you who will jump into the fray in a civil manner, you get my intellectual integrity award.

______________________________________________

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. Most of 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. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper: title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I)

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

I published the first year of Parvum Opus digitally this week, and although I have other material ready to use, I decided that this issue would carry the Foreword of Volume I, plus a list of all the titles, which I rather like seeing all together.

FOREWORD

Parvum Opus (Latin for small work) is a weekly column on the English language, and more, that I’ve been writing since before Christmas of 2002. I’m an English teacher, writer, and editor: one of those compulsive readers and proofreaders.

            My original intention was to write a short note on one point of English usage per week. It would be not just a grammar tip, but a comment on the way language is used and misused. The first issue was on the word “actionable”, which I’ve heard misused quite a bit. (By the way, in PO 13, I explain why I gradually came to use the British punctuation system, putting the punctuation mark outside the quotation marks, when it belongs there.)

            But it was impossible to confine myself to one item a week. There’s just too much material in print and on TV, and live too. So Parvum Opus gradually got longer, and now averages around 1,200 words a week. I usually take a couple of weeks off from writing every year, thus this first volume of 52 columns comprises the beginning columns of 2002 and all of 2003.

            The content expanded also. Since language is always about something, I wrote about the substance as well as the form of language. I could not, for instance, ignore the Iraq war. My views on that and other public issues have shifted since this first year of writing, which lost me some readers in subsequent years. Nevertheless, PO has surprised me with its persistence and longevity.

            Parvum Opus includes a lot of comments, questions, and information from readers who have been steady readers and writers over the years, and I thank them.

            Someday, when I get to some round number such as 500, I may change Parvum Opus to Trivium Pursuit. In the Middle Ages, when the great universities were established in Europe, students studied the Trivium and the Quadrivium.

            The Trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The Quadrivium consisted of arithmetic; geometry; music, harmonics, or tuning theory; and astronomy or cosmology. The Quadrivium is usually out of my range, but rhetoric and logic allow me to discuss politics and culture, which cover just about everything that’s not hard math and science.

            Unfortunately, I’ve never actually studied Latin. I started to take it in junior high. I lived in Texas then, where classrooms were hot in the fall semester, and Latin required more of my adolescent attention than my hormones allowed, so I dropped the class rather than fail it. But I’m attracted to Latin, and since 2002 I’ve attached two more Latin phrases to my opus. Vincit Veritas (Truth Conquers), the motto of the Keith clan, my paternal family, is sort of a company motto (see http://www.cafepress.com/parvumopus). Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (pleasant, useful, and proper), combines two familiar Latin tags. Dulce et utile was Horace’s description, or perhaps prescription, of what literature is, or should be: amusing and instructive. Horace also wrote Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country). I have not been called upon to die for my country, but Dulce, utile, et decorum est pro patria scribere. If my Latin is incorrect, blame my 12-year-old self.

            Any correct Latin comes from my husband, Fred, who stuck with four years of Latin in high school. Fred is my copyeditor and saves me from many errors. Again, the ones that remain are my own. Fred is also responsible for the change of my name from Rhonda Keith to Rhonda Keith Stephens in 2004.

            A writer is always tempted to rewrite or add to earlier work. I’ve mostly resisted this urge, other than making corrections and adding a few notes here and there.

— Rhonda Keith Stephens

P.S.  Utile:  I sometimes refer to formatting problems caused by trying to send PO through the mail; I’ve tried to please readers and myself, but the technology sometimes dictates, thus formatting is inconsistent as I tried over the years to come up with something simple and clear within the constraints of the technology. (This applies to the Kindle upload as well.) I sometimes mention my typos but I’ve tried to correct them. Formatting has been inconsistent as I tried to work it out over time. You’ll also notice that links to some Web sites may no longer exist. Almost all issues are at www.keithops.us. In 2007 I began posting them also at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.

