NBierma.com File

Friday, December 31, 2004

Posted 1:34 PM by Nathan
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,125516,00.html
Saving 'Merry Christmas'
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
LOS ANGELES - It isn’t exactly the season for “Jingle Bells” and Santa Claus, but one man is on a crusade to save Christmas anyway.
Manuel Zammarano has formed the Committee to Save Merry Christmas (search ) to protest the fact that big retailers profit from Christmas shopping dollars but refuse to mention the holiday by name.
His group has boycotted Federated Department Stores Inc. (search ), which owns Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, for collecting Christmas cash without giving Christmas credit for all the end-of-year gift buying.
Federated issued a statement saying phrases like “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” embrace all religious and ethnic celebrations that take place in November and December and are more appropriate for the “many diverse cultures in America today.”
Macy’s also points out that it features Santa in its parade and plays Christmas music in its stores.
But Zammarano says that such gestures mean little as long as retailers give in to political correctness.
Go to the video box near the top of this story to watch a report by FOX News' William La Jeunesse.

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Posted 11:09 AM by Nathan
From the Plain English Campaign:

We'll leave you this year with the following piece, sent to us by Alexandra Jones of San Francisco, who received it from Ralph Ostermueller of The Financial Valuation Group.

The Night Before Christmas:

Whereas, on or about the night prior to Christmas, there did occur at a certain improved piece of real property (hereinafter "the House") a general lack of stirring by all creatures therein, including, but not limited to a mouse.

A variety of foot apparel, e.g., stocking, socks, etc., had been affixed by and around the chimney in said House in the hope and/or belief that St. Nick a/k/a/ St. Nicholas a/k/a/ Santa Claus (hereinafter "Claus") would arrive at sometime thereafter. The minor residents, i.e. the children, of the aforementioned House were located in their individual beds and were engaged in nocturnal hallucinations, i.e. dreams, wherein vision of confectionery treats, including, but not limited to, candies, nuts and/or sugar plums, did dance, cavort and otherwise appear in said dreams.

Whereupon the party of the first part (sometimes hereinafter referred to as ("I"), being the joint-owner in fee simple of the House with the party of the second part (hereinafter "Mamma"), and said Mamma had retired for a sustained period of sleep. At such time, the parties were clad in various forms of headgear, e.g., kerchief and cap.

Suddenly, and without prior notice or warning, there did occur upon the unimproved real property adjacent and appurtenant to said House, i.e., the lawn, a certain disruption of unknown nature, cause and/or circumstance. The party of the first part did immediately rush to a window in the House to investigate the cause of such disturbance.

At that time, the party of the first part did observe, with some degree of wonder and/or disbelief, a miniature sleigh (hereinafter "the Vehicle") being pulled and/or drawn very rapidly through the air by approximately eight (8) reindeer. The driver of the Vehicle appeared to be and in fact was, the previously referenced Claus.

Said Claus was providing specific direction, instruction and guidance to the approximately eight (8) reindeer and specifically identified the animal co-conspirators by name: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen (hereinafter "the Deer"). (Upon information and belief, it is further asserted that an additional co- conspirator named "Rudolph" may have been involved.)

The party of the first part witnessed Claus, the Vehicle and the Deer intentionally and willfully trespass upon the roofs of several residences located adjacent to and in the vicinity of the House, and noted that the Vehicle was heavily laden with packages, toys and other items of unknown origin or nature. Suddenly, without prior invitation or permission, either express or implied, the Vehicle arrived at the House, and Claus entered said House via the chimney.

Said Claus was clad in a red fur suit, which was partially covered with residue from the chimney, and he carried a large sack containing a portion of the aforementioned packages, toys, and other unknown items.

He was smoking what appeared to be tobacco in a small pipe in blatant violation of local ordinances and health regulations.

Claus did not speak, but immediately began to fill the stocking of the minor children, which hung adjacent to the chimney, with toys and other small gifts. (Said items did not, however, constitute "gifts" to said minor pursuant to the applicable provisions of the U.S. Tax Code.)

Upon completion of such task, Claus touched the side of his nose and flew, rose and/or ascended up the chimney of the House to the roof where the Vehicle and Deer waited and/or served as "lookouts." Claus immediately departed for an unknown destination.

However, prior to the departure of the Vehicle, Deer and Claus from said House, the party of the first part did hear Claus state and/or exclaim: "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!" Or words to that effect.

