Clearly Clouded

 

On this day:
1673
French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reach the Mississippi River and become the first Europeans to make a detailed account of its course
1775
American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.This was a significant encounter, a planned battle, and the British famously bayonetted the American wounded. It became a focal point and rallying cry. The important Patriot leader, Dr. Joseph Warren, was also killed.
1930
U.S. President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law.
1939
Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison
1940
The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
1944
Iceland declares independence from Denmark and becomes a republic.
1972
Watergate scandal: five White House operatives are arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in an attempt by some members of the Republican party to illegally wiretap the opposition.
1994
Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O.J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

***
What, then, should be the primary-liberal rule in the footrace of life?
It should be – for natural justice to the individual and for the consequent flourishing of the individual’s family and fellows and trading partners and society through loving care and peaceful exchange and liberal conversation – an equality of permission, or allowance, or approval for a general right to do, to venture. Let no obstacles of human design be placed in your path. It is to be permitted to enter the race as an adult, and to accord to others the same permission. It is [Adam] Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”--mcclosky

***

In 2025, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Singapore, and the UAE are "traditionally popular destinations for migrating millionaires, especially for those operating in the financial services sector," due to their absence of capital gains tax.

***

Chick-fil-A, which topped the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in 2025, fell to second place this year. Jersey Mike's claimed first place.

***

Clearly Clouded

A modifier is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as "a word or phrase that is used with another word or phrase to limit or add to its meaning." "The tall girl" distinguishes one girl from the others based on height.

Sometimes the effect is not clarifying, it's funny. George Carlin made a living on contradictory modifying phrases, oxymorons, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, acting naturally, and civil war. Sometimes it's a great literary device: with “Oh, brawling love, O loving hate,” Shakespeare describes the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet.

And sometimes it's purposely obfuscating.

What are we to think of "mostly peaceful demonstrations?" Is it like almost warm, generally bloodless, sort of clean, pretty honest, usually safe, generally accurate, nearly won, mostly pasteurized? Unlike "the tall girl," a phrasing meant to refine meaning, these phrases are meant to diffuse meaning and detract from the word's specificity.

Now, that said, what are the implications of a modifier applied to a virtue?

Like a battle cry on a screaming field or a whispered password in the quiet dark, words arise filled with meaning, expressing the unexpressible. A tight, gravid couplet. Often articles or even books emerge to refine a complex notion, surround an idea and herd it into some more understandable--or imaginable--form, sometimes paring it down, explaining, at least, what it is not. The Holy Trinity. Entangled Particles.

And sometimes the task is accepted as just too much, and we are left with recognizable words cobbled together into an unrecognizable whole — social justice, minority rights — tantalizingly close, but not quite right.

Clearly Clouded

On this day:

1525
Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns.
1966
The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
1983
Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune (the furthest planet from the Sun at the time).

***

Law enforcement in Miami-Dade County is seeking to arrest former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown on a charge of attempted murder, according to a warrant reviewed by The Washington Post.

***

The self-indulgent, incoherent, manipulative, attention-seeking, entitled, and insincere press conference break-in by the California senator is an encapsulation of the self-indulgent, incoherent, manipulative, attention-seeking, entitled, and insincere street demonstrations. The real problem is that these people are too old to grow out of it, so it seems we are stuck with them.

***

Clearly Clouded

A modifier is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as "a word or phrase that is used with another word or phrase to limit or add to its meaning." "The tall girl" distinguishes one girl from the others based on height.

Sometimes the effect is not clarifying, it's funny. George Carlin made a living on contradictory modifying phrases, oxymorons, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, acting naturally, and civil war. Sometimes it's a great literary device: with “Oh, brawling love, O loving hate,” Shakespeare describes the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet. 

And sometimes it's purposely obfuscating.

What are we to think of "mostly peaceful demonstrations?" Is it like almost warm, generally bloodless, sort of clean, pretty honest, usually safe, generally accurate, nearly won, mostly pasteurized? Unlike "the tall girl," phrasing meant to refine the meaning, these phrases are meant to diffuse meaning, detract from the word, and its specificity.

Now, that said, what does social justice mean?.

Trifler

On this day in 1889, the Oklahoma land rush officially starts at noon as thousands of Americans race for new, unclaimed land.

***

Will NIL payments to college athletes create tiers of quality like baseball has?

***

Coke makes the concentrate for its U.S. sodas mostly in Atlanta and Puerto Rico, while Pepsi’s is imported from Ireland.