TITLES

1 Actionable 2 As Far As 3 Christmas Potpourri 4 New Year's Muse 5 Ghoti Hell 6 Deadheading 7 Fiercely Waging War Against Feisty Wordstyles 8 Relevant to  What? 9 In the News 10 Articulation and Extrapolation 11 The Bad, The Good, and The Silly 12 The English Follies 13 Creative Wordcrafting 14 Punctuation:  Separating the Dilettantes from the True Nerds 15 The Language Police 16 Tension 17 Who's Right? 18 Language Through the Looking Glass 19 All Intents and  Purposes 20 Fine Indistinctions 21 Teutonization 22 McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader 23 My Week, and Welcome To It 24 Unruly 25 Reviews 26 Lost Worlds 27 The Blair B itch Project 28 Be My Guest 29 Road Trip 30 The Universal Slagheap of the Particular 31 Assume a Virtue 32 Bumpers 33 Pronounce It Trippingly  34 Sentence Makeover 35 Word Noodling 36 Off Road Driving 37 Ladies and Gentlemen 38 Your Dime 39 Avoid Using Common Language Errors 40 English as a  What Language? 41 Spell Spiel 42 An English Teacher Gone Wrong 43 Definitions of Sorts 44 Reflexions 45 Nucular Attack 46 Droning On 47 Public Discourse  48 Namely 49 The Thing's English 50 Word Imperfect 51 Majorly Thankful 52 52 Pickup 53 Lost in Translation 54 The Big Story 55 Yes, Spot, There Really Is a  Christmas 56 Dulce et Utile 57 Dulce Et Futile 58 Comparisons Are Odious 59 Sentient Structure 60 Parvitude 61 Good Foolishness 62 Old Words 63 Shmembolism 64 All in Your Head 65 Veritas Vincit 66 Elitist Grumble 67 No End in Sight 68 Bad Writing 69 Let Us Define Our Terms 70 Why We're Confused  71 Something Blue 72 Something Old 73 Somethings Borrowed 74 Something New 75 You Said It 76 Make the Brains Run on Time 77 Now What? 78 Absolutely  American 79 May I Have a Word With You? 80 Rhetoric: "I'm Shocked, Shocked!" 81 Haunted Words 82 Ironically Speaking 83 Reading Like a Banshee 84 Iconography 85 Feelin' Herby 86 Sensitivity 87 Tongue Lashings 88 Road Trip 89 Changing Course 90 Want Fries With That? 91 Name Those Parts 92 The Point  of Balance 93 Teach a Person to Officiate... 94 Reason 95 Attention All You Well Known, Authors! 96 Notes from the Home Front 97 Wrap It Up 98 Up and  Up 99 Code Switching 100 Happy Thanksgiving to All of You 101 No Bobtail Parking 102 Custom Spam 103 Portly's Complaints 104 Merry Solstice 105 Resolution Moon 106 Happy Winter 107 Learn Latin and Make the Big Bucks! 108 Little Latin, Less Geek 109 Shakespeare in Iraq 110 Verbal Implants 111 Wordcraft 112 Levels of Diction 113 No Accident 114 Plew 115 Crash Bam Alakazam 116 Persistent Vegetable Love 117 English Major's Reading of the  Schiavo Story 118 Genie Us 119 Bleep 120 Heteronormative Like Me 121 Trader Joe's Novitiates 122 Hot Ice 123 Culture Noted 124 I Is You 125 Making Sense  126 O Beautiful 127 Be the Plucky Comic Relief 128 Summer Reading 129 Foot in Hand 130 The Issues Issue 131 Courage 132 Good Vibrators 133 Quite the Blitz  134 No Music-Only Lyrics Needed 135 Nifty Bits 136 Shakespeare Did Not Write This 137 Word Puzzle 138 Summer Scene 139 Not a Word 140 Be Prepared for  Catastrophe; Do Not Commit Tragedy 141 Constant Proofreader 142 Than Which 143 Terms of Address 144 Walla-Walla and Rhubarb 145 Art, Law, and Truth,  Part 1, Margaret Garner 146 Art, Education, and Truth, Part 2, Chronicles of Dylan 147 Need a Deadline? 