Posted 11:08 AM by Nathan
Among the additions to the forthcoming 2nd edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, according to Oxford editor Erin McKean:

Splen·da /?splend?/ * n. trademark an artificial sweetener used as a calorie-free sugar substitute.

cop·y·left /?käpï?left/ * n. an arrangement whereby software or artistic work may be used, modified, and distributed freely on condition that anything derived from it is bound by the same condition.
DERIVATIVES: cop·y·left·ed adj.
ORIGIN: 1980s: on the pattern of copyright.

size·ism /?s¥z?iz?m/ (also siz·ism) * n. prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's size: requiring large passengers to buy two seats is pure sizeism.
DERIVATIVES: size·ist (also siz·ist) adj. & n.
ORIGIN: from size + -ism 'basis for prejudice.'

ad·ult·es·cent /?adl?tes?nt; ??d?l-/ * n. informal a middle-aged person whose clothes, interests, and activities are typically associated with youth culture.
ORIGIN: 1990s: blend of adult and adolescent.

Sed·na /?sedn?/ * Astronomy a reddish celestial body about half the size of earth's moon. It is the most distant known object in the solar system and orbits the sun every 10,500 years.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Posted 1:51 PM by Nathan
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-23-tv-rather_x.htm?csp=34
CBS News anchor Dan Rather has been known for his folksy sayings. A sampling:

Election night 2004:

"(John) Kerry can still win it, but at this point he's got his back to the wall, his shirttail on fire, and a bill collector's at the door."

The election is "closer than Lassie and Timmy."

"Put on a cup of coffee; this race isn't going to be over for a while."

"(President) Bush is sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field."

"No one is saying that George Bush is not going to win the election, and if you had to bet the double-wide, you'd have to bet that he'd win."

"We used to say if a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun."

Election night 2000:

"This race is as tight as a too-small bathing suit on a too-hot car ride back from the beach."

"Bush is sweeping through the South like a tornado through a trailer park."

"Sip it, savor it, cup it, photostat it, underline it in red, put it in the album, hang it on the wall: George Bush is the next president of the United States."

Election night 1998:

"Democrats and Republicans are nervous as pigs in a packing plant over these returns."

Inauguration Day 1993:

"If an American inauguration can't bring a lump to your throat and a tear to your eye, if you don't feel as corny as Kansas in August, maybe you need a jump-start and some vitamins."

Election night 1992:

"I'd like to leave you with the words of that popular, secular, patriotic hymn: 'Long may our land be bright with freedom's holy light.'

Source: USA TODAY research

Friday, December 17, 2004

Posted 9:19 AM by Nathan
I had linguist Mark Liberman diagnose this statement by my wife:

"Oh well, right?"

I'm inclined to support your analysis that it's a kind of quote. A
similar case might be the use of fragments of familiar phrases:

"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth', right?"

or

"'Let him who is without sin', right?"

But the context doesn't seem to be as open to non-linguistic material as
quotative "be all" and similar things, where

"He was all _______'.

allows arbitrary mimesis, with or without any linguistic content at all
or even any sound.

Or do you think that your wife might have (for instance)

"[mimes gagging], right?"

I don't mean that she was quoting anyone in particular, but rather
quoting a generic mode of self-expression. Maybe "reference" or "refer
to" is better than "quote".

The analogy is to the use of fragments of famous phrases, like

"sic transit", right?

My idea was that such fragments don't need to be full phrases normally
interpreted, but can instead be allusions to the projection of ideas or
attitudes stereotypically associated with the referenced expression.

In the case of "oh well", what's referenced is an exclamation not a
fragment, but the idea would still be to allude to the attitudes
stereotypically associated with the expression.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Posted 2:20 PM by Nathan
OED on merry

I. That causes pleasure.

1. a. Of an occupation, event, state, or condition: causing
pleasure or happiness; pleasing, delightful. Obs.

eOE ÆLFRED tr. Boethius De Consol. Philos. (Otho) xxxi. 70 [For] y
ic nat hwæt a wor[uldlustas] myrges bringa [L. quid habeat
jucunditatis] hiora luf[igendum]. eOE Metres of Boethius (partly from
transcript of damaged MS) xiii. 45 Him a twigu inca emne swa merge æt
hi æs metes ne rec. OE ÆLFRIC Catholic Homilies: 1st Ser. (Royal) x.
259 eos woruld eah e heo myrige hwiltidum geuht sy, nis heo hwære e
gelicre ære ecan worulde, e is sum cweartern leohtum dæge. c1225 (?OE)
Body & Soul (Worcester) 7 onne domes dai [cum]e onne scalt u, erming,
up arisen, Imeten ine mordeden eo e murie [were]n, Seoruhful ond
sorimod. c1230 (?a1200) Ancrene Riwle (Corpus Cambr.) 198 He..spec
swie swoteliche & wordes se murie et ha mahten deade arearen to liue.
c1300 St. Sebastian (Laud) 19 in C. Horstmann Early S.-Eng. Legendary
(1887) 179 Guod it is and murie breren to wonie i-fere. c1330 (?c1300)
Speculum Guy (Auch.) 905 Hu murie hit were to haue e siht Off godes
face! 1435 R. MISYN tr. R. Rolle Fire of Love 57 No inge is meriar en
lhesu to synge. 1502 W. ATKYNSON tr. T. à Kempis De Imitatione III.
vi. 200 Nothynge is more swete than is loue,..nothynge..meryer [L.
jucundius].

b. With implied impersonal subject and indirect object denoting
the person characterized by happiness or joy. Cf. sense 4a. Obs.