***


Trifler

The word 'trifler' is a noun meaning 'one not to be believed or taken seriously.' Its origin is from Old French trufleor (liar, cheat). Its earliest documented use: 1382

The verb 'to trifle' is to dabble or dance around the issue, and a trifler does this with more flair than substance. It is much more definitive and aggressive than 'diffident.' The word also cleverly moonlights in metallurgy. 'Trifle' is a pewter alloy of medium hardness. A trifler can refer to one who works with trifle. Either way, triflers are never quite dealing in the essence.

An example of its usage: “The poet lives, and dies, and is immortal; but the eternal trifler of all complexions never dies. The eternal trifler comes and goes, sucks blood of living men, is filled and emptied with the surfeit of each changing fashion. He gorges and disgorges, and is never fed. There is no nurture in him, and he draws no nurture from the food he feeds on. There is no heart, no soul, no blood, no living faith in him: the eternal trifler simply swallows and remains.”
Thomas Wolfe; You Can’t Go Home Again; Harper & Row; 1940.

Wolfe sounds like he is describing a politician. 'There is no nurture in him.'

Gaslighting

New Agriculture head Rollins terminated 78 contracts for, among other things, “diversity dialogue workshops,” a “Brazilian forest and gender consultant” and a “women and forest carbon initiative mentorship program.” That added up to $132 million, or less than 0.06% of the USDA’s annual spending.

***

That the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world, possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right, and which no law of their own had taken away or abridged, was next the object of unjust encroachment.--Thomas Jefferson’s 1774 “A Summary View of the Rights of British America”

***

President Trump said early Monday that he was voiding all the last-minute pardons from President Joe Biden's term made using autopen. That's an interesting idea.

***



Gaslighting

Gaslighting” wass Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

The dictionary defines the word as “The act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.”

"...the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that “causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

"Lie" or "mendacity" is not enough.

“Gas Light” is a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.

There have been two film adaptations in the 1940s. One, George Cukor’s “Gaslight” in 1944, starred Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist and Charles Boyer as Gregory Anton. The two marry after a whirlwind romance and Gregory turns out to be a champion gaslighter. There are many clever moments--one is the rewriting of her diary--but, in originating the word, he insists her complaints over the constant dimming of their London townhouse’s gaslights is a figment of her troubled mind. It wasn’t.

Epic Fail

Nearly one and a half million women in this country are currently selling their bodies on the platform OnlyFans.

***

EV sales in 2024 (1,301,411) were higher by 7.3% and accounted for 8.1% of total sales, up from 7.8% share in 2023. While the rate of growth has slowed, volume continues to expand. In the second half of 2024, more than 700,000 EVs were sold, accounting for 8.7% of total new vehicle sales.

***

Epic Fail

The unfortunate FBI spokesperson, Aletha Duncan, speaking at the New Orleans atrocity, declared that the event was not an act of terrorism and made several syntax errors. Then she made a request of the audience: "This is my ask..."

Nominalization is the nouning of a verb. Appeared as a verb preceeded the noun "request," borrowed from the French, a few times 1000-1200, then did not reappear until 1700. Still, it is rare, appearing in three specialized uses: in card-playing, finance, and fund-raising. More common in Australia and, lesser, in the UK. particularly denoting size, as in "a big ask."

“Do you have a solve for this problem?” "Enclosed is the invite." “Let’s all focus on the build.” “That’s the takeaway from today’s seminar.” Or, from a No. 1 hit in Britain, “Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?”

Each of these jarring sentences contains an example of nominalization, where a verb or adjective has been transmuted into a noun. There are two types of nominalization. Type A involves a morphological change, namely suffixation: the verb “to investigate” produces the noun “investigation,” and “to nominalize” yields “nominalization.” Type B is known as “zero derivation” — or, more straightforwardly, “conversion.” This occurs when a word has been switched from a verb or adjective into a noun without adding a suffix.

They are associated with bureaucracy and general carelessness.

"Their boosters see them as marvels of concision, but one person’s idea of streamlining is another’s idea of a specious and ethically doubtful simplicity." (Hitchens)

In the case of the unfortunate Ms. Duncan, it's the latter.

Words

 Duke beat Clemson 27-7.

***

Zverev beat Sinner

***

Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee’s, have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and local pharmacies like CVS deepen isolation. Among publicly-funded spaces, libraries and parks are more redistributive than museums and historical sites. And, despite prominent restrictions on chain stores in some large US cities, chains are more class diverse than independent stores. The mix of establishments in a neighborhood is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships (Chetty et al., 2022).