148 Why Not? 149 Snidely Marmish 150 The Inimitable  Jane 151 Thanks 152 Fun With Your Brain 153 How Swearing Works 154 Nuf Said 155 A Christmas Blessing 155 Lustrous Winter 157 Well Done 158 Scraps  159 English Math 160 Phemism 161 Phemes and Misnomers 162 Stet Happens 163 Next Time 164 Wergle Flomp 165 Countereditor 166 Audible Punctuation  167 Fightin' Words 168 Blak Market 169 Liber Education 170 So Shew Me 171 Call Me Becky 172 Misphiled 173 Lost by an Ethnicality 174 So Much Depends  175 Rage the Soup 176 Rough Stough 177 Effort This 178 So Called 179 Irony Bored 180 Logorrhea 181 What Are You Laughing At? 182 Wordplay 183 From  Motorvatin' to Truckin' 184 Everybody Has a Book Inside... 185 The Breeder Next Store Waters the Cat 186 Na-Nish-Yazzie 187 Laissez le ton beau de Marot  rouler 188 Peccable English 189 Flammatory Words 190 Unchurch Me, You Cad 191 Ephemera 192 I Don't Think, Do You? 193 Alien Writing 194 Logic-101  195 Good Nevsh 196 The Wordist 197 Travelogos 198 Glibly Retreat and Think of Cakes 199 Do Bust My Chops 200 Happy Thanksgiving 201 On a Wish and a  Prayer 202 Standard Slaughter and Conquest 203 Nonce Words 204 Whaddya Say? 205 It's a Long Way to Literary 206 Happy New Year! 207 Love Me for My  Floy-Floy Alone 208 Can of Words 209 Salty Dog 210 Golden Bull 211 Bogspot 212 Frim Fram Sauce 213 Lobal Cooling 214 Word Control 215 Bananas 216 Opuscule  217 The Ideas of March 218 The Sky Is Warming! The Sky Is Warming! 219 Sad Is To Stupid As Challenging Is To Cargo Cult 220 Dueling Aphorisms 221 Made  You Say It 222 Creative Writing 223 Who's Your Daddy? Or What? 224 Anti-Irony 225 Prosaic Qualities 226 Insider's Secrets to Good Writing! 227 Professional  Nitpicking 228 Pass on These Words 229 Distortion, Violation, Corruption 230 Swanning Around 231 Geek Chorus 232 Scot Logic 233 Tiki Talk 234 Typo Blood  235 Hari Kari 236 Let's Enjamb 237 The Glass Wind Eye 238 Language Profiling 239 Webly Words 240 Tiny Muskens 241 Civilly Defensive 242 Gitter Done 243 A  Call for General Victory 244 This Is Your Brain On 245 Mongoose in a Mudhole 246 Shared Culture 247 Little Read Riding Herd 248 Meat Puppet on a Mission  249 Librivox 250 The Writester Stuff 251 Au Contrarian 252 I Preapproved This Message 253 Thanks 254 And Then There Were None 255 Confabulogistic  256 Tunavision 257 Bon Bon Mots 258 Special Effects 259 Smartastic 260 Smoke Filled Brains 261 Babel 262 Diverse Dispissal 263 Rectification of Language  264 Uncommon Reader 265 PO of Pallor 266 Giving Grammar Its Due 267 Nuancy 268 Nomenclatter 269 VIP RIP, RIP VIP 270 Foi Grace 271 Yo Grandma  272 American Tongues 273 Lying on My Mind 274 Inelegant Variations 275 Power Lines and Buzz Words 276 Standardized Egotesting 277 High Toned Vagaries  278 Veritas Vincit et Snafut 279 The Ivory Factory 280 Speak Softly and Carry a Big Axe Stick 281 Fierce Rhetoric 282 Fecieval Studies 283 'Tis a Gift to Be  Simplex 284 Find Shades of Meaning 285 This Week in Literacy 286 LOL Writer 287 Happy Occident 288 Drop Rancor 289 Why I Am Called to This Work  290 Unrecovery 291 Hatable Slang 292 Vintage Hemlock 293 Into the Morass 294 Pleasant Shrewdness 295 Home to Home 296 Distractions 297 Font of Wisdom  298 Code Words 299 Bakers Dozens 300 Transgressive Reading 301 Hell in the Hallway 302 Taxonomy of English 303 Synchronized Spooning 304 God Speeden  305 Allegedly Happy Holidays 306 On Mendication 307 Cultivating Commas 308 Happy Hogmanay 310 Back in Business 311 Acronymical 312 Kindling 313 Plexiglas  Belly Button 314 Grammatorically Speaking 315 Serial Killer Examples 316 An Education Carol 317 Person-Caused Weasling 318 The Invisible Circus 319 Eve Span  320 Quack 321 Endowed Purposes 322 A Few Choice Words 323 Screeching: Halt 324 Turf Language 325 Dulce, Utile, et Decorum