OE Homily: Larspell (Corpus Cambr. 419) in A. S. Napier Wulfstan
(1883) 237 He sæde, æt him nære næfre ær swa ee ne swa myrige on nanum
yfele, swa him a wæs. OE Homily (Hatton 113) in A. S. Napier Wulfstan
(1883) 152 Hyre wæs myrge on hyre mode urh æt. c1275 (?a1200) LAAMON
Brut (Calig.) 11691 Him wes to murie, for is lond wes a swie god.

c. Of music, speech, etc.: pleasing to the ear, pleasant to hear.
Of a musical instrument: producing a sweet sound; (of a bird) having a
pleasant song. (In later use passing into sense 5.) Obs.

OE Hymns (Durh. B.iii.32) cxxvii. 5, in I. Milfull Hymns of
Anglo-Saxon Church (1996) 413 Dulci..ymno omne per aevum : mid
merigum..lofsange geond ælce ylde. c1175 (OE) Homily (Bodl. 343) in S.
Irvine Old Eng. Homilies (1993) 198 ider e [sc. the blessed] beo
ibrohte mid murie lofsongum. c1275 Owl & Nightingale (Calig.) 345 Ne
bo e song neuer so murie at he ne shal inche wel unmurie.

...

e. Of weather, climate, a season, a day, etc.: pleasant, fine. Of
a wind: favourable for sailing. Also fig. Obs.
The sense is attested earliest as a surname.

1214 in P. H. Reaney & R. M. Wilson Dict. Eng. Surnames (1991) s.v.
Merryweather, Henry Meriweder. c1275 (?a1200) LAAMON Brut (Calig.)
20924 Wind stod on wille weder swie murie. ?a1300 in R. H. Robbins
Secular Lyrics 14th & 15th Cent. (1952) 144 Myrie a tyme I telle in
may, Wan bricte blosmen breke on tre.

...
f. Of looks or appearance: pleasing to behold, attractive. Obs.

c1225 Life St. Katherine 314 i leor is, meiden, lufsum, & ti mu
murie. a1325 (c1250) Gen. & Exod. 2258 Her non hadden o loten miri.
a1500 (c1400) Sir Cleges (Adv.) 27 The knyt hade a ientyll wyffe..And
mery sche was on site. 1559 Passage Q. Eliz. Aij, Her grace by holding
vp her handes, and merie countenaunce to such as stode farre of,..did
declare her selfe [etc.]. 1703 London Gaz. No. 3948/4 A dun
Gelding..with a round Barrel, longish Legg'd,..a merry Countenance.

...

2. Of a tale, saying, jest, etc.: amusing, diverting, funny.
Now only with mixture of sense 5.

c1390 CHAUCER Parson's Tale 46, I wol yow telle a myrie tale in
prose. c1400 (c1378) LANGLAND Piers Plowman (Laud) B. XIII. 352
ei..anne had merye tales, And how at lechoures louyen lauen an iapen.
1488 HARY Actis & Deidis Schir William Wallace II. 36 Quhen Wallas
herd spek of that mery saw, He likit weill at that mercat to be. 1530
J. PALSGRAVE Lesclarcissement 244/2 Mery taunt, lardon. 1530 J.
PALSGRAVE Lesclarcissement 244/2 Mery jeste a ryddle, sornette. 1563
Homilies II. Idolatry III. (1859) 265 Seneca much commendeth
Dionysius, for his merry robbing of such decked and jewelled puppets.
1594 SHAKESPEARE Tit. A. V. ii. 173 Two of her brothers were condemnd
to death, My hand cut off and made a merrie iest.

...

II. Characterized by happiness or joy.

4. a. Full of animated enjoyment (in early use chiefly with
reference to feasting or sporting); full of laughter or cheerfulness;
joyous. Also of a person's general disposition: given to joyousness or
mirth.

c1325 in G. L. Brook Harley Lyrics (1968) 49 Heo is..Maiden murgest
of mou. a1375 William of Palerne 4926 ei muriest at e mete at time
seten. c1390 in C. Brown Relig. Lyrics 14th Cent. (1924) 148 When men
beo murgest at heor Mele, I rede e enke on uster-day. a1438 Bk.
Margery Kempe I. 63 Why ar e no myryar?

...
c. Boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slightly drunk, tipsy.
Cf. market-merry s.v. MARKET n. 12b, merry-drunk s.v. MERRY adv. 2.

a1382 Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.): 1 Kings (Bodl. 959) xxv. 36 er was
to hym a feste in his hous..and e herte of naabal myrie [a1425 L.V.
iocounde; L. iucundum]; forsoe he was drunke ful myche. c1475 (1392)
MS Wellcome 564 f. 52, Whanne he is drunken, he is oirwhile angri and
oirwhile merye.