***

Words

Bully is one of those words that means many things, from corned beef to the start of field hockey play.

Its main use, as 'intimidator,' has accelerated in its use and is a classic example of evolution, its paths and diverse outcomes.

Bully:

1530s, "sweetheart," a term of endearment applied to either sex, of uncertain origin; perhaps from Dutch boel "lover; brother," which probably is a diminutive of Middle Dutch broeder "brother" (compare Middle High German buole "brother," source of German Buhle "lover;" see 'brother' (n.)).

The meaning deteriorated 17c. through "fine fellow" and "blusterer" to "harasser of the weak" (1680s, from bully-ruffian, 1650s). Perhaps this was by influence of bull (n.1), but a connecting sense between "lover" and "ruffian" might be "protector of a prostitute," which was one sense of bully (though it is not specifically attested until 1706). "Sweetheart" words often go bad in this way; compare 'leman,' also ladybird, which in Farmer and Henley ("Slang and Its Analogues") is "1. A whore; and (2) a term of endearment." Shakespeare has bully-rook "jolly comrade."

The adjective meaning "worthy, jolly, admirable" is attested from 1680s and preserves an earlier, positive sense of the word. It enjoyed popularity in late 19c. American English, and was used from 1864 in expressions, such as bully for you! "bravo!" (from etymology online)

Aptronyms

“History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” Brooks

***

The government ain’t us. Failure to grasp this reality explains why the normally quite sensible Larry Summers mistakenly thinks that, because “the economy looks stronger than expected,” Fitch’s downgrading of U.S. government debt is “bizarre and inept.” Fitch did not downgrade the U.S. economy; it downgraded the debt issued by a particular organization – the U.S. government.--Bordeaux

***

According to the Census Bureau:

• 45.3 million immigrants were living in the U.S. as of 2021.[76] [77] [78]
• immigrants comprised 13.6% of the U.S. population in 2021.[79]
• from 1850 to 2021, the portion of the U.S. population comprised of immigrants ranged from 5% to 15%, with a median of 13% and an average of 11%:

[80]

Aptronyms

The playwright Richard Sheridan put meat in the names of his characters, called 'aptronyms, which reflect the traits of their owners--Anthony Absolute, Lidia Languish, Lady Sneerwell--and when English did not accommodate, he made them up--Malaprop. And we look for this in our real world; I knew a surgeon named 'Slaughter" and an obstetrician named "Conception." So it was with mixed emotions I saw the Pirate's battery last night. The pitcher was a new guy the Phillies gave up on (with his 90 mph fastball) and their catcher, off waivers, playing here --the team of last resort--rather than retiring, Jason Delay. The Pirate battery: Falter and Delay.

Sheridan would be thrilled.

WOD

Has anybody ever been in a business meeting and had someone stop and call his dad?

***

Only 3 colleges dropped mandates from last week to this week leaving us with 101 colleges still mandating COVID vaccines for fall.

***

At 440GW, the amount of new renewable electricity generation capacity (mainly solar) added this year will, for the first time, apparently be greater than total global nuclear generation capacity (413 GW).

WOD

In her recent book, Babel, the youthful, wonderfully talented, nascent intellectual, and activist R.F. Kuang writes about colonialism in a time of magic. The magic is generated and directed by the subtle tension between the definition and the etymology of words. It's a fun, clever idea ...so, with some prodding, the Word of the Day is back.

Amanuensis: n: 1. a person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another; secretary. 

Amanuensis can be traced to the Latin phrase servus ā manū meaning "slave at hand." It entered English in the early 1600s. Should the word be banned because of its origin?

Adjectives

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.--cs lewis

***

Sasse may resign.

***

Pittsburgh Police responded to an armed carjacking and robbery in Shadyside on Tuesday night, marking the third carjacking reported in the neighborhood within the last seven days.

***

Liberalism held that society’s work should be carried on, its responsibilities met, and its difficulties dealt with, by the application of social power, not governmental power; social power meaning the power generated and exercised by individuals and groups of individuals working in an economy which is free of governmental interference – an economy of free contract.--Knoc

***

Adjectives

Years ago the Beat poets used to link words for their sensual effect. They had no real, coherent meaning but sought an impression. 'Radio belly.' 'Cat shovel.' They created a sense without a definition.

'Peoples democracy' is a Marxist-Leninist term for an economic/social/political movement. That is, it is democracy with an adjective. Not really a democracy. Not an elaboration, but a distortion where 'democracy' softens the moderator.