______________________________________________

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. Most of 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. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

      Parvum Opus Volume I. The first year (December 2002 through 2003). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get PO’ed. Collection of columns.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

Graphic covers of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper: title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I)

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

______________________________________________

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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Why a garden?
Today’s words: discrimination and choice.

            While doing my minimal bit of garden today I reflected on the fact that so many people have written on gardens, on the physical garden itself; but inevitably gardening leads to meditation and metaphor.

            First, there’s The Garden. The one in Eden. It wasn’t the Forest of Eden, the Jungle of Eden, or the Wilderness of Eden. Why was it a garden and not a wilderness? Because a garden means Someone has selected certain plants over others. Everything is available outside the garden, but everything is too much for humans.       

            Deciding what to plant is both the fun part and the hard part of gardening. Too much to choose from. In my little 3 x 6 foot patch by the front steps, we have pachysandra (which Fred planted some years ago; it flourished and then thinned out); three different small varieties of day lily; ferns and lilies of the valley from a former neighbor; a new mint plant called Kentucky colonel; one and a half hostas; portulaca in a concrete pot with four sort of Green Man faces all around; one hyacinth; and a few ornaments, with Saint Francis of Assisi overlooking it all.

            I pull out the plants I call weeds, even when they aren’t necessarily less beautiful than the ones I plant. Some plants overgrow others and prevent them from growing. I can’t just leave the bindweed to grow as groundcover, despite its lovely white flowers, because it wraps itself around other plants in a menacing manner. The Virginia creeper has big underground roots that pop up just anywhere. A garden is all about discrimination, not about inclusiveness. If I were a farmer, I’d be even more ruthless.

            Years ago I knew a young woman who didn’t think it was right to discriminate in her lawn. She let it grow wild — “natural” — but since her house was in a tract development, her neighbors complained because the small wilderness attracted rodents and snakes from the nearby woods. This is why even people who don’t care for gardening or for lush lawns keep a large cleared area around their houses:  so they can see what’s coming at them.

Mike Speaks

?  Regarding Michael Savage being banned from the UK, Mike Sykes writes:

It's not a problem. Why should we let him in, when we have enough obnoxious people in this country already?
?  Regarding milk leg and wobbles on my mystery list:

You're right about [milk leg]:  (1922 C. S. Whitehead & C. A. Hoff, New Eugenics (1928) I. v. 209.) It is technically called phlegmasia dolens, but from the fact of its resemblance to a thin bag of skin filled with milk, and as it was formerly thought that the milk from the breasts in some way managed to get there, it has been called 'milk leg'. When my sister-in-law had it it was called 'white leg'.
Wobbles:  As you thought, a disease, as in 1895 Queenslander 7 Dec. 1090 Rickets or Wobbles in Cattle.
?  Regarding Leonard Pitts’ religion, quoting Pitts:

I quote: ‘...  my people — Christians — ...’.
“My people” could mean his family, or black people generally, but doesn’t necessarily mean it’s his religion too. In fact since he didn’t say “my religion” I’m inclined to think it’s not.

Dumber than Anvils

Bill R. referred me to Fred Reed’s blog again, a good rant on education, Coma in the Schools: Growing Up Dumber Than Anvils. (Sorry if this offends any students, grads, teachers, or anvils.)

            Bill also wrote about turf language:

Specialist language used by specialists is often verbal shorthand for precise concepts. For example, in nuclear power plant engineering, “LBB” or “leak-before-break” names a very specific phenomenon. It may function as turf language—if you don’t know LBB, you’re not in the club—but its primary attraction is that it saves the professionals from a three-sentence description every time they talk about it.

            A key difference between precision language and turf language is that for true turf language, there is no precise meaning. That would be the problem in education, I suspect. (Recall that part of the PhD is supposed to be an “original contribution to human knowledge.” If you can’t make one, you have to BS a “contribution” by dressing up something else in your language.)

            I started out to get a degree in education but switched to liberal arts after my first semester, in order to teach at college level. I hadn’t been especially impressed by my first couple of education courses. With the increase in the "professionalism" of teachers, greater requirements for certification, etc., in the last century has come a decline in product quality.
            An aside regarding unnecessary degrees:  Many years ago I read about someone who was getting a PhD in physical education, and for her doctoral thesis, her contribution to the universe of scholarship, she did "original research" comparing bacteria levels on people who bathed and on bums who went for long periods without bathing. People who don’t bathe accumulate more bacteria on their skin, she found.

Grandma’s Button Box

V  Found this while I was looking for an online Latin translator:

“Firstly I have to tell you that the name Tiffany does not exist at all in Latin and ...”