..

b. Of a season or festival: characterized by celebration and
rejoicing. Freq. in Merry Christmas! and other seasonal greetings.

1565 Hereford Munic. MSS (transcript) 209 And thus I comytt you to
god, who send you a mery Christmas & many. 1600 SHAKESPEARE 2 Hen. IV
V. iii. 36 Welcome mery shrouetide. 1617 F. MORYSON Itinerary II. 87
To keepe a merry Christmas. 1667 EARL OF SANDWICH Let. in W. Temple
Wks. (1720) II. 136, I wish you a very merry Christmas. 1711 SWIFT
Jrnl. to Stella 25 Mar. (1948) I. 223 Morning. I wish you a merry
New-year; this is the first day of the year, you know, with us. 1798
J. AUSTEN Let. 25 Dec. (1995) 30, I wish you a merry Christmas, but no
compliments of the Season. 1843 DICKENS Christmas Carol iii. 104 They
wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog. 1909 Daily
Chron. 26 Jan. 5/6 'A Merry Christmas!' he shouts light-heartedly at
curtain-fall. 1944 H. MARTIN & R. BLANE (title of song) Have yourself
a merry little Christmas. 1987 Woman's Own 19-26 Dec. 69/3 'A merry
Christmas, Uncle!' he said cheerfully. 'God save you!'

III. Phrases.

6. a. to make merry: to be festive, to celebrate; to enjoy oneself
with others in drinking, dancing, etc.; also with reflexive pronoun as
object in early use.
[In quot. c1330 app. a blended construction: made hem ioie and made
hem miri. It is not clear whether the use with reflexive pronoun is
the original construction.]

c1330 (?a1300) Arthour & Merlin (Auch.) 8218 er ai made hem ioie and
miri For store and tresor at ai brout. a1375 William of Palerne 1880
Make we vs merie for mete haue we at wille.

...

www.oed.com

Monday, December 06, 2004

Posted 2:29 PM by Nathan
The New York Times
October 19, 2003
ON LANGUAGE; Flagellum Dei
By William Safire

We will come to sodomy in a moment. To stagger together through today's
column about grammatical possessiveness, you and I must agree on the
difference between a gerund and a participle.

Take the word dancing. It starts out as a form of a verb: "Look, Ma, I'm
dancing!" When that word is used as an adjective to modify a noun -- "look
at that dancing bear!" -- it's called a participle.

But when the same word is used as a noun -- "I see the bear, and its dancing
isn't so hot" -- then the word is classified as a gerund. (From the Latin
gerundum, "to bear, to carry," because the gerund, though a noun, seems to
bear the action of a verb.)

We give the same word these different names to tell us what it's doing and
what its grammatical needs are. Two great grammarians had a titanic spat in
the 1920's over the use of the possessive in this sentence: "Women having
the vote reduces men's political power." H.W. Fowler derided what he called
"the fused participle" as "grammatically indefensible" and said it should be
"Women's having"; Otto Jespersen cited famous usages, urged dropping the
possessive and called Fowler a "grammatical moralizer."

Comes now Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with the latest manifestation
of this struggle. An Associated Press account of his stinging dissent in
Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Court struck down that state's anti-sodomy
law, quoted Scalia out of context as writing, "I have nothing against
homosexuals," which seemed condescending. His entire sentence, though, was
not: "I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting
their agenda through normal democratic means."

Note the lack of apostrophes after homosexuals and group to indicate
possession; Fowler would have condemned that as a "fused participle." Such
loosey-goosey usage from the conservative Scalia, of all people?

"When I composed the passage in question," the justice informs me, "I
pondered for some time whether I should be perfectly grammatical and write
'I have nothing against homosexuals', or any other group's, promoting their
agenda,' etc. The object of the preposition 'against,' after all, is not
'homosexuals who are promoting,' but rather 'the promoting of (in the sense
of by) homosexuals.'

"I have tried to be rigorously consistent in using the possessive before the
participle," Scalia notes, "when it is the action, rather than the actor,
that is the object of the verb or preposition (or, for that matter, the
subject of the sentence)."

But what about his passage in Lawrence, in which he failed to follow Fowler
and fused the participle?

"I concluded that because of the intervening phrase 'or any other group,'
writing 'homosexuals"" -- with the apostrophe indicating possession -- "(and
hence 'any other group's') would violate what is perhaps the first rule of
English usage: that no construction should call attention to its own
grammatical correctness. Finding no other formulation that could make the
point in quite the way I wanted, I decided to be ungrammatical instead of
pedantic."