Now, what does 'social justice' mean? Is it 'justice' with a curve? Isn't that actually the definition of 'injustice'?

So, does the adjective refine or distort the meaning of the word? And what kind of culture reveres inaccuracy and distortion?

Top of Mind

The national debt is now over 31 trillion dollars. 31 Trillion.

***

EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. nonprofit that used National Institute of Health funds to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic, has been approved for yet another five-year federal grant, despite a history of violating the terms of its contracts. (NR via Don)

***

North Korea fired a rocket over Japan. That is probably all the world needs to know about the reliability and responsibility of government leaders. Like flying up to foreign jet fighters, these people need to be the center of attention, need to be a player. Even if they stimulate an equally bent foreign leader to react and blow everyone up.

Remember, during the Cuban Missle Crisis, Castro begged the Russians to attack the U.S., despite knowing the first response by the Americans would be to obliterate Cuba and its people. Castro's peopel.

And remember, too, the mood in the Kennedy White House was to attack.

***

Top of Mind

“I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like Representative [Jim] McGovern, Senator [Mike] Braun, Senator [Cory] Booker, Representative Jackie — are you here? Where’s Jackie? — I think she wasn’t going to be here — to help make this a reality,” the president said.
The Indiana Republican, who was the co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, had died earlier in an August car accident that also killed two of her staffers.

Jean-Pierre came to Biden’s defense, noting that it’s not “unusual to have someone top of mind,” especially at a “big event.” “If you put it into the context,” she continued, “it happened at an event where we were calling out the champions, congressional champions in particular, of this issue, this important issue when it comes to food and security.”

"Top of mind." What was she saying? It became a meme, repeated over and over by Jean-Pierre and her friends. What were they saying?

"Top of mind" is a marketing term referring to the idea of associating a particular need with a particular solution. Think 'Kleenex.' It's a relatively recent term. There is an idiom definition of "occupying one's foremost attention or concern."

If you Ngram it, it is rare, appearing over the last thirty years with 10% of the frequency of "Glioblastoma," a very unusual brain tumor.

Why would she use such a phrase? Because these people create bizarre beliefs and then assume their audience holds that ground in common with them.

These people create their own worlds, live in them, and demand you do too. "Top of mind" means nothing to the average guy who is not in marketing. So she takes it, repurposes it, and then uses that redefinition to explain why it's reasonable that the President of the United States is looking for a woman he knows is dead. In the same way, they create a fuel shortage purposely, give fortunes to Iranian theocrats who despise us, explain the advantages of declining police roles and the increasing public riots, redefine the meaning of "recession," raise deficit spending to fight inflation, fight discrimination with discrimination, declare the border 'secure'--all for our benefit--all outrageous notions delivered with a calm straight face, breaking serenity only to pose in astonishment when disbelief appears.

 

 

 

Sowell and a Mr. Dumpty

There is a creepy change in America. Some elements are beginning to attack the founders of the nation personally, judging them by criteria not present in their time. But if a standard-bearer is attacked, will his ideals be next?



                           Thomas Sowell and a Mr. Dumpty


"‘When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'

‘The question is,' said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things."

‘The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that's all.'"

Sowell on the manipulation of words, as collected by Ebeling:

“Public service” means not the private market’s provision of goods and services desired and valued by the consumers of society. Instead, it means governmental employment in which the state preempts the voluntary wishes of people with the preferences of those who control the state. 
“Greed” refers to the peaceful, market-oriented attempt of people to improve the circumstances of themselves and their families. “No amount of taxation is ever described by the anointed as ‘greed’ on the part of the government or the clientele of government.” 
“Responsibility” does not mean the individual’s accountability for his own actions and their consequences; rather, it refers to the collective guilt of society for creating poverty, crime, or racially biased attitudes. 
“Rights” do not mean the inalienable liberties that all men have, and which may not be abridged without causing real injustice; instead, they refer to the ever-expanding redistributive “entitlements” which governments are to give to some at the expense of others in society.

Minting Language

It’s not often that a word coined as a result of a competition becomes part of the language, but "scofflaw" did. In 1924, during Prohibition, banker Delcevare King of Quincy, Massachusetts announced a contest to coin a word to describe “a lawless drinker”. The prize was $200 in gold (about $5,000 today). 