V  In a catalogue: “Indian cotton skirt in a classical patchwork print.” Cute skirt but classical is the wrong word. “Classic” means something of high quality or an outstanding example of its kind. “Classical” means from an ancient period of art, especially from Greek or Rome, or, a certain kind and period of music. The print of the skirt is not of an ancient period; it’s vaguely patchwork and vaguely block print. You could call it classic, but that would be a stretch too.

V  IMHO usually means “in my humble opinion” but some people think it means “in my honest opinion”, which shows why acronyms are a bad idea. Speaking of humble opinions, is that an oxymoron? Would you hold an opinion that you simultaneously thought was incorrect? Not unpopular or immoral, but just wrong? “You always think you’re right” is not a useful attack in an argument. Of course we always think we’re right. If we didn’t, we’d switch to another opinion, and this includes opinions about facts as well as values.

V  “She actually was Miss Teen USA back in the day.” (Said of the Miss California runner-up in the recent Miss USA foolishness.) Back in what day? The old days? The girl can’t be 25 yet.

Proofreading Needs Bailout

Curiosities of Literature by John Sutherland (reviewed in the May 11, 2009 Wall Street Journal by Charles Harrington Elster; you’ll have search for the article; I wasn’t able to grab the URL, which is apparently protected) is a book of literary trivia. For instance, the first western novel was published in 1860, by a woman, Ann S. Stephens (no relation to Fred, as far as I know).

            Elster notes that it suffers from lack of proofreading. You may have noticed more errors in books published in the last couple of decades than in older books. Publishers are cutting costs by eliminating proofreaders. Many publishing companies have been bought out by big corporations that don’t really love publishing; most manufacturers would not tolerate so many flaws in their products. Elster says he found more than 50 errors in the first 100 pages of this book, such as: “The poet Amy Lowell, was in the practice of renting five rooms in any hotel she booked into.”

            Around Christmas I picked up a local city magazine and noticed errors on the cover. Inside, of course, there were more. I e-mailed the editor, who replied that they’d had a proofreader but she moved on, so I offered my services, but didn’t get the gig; possibly they found someone cheaper or continue to do it themselves. I haven’t bought another issue to check for errors.

            Elster also complains that Curiosities of Literature doesn’t have an index. Indexes cost money. I’ve built indexes. Authors usually don’t do their own, and Sutherland obviously didn’t do much proofreading of his own galleys either.

Note to Readers

I will be publishing collections of each year of PO for Amazon Kindle and Lulu.com. Some of your letters have appeared in PO, for which I thank you. If you have any preference about use of your name, let me know.

             If you’d like to send any sort of commentary or blurb for the book, feel free to write to me. I’m rather amazed that Parvum Opus has been going for so long, since just before Christmas of 2002. For which I thank you.

______________________________________________

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. Most of 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. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

SIGG WATER BOTTLE, ORGANIC T-SHIRTS IN GREAT COLORS, MINI-CAMERAS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, TOTE BAGS, MOUSE PAD, TEDDY BEAR, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop: (NOTE: There are problems viewing this site with Firefox but Earthlink seems OK.)

Cover graphics of my books

Dulce, Utile, et Decorum (Sweet, Useful, and Proper: title of new collection of Parvum Opus, Volume I)

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

If you don’t see exactly what you want — a particular design or text on a particular item — let me know and I’ll customize products for you.

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

______________________________________________

PARVUM OPUS

Number 324

______________________________________________

Summer Fun

Free Online Courses

I know you have time on your hands, so instead of clocking in to the devil’s workshop, you can take free and pressure-free classes online. I’m considering ten hours of introduction to Latin and maybe Scottish heritage, but haven’t looked at all the possibilities yet. Check out:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu)

Open University (open.ac.uk)

Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu

Tufts University (tufts.edu)

Stanford (stanford.edu)

University of California, Berkeley (berkeley.edu)

Utah State University (usu.edu)

Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (kutztownsbdc.org)

University of Southern Queensland (usq.edu.au)

University of California, Irvine (uci.edu)

Library Thing

Tim Bazzett recommends Library Thing, a web site where you can easily enter your own library list, books you like, rate them, read reviews, connect with other people who like the same books, and more fun stuff.

Online Etymology Dictionary

You can sponsor a word on the Online Etymology Dictionary, which would help them and could be fun for you. Give your loved one a word for six months. Or advertise super cheap.