But his attempt to be a regular guy backfired. In a jocular tone, Scalia
observes: "God -- whom I believe to be a strict grammarian as well as an
Englishman -- has punished me. The misquotation would have been more
difficult to engineer had there been an apostrophe after 'homosexuals.' I am
convinced that in this instance the A.P. has been (unwittingly, I am sure)
the flagellum Dei to recall me from my populist, illiterate wandering. (You
will note that I did not say 'from me wandering.')"

My does beat me before that gerund wandering. Robert Burchfield, editor of
the third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, writes, "The possessive
with gerund is on the retreat, but its use with proper names and personal
nouns and pronouns persists in good writing."

Now let's parse Scalia's self-parsing. In his refusal to say "from me
wandering," wandering is a gerund. When a personal pronoun comes in front of
a gerund, the possessive form is called for: say my, not me. This avoidance
of a fused participle makes sense: you say about the abovementioned bear "I
like his dancing," not "I like him dancing," because you want to stress not
the bear but his action in prancing about.

In Scalia's dissent in the Texas sodomy case, promoting is a gerund, the
object of the preposition against. His strict-construction alternative,
using apostrophes to indicate possession -- "against homosexuals', or any
other group's, promoting" -- is correct but clunky. He was right to avoid
it, and is wrong to castigate himself for eschewing clunkiness.

There would have been another choice, however: put the gerund ahead of the
possessors. Try this: "I have nothing against the promoting of their agenda
by homosexuals, or by any other group, through normal democratic means."
That would not only avoid the confusing apostrophes, but follows "I have
nothing against" with its true object, the gerund promoting -- and would
make it impossible for any reporter to pull out a condescending "I have
nothing against homosexuals." ...

[This column was printed as the introduction to Safire's "The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time." In a response printed in the book, Scalia points out that Safire's inversion--"their agenda by homosexuals"--violates the rule that antecedents should precede their pronouns.]

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Posted 10:31 AM by Nathan
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/03/entertainment/main556831.shtml
http://www.afi.com/tv/handv.asp

From the American Film Institute's list of top 100 movie heroes and
villains,
with character and performer names and the film:

Heroes
1. Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), ``To Kill a Mockingbird.''
2. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), ``Raiders of the Lost Ark.''
3. James Bond (Sean Connery), ``Dr. No.''
4. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), ``Casablanca.''
5. Will Kane (Gary Cooper), ``High Noon.''
6. Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), ``The Silence of the Lambs.''
7. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), ``Rocky.''
8. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), ``Aliens.''
9. George Bailey (James Stewart), ``It's a Wonderful Life.''
10. T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole), ``Lawrence of Arabia.''
11. Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.''
12. Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), ``The Grapes of Wrath.''
13. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), ``Schindler's List.''
14. Han Solo (Harrison Ford), ``Star Wars.''
15. Norma Rae Webster (Sally Field), ``Norma Rae.''
16. Shane (Alan Ladd), ``Shane.''
17. Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), ``Dirty Harry.''
18. Robin Hood (Errol Flynn), ``The Adventures of Robin Hood.''
19. Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), ``In the Heat of the Night.''
20. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, (Paul Newman and Robert Redford),
``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.''

Villains
1. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), ``The Silence of the Lambs.''
2. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), ``Psycho.''
3. Darth Vader (David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones), ``The Empire
Strikes Back.''
4. The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), ``The Wizard of Oz.''
5. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.''
6. Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), ``It's a Wonderful Life.''
7. Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), ``Fatal Attraction.''
8. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), ``Double Indemnity.''
9. Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), ``The Exorcist.''
10. The Queen (voiced by Lucille LaVerne), ``Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs.''
11. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), ``The Godfather Part II.''
12. Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), ``A Clockwork Orange.''
13. HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), ``2001: A Space Odyssey.''
14. The Alien (Bolaji Badejo), ``Alien.''
15. Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), ``Schindler's List.''
16. Noah Cross (John Huston), ``Chinatown.''
17. Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), ``Misery.''
18. The Shark, ``Jaws.''
19. Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton), ``Mutiny on the Bounty.''
20. Man, ``Bambi.''

(AP) Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird” beat out an army of
swashbuckling idols for the top spot on the American Film Institute's list
of top screen heroes. Hannibal Lecter from “The Silence of the Lambs” chewed
up the competition to lead the list of film villains.

The institute unveiled its ranking Tuesday night of the top good and bad
guys in American film on the CBS special “AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Heroes &
Villains.”

Finch, played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 classic, was a faultlessly noble
widower raising a daughter and son amid Southern racial unrest as he
defended a black man accused of raping a white woman.

“I think Atticus Finch just represents the goodness all of us want to see in
others and feel in ourselves,” said Jean Picker Firstenburg, the institute's
director. “This is a hard time in human history, and we look for the bright
spots that show us the way.”

Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was No. 2 on
the heroes list, and Sean Connery's James Bond from “Dr. No” came in third.

Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 thriller plus the sequel
“Hannibal” and the prequel “Red Dragon,” was a delectably fiendish serial
killer who boasted about eating a man's liver with fava beans and a nice
Chianti.

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) of “Psycho” was second on the bad-guy list,
and Darth Vader (played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones)
placed third for “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger, host of the AFI special, was the only actor to place
essentially the same character on both lists. His malevolent cyborg from
“The Terminator” was No. 22 among villains, while his nice-guy cyborg in
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” placed 48th among heroes.

“I am absolutely ecstatic about it,” Schwarzenegger said. “To say you are
one of the 50 favorite villains and one of the 50 favorite heroes in the
history of American motion pictures, that is unbelievable, and I felt very
honored.”

Rounding out the top 10 list of heroes, in order: Rick Blaine (Humphrey
Bogart), “Casablanca”; Will Kane (Gary Cooper), “High Noon”; Clarice
Starling (Jodie Foster), “The Silence of the Lambs”; Rocky Balboa (Sylvester
Stallone), “Rocky”; Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), “Aliens”; George Bailey
(James Stewart), “It's a Wonderful Life”; and T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole),
“Lawrence of Arabia.”

The rest of the top 10 villains, in order: the Wicked Witch of the West
(Margaret Hamilton), “The Wizard of Oz”; Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher),
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”; Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), “It's a
Wonderful Life”; Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), “Fatal Attraction”; Phyllis
Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), “Double Indemnity”; Regan MacNeil (Linda
Blair), “The Exorcist”; and the Queen (voiced by Lucille LaVerne), “Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

The 100 heroes and villains were chosen from 400 character nominees on
ballots sent to 1,500 actors, directors, critics and others in the movie
business.

The heroes list included one dog (Lassie in “Lassie Come Home,” No. 39), two
comic-book heroes (Superman in the 1978 movie version, No. 26, and Batman in
the 1989 film, No. 46), and loads of real-life figures.

Along with T.E. Lawrence, heroes based on real people included Oskar
Schindler (Liam Neeson) in “Schindler's List,” No. 13; Norma Rae Webster
(Sally Field) in “Norma Rae,” No. 15; Mahatma Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) in
“Gandhi,” No. 21; Gen. George Patton (George C. Scott) in “Patton,” No. 29;
and Erin Brockovich (Julia Roberts) in “Erin Brockovich,” No. 31.

The villains list contained a range of non-humans, including the HAL 9000
computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” No. 13; the murderous extraterrestrial
in “Alien,” No. 14; the shark in “Jaws,” No. 18; and the Martians in “The
War of the Worlds,” No. 27.

Humanity as a whole made the list: “Man,” whose encroachment menaced forest
wildlife in “Bambi,” ranked as villain No. 20.

© MMIII The Associated Press.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Posted 6:08 PM by Nathan
Becoming Good:
A Pentadic Analysis of the Moral Messages in Elementary School Curricula and Textbooks from Two Contexts

Marissa Bambrey, Wooster College

presented at NCA 2004

partial list of Works Cited:

Bellitto, Christopher M. “Incomplete Pictures: Religion in High-School Textbooks on European History.” Social Studies 87 (1996): 274-80.

Kohlberg, Lawrence. “Moral Development and the New Social Studies.” Social Education 37 (1973): 369-75.
---. “Stages of Moral Development as a Basis for Moral Education.” Moral Development, Moral Education, and Kohlberg: Basic Issues in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Education. Ed. Brenda Munsey. Birmingham: Religious Education, 1980. 15-98.

Nord, Warren A. Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995.

Primary Grade School Social Studies Curriculum. Unpublished collection. Kingsway Christian School [Orrville, Ohio], [2003].

Pritchard, Ivor. “The American Standards for Citizenship: Do They Include Morality?” International Journal of Social Education 16 (2001): 94-108.

Purpel, David E. The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education: A Curriculum for Justice & Compassion in Education. Granby: Bergin & Garvey, 1989.
---. “The Politics of Character Education.” The Construction of Children’s Character: Ninety-sixth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Ed. Alex Molnar. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. 140-53.

Revell, Lynn. “Children’s Responses to Character Education.” Education Studies 28 (2002): 421-31.

Vitz, Paul C. “Religion and Traditional Values in Public School Textbooks.” The Public Interest (1986): 79-90.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to determine how basic values and morals are presented rhetorically to elementary school students in grades one through six in the social studies curricula and textbooks used by public, secular schools and private, Christian schools. The study examined the curricula and textbooks used in both settings to determine how morality was portrayed and presented to students who learn in environments utilizing the requirements set forth by the United States government and the Christian schools they attend. Due to the separation of church and state in America, which as it appears in the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution states that the government should not promote or hinder the practice of religion in regards to a particular faith or a broad social phenomenon (Carter 6), it was expected that the curricula would include both similarities and differences in its content concerning the appropriate ways in which to instill values in young people. The research sought to determine how these messages are different and similar in the secular versus the religious domain.