Delcevare King, was a prominent member of Boston Republican society in the early 20th century. His father, Theophilus King, was a Quincy philanthropist and president of the Granite Trust Company; the younger King would eventually rise to that position as well. King seems to have combined firm moral convictions with a jolly clubbish spirit. He was vice president of the Massachusetts chapter of the Anti-Saloon League, an officer of the Watch and Ward society (the anti-vice organization whose activities inspired the ironic slogan “Banned in Boston”), and active throughout his life in a dizzying number of other local organizations, from the Church Attendance Council to the Rod and Gun Club. A bon vivant for a good cause, he played Santa Claus every year for tenement children and was master of ceremonies at the famed free-speech venue the Ford Hall Forum.

In early January 1924, it was reported that, in support of the three-year-old national policy of Prohibition, King would award $200 in gold to the person who invented the best word to denounce a violator of the 18th Amendment. “I do seek a word which will stab awake the conscience of the drinker...and stab awake the public conscience to the fact that such lawless drinking is, in the words of President Harding, ‘a menace to the republic itself,’” King said, according to the Globe.

Along with two other judges, also from “dry” society circles, King received more than 20,000 entries. They included “boozshevic,” “contralaw,” “klinker,” “lawjacker,” “slacklaw,” and “wetocrat.”

In the end, two people independently suggested “scofflaw,” winning $100 apiece—Henry Irving Dale of Andover and Kate L. Butler of Dorchester, who dreamed it up while on a train returning from vacation in New Haven. King described his criteria for the selection: He was looking for a word of no more than one or two syllables; starting with “s,” “such words having a sting”; and applicable to any legal violation.

The editors of the Harvard Advocate, a student magazine, promptly proposed a $25 prize for words describing a “dry,” or a Prohibitionist. (“The [Advocate] editors wish it understood,” the Globe wrote in February 1924, “that they are ‘wet,’ but are not trying to encourage the violation of any laws.”) Among the more than 2,200 entries were “fear-beer,” “suds-hate,” “jug-buster,” and the winner, sent in by Katherine Greene Welling of New York City: “spigot-bigot.” The most common response: “Delcevare.”

Laconic

Laconic: adj: 1. using few words; expressing much in few words; concise: a laconic reply. origin: 1580s, probably via Latin Laconicus, from Greek Lakonikos, from Lakon "person from Lakonia," the district around Sparta in southern Greece in ancient times, whose inhabitants were famously proud of their brevity of speech.

A story:

Philip II of Macedon was consolidating his military position in Greece. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other major city-states, he turned his attention to Sparta and asked, with bad intent, whether he should come as friend or foe.

“Neither,” was the reply.
He then sent this message:
“You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city”
The Spartans again replied with a single word:
“If.”

"A" and "An"

A little bit from The Purdue OWL on "a" and "an":



"A" goes before words that begin with consonants.

• a cat
• a dog
• a purple onion
• a buffalo
• a big apple

"An" goes before words that begin with vowels:

• an apricot
• an egg
• an Indian
• an orbit
• an uprising

Exceptions

Use "an" before unsounded "h." Because the "h" hasn't any phonetic representation and has no audible sound, the sound that follows the article is a vowel; consequently, "an" is used.

• an honorable peace
• an honest error

When "u" makes the same sound as the "y" in "you," or "o" makes the same sound as "w" in "won," then a is used. The word-initial "y" sound ("unicorn") is actually a glide [j] phonetically, which has consonantal properties; consequently, it is treated as a consonant, requiring "a."

• a union
• a united front
• a unicorn
• a used napkin
• a U.S. ship
• a one-legged man

O.K.

"O.K." is an Americanism that has swept the world. Consequently it is a great target for linguists. Where did the phrase come from?

The man responsible for unraveling the mystery behind “OK” was an American linguist named Allen Walker Read. An English professor at Columbia University, Read dispelled a host of erroneous theories on the origins of “OK,” ranging from the name of a popular Army biscuit (Orrin Kendall) to the name of a Haitian port famed for its rum (Aux Cayes) to the signature of a Choctaw chief named Old Keokuk.

During the late 1830s, it was a favorite practice among younger, educated circles to misspell words intentionally, then abbreviate them and use them as slang when talking to one another. (Reminiscent of the Cockney rhyming speech.)

The initials “O.K.” were first published in The Boston Morning Post in 1839. It was meant as an abbreviation for “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” at the time. OK steadily made its way into the everyday speech of Americans.
It was picked up by contemporary politicians. When the incumbent president Martin Van Buren was up for reelection, his Democratic supporters organized a band of thugs to influence voters. This group was formally called the “O.K. Club,” which referred both to Van Buren’s nickname “Old Kinderhook” (based on his hometown of Kinderhook, New York), and to the term recently made popular in the papers. At the same time, the opposing Whig Party made use of “OK” to denigrate Van Buren’s political mentor Andrew Jackson. According to the Whigs, Jackson invented the abbreviation “OK” to cover up his own misspelling of “all correct.”