Ysabella Brave Phonetic Alphabet

Isabella Brave is the pseudonym of a singer, songwriter, and speaker who’s become one of the most popular YouTube contributors, until she became very ill. One of her fans came up with the Ysabella Brave Phonetic Alphabet. It’s not likely to replace alpha-bravo-charlie, but it may inspire you to develop your own specialized phonetic alphabet. For business, you could start with accountant-budget-corporate; but you could do better.

            While looking around for university jargon (academic-bursar-college) I ran across this article about buzzwords, quoting Jeffrey Mirel of the University of Michigan: "All professional language is turf language." Actually some professional language is necessary, as in the case of new technology, but not so with education.

EW

According to Daniel Hannan, my new British hero, the commissioner for information society and media*, Viviane Reding in the EU says there should be an Internet .eu domain to make the Internet “more accessible to women”. Huh? It doesn’t matter if another domain extension is added, but how would .eu help women? Even if it were “.ew”, for European Women, I can’t see that their lives would be changed.

* Why no comma after “information”?

            The UK, by the way, has banned radio talkman Michael Savage from the land. Michael Savage does nothing but talk and he never has advocated violence, so what’s the problem? He’s obnoxious but not dangerous. Maybe it’s retaliation for the cheesy gifts Obama gave the Queen and Prime Minister, but they hit the wrong person. They also threw out Geert Wilders, whose problem was also speech that some people didn’t like. I’m thinking that if I were at all well known, I wouldn’t be allowed to go back to Scotland. I’d have to sneak in via rowboat on the North Sea to visit Dunnottar again. I’ll bring my claymore.

Things You Probably Don’t Have to Worry About Anymore

I found this list lying around but I can’t remember where I copied it from and I can’t find “thrumps” on the Web, which is unusual, though Donald Trump turned up. I’m pretty sure it’s a list of diseases, either human or animal, that I may have seen on old medicine bottles in an old Sears catalog:

milk leg

whites

wobbles

hollow hills

thrumps

Education

>>>  Obama trimmed the trillion-dollar budget by cutting a school voucher program, which was a drop in the ocean of money he and Congress are spending. Why did he cut that? Discuss.

>>>  John McC sent a neat little moral tale about education and also socialism; not sure if it’s it’s a true story.

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student but once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

            All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.  After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little.

            The second test average was a D!  No one was happy. When the third test rolled around the average was an F.

            The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

            I never did like group projects when I taught English.

            I conducted a somewhat different experiment in my early days of college teaching. I said the students could have any grade they wanted, which I thought would make them pay attention to only the actual content of the class rather than their grades. The only stipulation was that they had to do all the work. I also asked them to meet me in my office to explain personally why they wanted the grade they did. I didn’t put grades on their papers but I marked errors and commented on the writing just as I always did. It was not an experiment in socialism; it was an experiment in intellectual liberty, or so I thought.

           As I recall, there was no difference in the overall quality of work. Most of the students asked for grades a little higher than I would have given them, all As and Bs except for two, but some of them said, “I know I don’t deserve this but I need it.” Two students said, “I really would like an A but I know my parents wouldn’t believe it, so give me a B.” Some of them really believed they deserved the A, when I did not, but I didn’t tell them that. One student, who would probably have received an A anyway, didn’t like the experiment because he liked working for and earning his grades. At the time, I didn’t understand him, and thought he was too focused on grades and not on the content of the class, but now I understand that competition is a pretty good motivation for some people to learn or to do anything else. One student didn’t like having to explain what grade he wanted. Only two students asked for Cs. One was an older student, a black man who’d been in jail. He probably would have gotten a C; his writing skills weren’t very good technically, but he was bright and obviously had more integrity than a lot of the students. The other one was a young white guy, a musician, who was a somewhat better writer technically and was really interested in the work. I remember that he wrote something once about music, wondering why there were only eight notes in the major and minor scales.

Pitted

Pulitzer-prize winning syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote an attack on Christians/Christianity that wouldn’t be possible if you substituted any other religion. These days telling the truth can be a hate crime, but Pitts was not truthful. He is ignorant of history yet he obviously has an axe to grind. I wrote a letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer, which they didn’t print:

The Enquirer has divested itself of staff so entirely that it cannot produce one locally written editorial a day now, and apparently no one on staff objected to Leonard Pitts' "Are Christians on God's side?" In the interests of full disclosure, we should know what Pitts' religion is. If he'd attacked any other religion, he might fear reprisal by rusty sword or ACLU (keeping in mind that atheism is a religion of sorts). Leaving aside the question of why some Christians don't object to an interrogation method used in training our own military, and probably in fraternity hazings, Pitts' knowledge of history -- as well as of the present -- is pitifully thin if thinks that only a few "iconoclasts" have done the "dangerous and moral thing" (and by the way, technically Unitarian Universalists are not Christians). I'm surprised he didn't list Jeremiah Wright as one brave Christian.