Posted 6:07 PM by Nathan
NY Times
11/29/04

DEAR DIARY:
It was a weekday afternoon. I was on a downtown E train absorbed in my newspaper. The door from the preceding car opened and a bespectacled man entered.
"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!" he shouted and, as if reading my mind, added: "I am not here today to ask you for money. I am here to thank you for what you have already been kind enough to give me over the past few months. Your money has allowed me to get these special glasses that I am now wearing. I am still legally blind, but now I can read. This is what has allowed me to get a job. A job! So I thank you! I thank all of you!"
He went into the next car, and I could see him addressing those riders, too. I couldn't remember encountering him before this, and I certainly didn't remember giving him any money. But I certainly would like to have done so.
Gene Epstein

Monday, November 29, 2004

Posted 4:28 PM by Nathan
The New York Times
ON LANGUAGE; Pg. 21
By William Safire
June 27, 2004 Sunday

Gone Missing

'An Astrophysicist Goes Missing, and His Children Search the Stars''
was a headline that caught the eye of Daniel Baldwin of New York: ''My
intuition tells me that the term goes missing is grammatically
incorrect,'' he writes. ''Here is a possible explanation: It is proper
to link goes with a gerund (e.g., goes fishing) but not with a
participle (e.g., goes missing). Am I on the right track?''

A technically correct track -- I salute all gerundologists -- but
headed in the wrong direction. This is a tale told by an idiom that
leaves many of its users vaguely uncomfortable. ''I heard it on the
BBC news via NPR,'' Jack Wheatley writes. ''Is it something the queen
said and now it is O.K.?''

You see and hear gone missing all over the place, applied to people and things:

An ABC newscaster in April: ''Halliburton says about 30 of its
employees have been killed or gone missing in Iraq.'' A Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation newscaster: ''The U.N. oil-for-food program
in Iraq was supposed to be a humanitarian effort. . . . But it seems
billions of dollars may have gone missing.'' It is also applied to
intangibles: in an article about Abu Ghraib prison, The Washington
Post headlined ''Usual Military Checks and Balances Went Missing.''

''Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people,'' tut-tuts
the BBC News Styleguide, ''but its use is widespread. There are no
easy synonyms. Disappear and vanish do not convince, and they suggest
dematerialization, which is rare.''

It's British English, and not new. ''I was obliged to return to
Adrianople to get some supplies,'' wrote a naval correspondent for The
Times of London on Aug. 10, 1877, in a dispatch about the Turkish
armies in the Balkans, ''as a box which should have reached me at
Tirnova had gone missing.''

Why has the construction lasted so long and now blossomed? It does a
semantic job that needs doing, that's why. No other term quite
encapsulates ''to become lost inexplicably and unexpectedly,'' which
connotes suspicion of trouble. From the most serious loss (a person
kidnapped, or a soldier unaccounted for or absent without leave) to an
irritating minor loss (an object is mislaid), to go missing -- always
in its past tense, went, or past participle, gone -- conveys a
worried, nonspecific meaning that no other word or phrase quite does.

Is it good grammar? It may well stretch our hard-wired sense of
syntax. To critics, a simple is missing would solve the problem. But
because gone missing has acquired the status of an idiom, which is
''an unassailable peculiarity,'' it is incorrect to correct it. As the
fumblerule goes, ''idioms is idioms.'' Relax and enjoy them.

One sense of to go is ''to pass from one state or place to another.''
If you can go public, go to pieces and go bonkers, it goes without
saying that you can go with the flow and be gone missing. ...

Monday, November 22, 2004

Posted 1:45 PM by Nathan
Grief gives life to gift business;
Ways to express sympathy move beyond flowers

By Susan Chandler
Chicago Tribune
September 12, 2004

As a social worker in a neonatal intensive care unit,
Renee Wood became adept at comforting people in the
throes of grief. She often would sit with families
while their babies were being taken off life support.

But when her sister-in-law's father died unexpectedly,
Wood was at a loss. She wanted to send something more
than flowers but she couldn't find a gift that seemed
appropriate and lasting.

That started her thinking. If she was struggling to
find a meaningful sympathy gift, others must be having
the same problem.

"I was literally awake for four straight days when I
started thinking about the possibilities. I couldn't
sleep. I was pumped with adrenaline," Wood said.

From the basement of her west suburban home in Geneva,
Wood launched The Comfort Co., an Internet-based
retailer that sells everything from garden stepping
stones to holiday remembrance ornaments.

She has now been in business for four years, and
Comfort Co. is still a one-woman show. By the
standards of big retailers, her sales are tiny, on
target to exceed $100,000 this year.

Yet the heartfelt response Wood has received from
customers has convinced her that she is on the right
track. And the trend lines are promising. Last August
she received 64 orders; this August she got more than
250--all with no advertising.