Speak-easy

Speak-easy: noun: A place where alcoholic beverages are illegally sold; specifically such a place during the period of prohibition in the United States.

Speak-easies so named were born in Pennsylvania in 1888, when the Brooks High-License Act raised the state fee for a saloon license to $500 from $50. The number of licensed bars promptly plummeted, but not all of the barkeeps unable to get a license shut their doors. Kate Hester had run a saloon in McKeesport, just outside of Pittsburgh for years; she refused to pony up the new license fee and wanted to keep from drawing attention to her newly illicit joint. When her patrons got too rowdy, she hushed them in a hoarse whisper, “speak easy boys, speak easy!” It wasn’t long before Hester’s “expression became common in McKeesport and spread to Pittsburgh,” noted the New York Times in 1890.

“Some day, perhaps, Webster’s Dictionary will take it up."--NY Times, July 6th, 1891.

Holophrase and The Identity TKO.

A holophrase is a single word used to express a complex idea. While adult uses like "Help," "Fire," "Go," and "Come" are all legitimate examples, the concept is really pre-linguistic, applied to children more than adults. So a child will say "Up," rather than "I want you to lift me up into your arms,"  "Food," rather than "I want food."


Which brings us to what appears to be holophrasis in its modern, grown-up extension of the juvenile: The Self-described Identity, or The Identity TKO. In a way, it is the obverse of the old, bigoted sneer, like "Commie," or "Mick," but turned on itself with its attendant enhancement. So one might declare oneself a "Native-American," or a "Woman," or a "Black" and this single identification contains all the history and narrative a deprived or suppressed culture might have.

And, as such, it trumps all argument, debate and criticism.

Beastly Bigotry

The word "spaniel" refers to the several breeds of small to medium-sized dogs with long drooping ears and a silky coat. But it means something else: A submissive or fawning person. It is an old word, coming from Old French espaignol/espaigneul (Spanish dog), from Hispaniolus (Spanish), from Hispania (Spain). Its earliest documented use is 1386. So its original meaning, "Spanish dog," became a "fawning person." Or perhaps the fawning element came first as a Spanish quality and was later applied to the dog breed. Does this imply something derogative about the Spanish? Could this hint at an obsequious quality that might diminish Hispanics?
Best be rid of the word entirely. And Paddy Wagon, too. 

Ex-Pats

As if the world was not mean enough, this article recently appeared in The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration It even includes a reference to a similar article in the WSJ. 

The essence of the article is here: "Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’."

According to Wiki, an expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of their citizenship. The word comes from the Latin terms ex ("out of") and patria ("country, fatherland"). In common usage, the term is often used in the context of professionals or skilled workers sent abroad by their companies. The term 'expatriate' in some countries also has a legal context used for tax purposes, meaning someone who does not have tax residence in the country they are living. An expatriate living in a country can receive a favorable tax treatment – they are still subject to taxation, but not in the same way as tax residents. "Expatriation" goes both ways; a country can expatriate a citizen, essentially exiling him and depriving him of citizenship as Nazi Germany did to its countless "undesirables."

Expat has a nuance but it is not racial, it is cultural. The classic expatriate in history was suffering a self-imposed cultural exile, a flight both from and to a cultural ambiance. Henry James, the writers of the 1920s like Hemingway found places in the world they found more compatible than home. This was less a work decision than an emotional one. Hemingway would be stunned to be called an "immigrant in Paris."

Leaving a country for the economic advantage of another or the safety of another has never been an expatriate act; the Pilgrims, as white as you can get, were not expats. But things change. People can see things differently. But they should not be allowed to blatantly distort for their own racist ends. 

Words: Mata Hari

"Mata Hari" means a seductive woman who works as a spy. It was a "real" name, or rather a stage name of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (1876-1917), a Dutch exotic dancer. The name is Malay, which means "sun,"
literally "eye of the day", from Malay mata (eye) + hari (day, dawn). Interestingly, 'mata mata' means 'spy' in Malay.

"Eye of the day" is a mirror of her real names, Margarete Gertrude Zelle. Margarete means either pearl or daisy and daisy means "day's eye".
She was executed by the French.

Mata Hari in Leeuwarden