            I consider this an attack on Christians not just by Pitts, but also by the Enquirer.

            The letter Enquirer printed two letters on Pitts’ column. Neither criticized the newspaper, not that that has anything to do with their editorial decision. One supported Pitts and said he was just writing history. That’s balanced journalism. (You’ll have to study the history yourself.)

            The only reason I didn’t cancel the subscription, not a thing I would ordinarily do, is because Fred pointed out that the current newspaper deliveryman (if it is a man) is so meticulous. He always places the paper on the porch, not in the street or under the shrubbery, and he even put it under the doormat yesterday. So Pitts and the Enquirer live another day.

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. Most of 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. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

      The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

      Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

      Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

      Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

10% discount on my Lulu publications:

Browse to: http://www.lulu.com/landing/lulu_coupon_10?a=4001629

Click "Buy" and enter 'BESTSELLER10' at checkout.

Save 10% on your order.

NEW PRODUCTS:

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Cool covers of my books

No Pain, No Pain

Star o’ the Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic)

I am here maternity tops

I eat dead things (doggy shirt, pet dishes, and BBQ apron)

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

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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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com.. 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.

Screeching: Halt

As you may know, a California woman lost a beauty contest very probably because she said she believes marriage is between a man and a woman, which is now a radical opinion and hate speech (although our sainted president has voiced the same opinion). A gay man who calls himself Perez Hilton was a judge of the Miss USA pageant, and called the contestant some very bad names because of her views. His real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr. and he changed it because he’s a Paris Hilton wannabe. Of all the females he could aspire to be, why didn’t he pick someone more impressive, like Michael Jackson?

In case you missed it, his question in the speaking-and-breathing part of the competition was: “Vermont just became the 4th state to legalize gay marriage. Do you think all states should follow suit?” Does this mean, exactly:

Do you think all states should take a vote?

or

Do you think all states should legalize gay marriage?

In effect, though, the real meaning of his question was, what do you think about gay marriage, and there was only one right answer.

In the movie, Miss Congeniality, the radiant Sandra Bullock plays a cop who goes undercover as a beauty contestant. She too has a firm grasp of her principles and, in addition to world peace, says the most important thing to society is harsher punishment for parole violators. Check the trailer at 2:21.

I watched beauty pageants as a child with feelings of enchantment (why didn’t the press ask me about enchantment instead of asking Prez O what he found most enchanting about being president?) and envy. As a young feminist I watched them with disapproval. Now I just check into them once in a while as a sort of a cultural canary-in-the-mine test: Perez Hilton was the latest whiff of gas, with Miss California being the canary.

My all-time favorite pageant was about 15 years ago, a combined Miss-Mrs.-Miss Teen Louisiana, when a profoundly wonderful black church gospel choir, in robes, sang live background music for the bathing suit parade. Something about going down to Jordan and crossing over. I’m not sure if that was the same pageant where the girls dressed in cowgirl style miniskirts with Stetsons and pistols and pranced around to the haunting “Ghost Riders in the Sky”.

Now I’ve added to my viewing repertoire the children’s pageants. Recently I mentioned that a man who seems to be gay — not that I would stereotype — runs Little Miss Perfect beauty pageants for children, of which he said some of the girls look like they just stepped out of the show “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”. I don’t think he meant it as a criticism.

On the whole, I don’t think gay men are the best judges of female desirability. For one thing, it stands to reason that a woman who enters a beauty contest is likely to be relatively traditional in her views. For another thing, gay men of the Perez Hilton ilk are just too envious and mean without being witty; as someone pointed out, Perez Hilton is no Oscar Wilde nor Noel Coward. And no one should be judging little girls’ sex appeal.

Gran Torino

I liked the movie Gran Torino pretty well though there were some weak spots. The movie was popular but “controversial” because the protagonist used a lot of racial epithets, which in a lot of people of an older generation do not necessarily and always denote racism and an evil heart. Life is more complicated than that, as this movie demonstrates when people other than white people do the same thing and worse, if in a different language. The TV show All in the Family depicted a man who used rude racial epithets, but he was played as a bonehead, so the show was considered to be a breakthrough, sophisticated and superior. We were supposed to look down on Archie Bunker. We can’t look down on Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino.

The movie isn’t really about racism anyway. It’s about the despoliation of the American vista, and it’s about how to confront real evil. I don’t want to give away the ending, but Kowalski’s sacrifice at the end was unsatisfactory because it was based on the expectation that clearly guilty criminals will do substantial jail time for murder, and we know that’s not true anymore, partly because so many people, including judges and lawyers, do not believe in evil. They believe in “mistakes” (regarding which, see Daily Writing Tips).

Sheesh and Heesh

I mostly agree with Chuck Hustmyre’s rant about genderless nomenclature. He started out on “Flagger” signs but that one doesn’t bother me. If I were a flagger I wouldn’t care if I were called a flagger, flagman, or flagwoman, though “flagger” hints that one may be flagging in more than one sense.

But why not change signs to verbs instead of nouns? Flagging ahead. Working on the railroad. Chairing going on. And why not just slaughter, rather than manslaughter, which Hustmyre notes has not been changed to personslaughter? (And did you ever notice that manslaughter looks like mans-laughter?)

I didn’t know that “lady” is ever replaced with “gentlewoman” as a less sexist counterpart to gentleman. This would be a peculiar echo of the British class system which could only be perpetrated by someone ignorant of the history of English. Also, whoever replaced fishermen with fisher has a tin ear and is ignorant of the traditional Christian expression, “fishers of men”.

Hustmyre errs about the word “prostitute”, however. The noun never referred only to females; the substitution of “sex worker” sought to eliminate not gender but any residual tinge of immorality or unseemliness.

By the way, though you can’t call suicide bombers et al terrorists, according to Janet Napolitano you can now call U.S. veterans (except the American Muslim soldier who fragged his fellow soldiers), anti-abortionists, conservative religious people (except Muslims), and most of your parents and grandparents, potential terrorist threats.

Anonymous

I ran across a university page that has something to do with writing but I couldn’t read the whole thing. (When I read the name Foucault I knew I was in deep authorship.) But someone (a professor?) wrote this about new technology and authorship:

New media is the equivalent of the treatise from the 18th century. The writing of a treatise would establish an ‘autonomous discourse’ (Olson 1980a) that could not be directly questioned or contested. Ideas in oral tradition were able to be immediately questioned. However written texts cannot be directly questioned because the text has been detached from its author. With the advent of the Guttenberg press, individuals could craft a treatise, and inexpensively print and distribute their ideas to any who were willing to read….

He needed a comma after “however”, and Gutenberg, which is spelled with one T, worked considerably before the 18th century. Anyway the idea is that the medium (or technology) makes the author disappear (did this not apply to hand-written books?), but when people had to speak their ideas face-to-face(s), the author then — existed? I think that’s part of what he means anyway but he’s just being silly. The difference is in the time between writing, reading, and response, not in the existence of an author. And actually, “ideas in oral tradition” were more likely to be lost if they couldn’t be remembered exactly; writing preserves ideas.

It is, however, a bit difficult to determine who wrote this article. Perhaps if money were changing hands, he’d be more literal about authorship.

Scapeswine

I get to make up a new word because Egypt’s government is calling for the eradication of all the pigs in Egypt, and this time they mean the delicious bacon, pork chop, and BBQ ribs-producing kind, not the infidels who eat pork. Muslims don’t eat pork. Egyptian Christians do. Maybe they’re just worried about swine flu. But Hindus don’t eat cows and they worship the cows, or at least protect them. Egypt could just sell its pigs to other countries.

Theological question: why would the Creator make a bad animal? There are creatures I don’t like and that are dangerous to me, from viruses to crocodiles, but this scapepigging is as bizarre in reverse as the deification of the preying mantis by the Kalahari Bush people of southern Africa. Fred said that the preying mantis was at least a supreme example of the “other”.

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. Most of 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. Short article with photos. (Lulu.com only.)

The Wish Book is fantasy-suspense-romance featuring the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Novella.

Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is 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? Short story.

Still Ridge is 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. Short story.

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

Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Cats: One woman's tale of menopause, in which I learn that the body is predictive; I perceive that I am like my cat; and I find love. Autobiographical essay.

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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/; 2009 issues are at http://cafelit.blogspot.com. 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.

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.

______________________________________________

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.

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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.

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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