"I get up every morning and can't wait to get
started," said the 39-year-old mother of four
daughters.

Americans often have been criticized for their
impatience with grief.

Many people get only a handful of paid days off to
deal with the death of a spouse, child or parent and
are expected to be back in top form after that.

But it takes much longer than a week to get over a
serious loss, grief experts say.

"We, as a society, want to solve problems. Grief can't
be fixed. It is a process that a person needs to go
through," explains Pat Loder, executive director of
Compassionate Friends, an Oak Brook-based non-profit
that helps families who have lost children.

"People are really very uncomfortable talking about
grief. They'd rather talk about sex."

There certainly is no sign of a wholesale change in
attitude about death and dying. But Wood and others
believe many people are becoming more interested in
expressing sympathy and remembering those who have
died, a trend accelerated by the aging of the Baby
Boom generation and, perhaps, U.S. casualties in Iraq
and the Sept. 11 attacks.

...

Caption: Memorial stepping stones are
popular gift choices at Renee Wood's online store, The
Comfort Co., which she founded four years ago and runs
from her Geneva home. Tribune photo by Bill Hogan.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Posted 8:39 PM by Nathan
Some e-mail responses to this op-ed in the Detroit Free Press:

BLEEDING HEARTS:
- Since the election I have struggled and debated with some of my closest Christian friends about why I voted for Kerry and why they voted for Bush. ... A lot of [my Christian college friends] were very conservative Republicans! How do we as Christians change this mind set?

- Thank you for setting the record straight on the value issues!

- Amen! ... I am a fellow Christian that shares your views and agrees with your sentiments wholeheartedly. I’ve always scratched my head in utter amazement that most Christians are led to believe “Christian = Republican” ????

- It is a comfort to know others share my views.

- I myself am a Christian - attend church every Sunday and Wednesday and actively involved in other church activities- that voted for Kerry. I even felt like the black sheep among my fellow Christians, and questioned myself and prayed on this issue. To me the two big issues that swayed Christians are small issues and are being approached in the wrong way. ... I want to thank you for making me feel that as a Christian, that I did not neccesarly vote wrong when I voted for Kerry.

- Although I consider myself agnostic at best, I believe that I would be far more comfortable with religion if more Christians (and Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.) articulated their faith and avoided hypocrisy the way you did in your article.

- Thanks for stating your opinion on values and the election. I couldn't agree more. I'm sure it will generate a lot of hate mail to you from those family values christians who voted for Bush. Obviously, I did not. I will never understand how someone of high moral values can justify and support the war on Iraq given all of the disclosures that have wiped away the President's (and Cheney's) arguments for it.

- You've expressed things that I have felt but didn't know how to express. ... It's difficult for me to determine how we read the same Bible and come up with different viewpoints. It seems like many Christians forget that they have brains.

- Thank you for putting so simply ... what I have been feeling these many long months about the "Christian values" issue. Somehow it's all gotten twisted around. ... I am passing your article along to others who share my feelings. Regards, Another "2 in 10er"

- Amen.

- As a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I thoroughly agree with your perspective, especially your note about keeping church and state separate for the sake of the church!

- I applaud you for articulating a universal definition of "values" that Christians and non-Christians (where I fit in) can embrace. It saddens me that Sen. Kerry was unable (or unwilling) to get this message across which I believe was the fatal flaw of his campaign. ...

- Thank you so much for articulating what I feel. I, too, consider myself a Christian and am appalled at the way "values" have been hijacked in order to support an agenda that has nothing to do with Christianity.

- Thank you for expressing what many Christians are thinking as they follow the precepts taught by our Lord and Savior.

- Thank you so much for so clearly articulating my views as a Democratic voter in this election. What a much-needed breath of fresh air!

- I enjoyed your editorial ... I was glad to see that opinion in the newspaper. Unfortunately, your view is one that myself and many other Christian Democrats preached for months leading up to the election, and still opinions did not change. ... I feel people will vote on actual issues when they start listening and taking things seriously, I am only worried about how long that may be.

- An excellent statement, and I know that you are speaking for [me], who voted for Kerry for the social justice reasons which you mentioned. ... I wish that Kerry had won, so such pieces would not have to be written:)

- Praise the Lord!... I hope you keep the faith and never tire of doing good. There are more people out there who agree with you than you may realize.

- I would like to tell you how heartening it is to know that there are Christians out there who think the same way as my family. After the elections, I did not want to go back to our church and be associated with people who limited their Christianity to 2 issues. It seems the whole country is full of them. I know God is sovereign and in control but I am struggling with the fact that an incompetent person is once again at the helm. ... Let's not stop praying for our country.

- You put my feelings about our recent election into words. Thank you.

- I feel the same. As a married church-goer in [x], I resented the right's seeming abduction of the moral high ground.

- I enjoyed your column. I must admit that I almost didn't read it after seeing you were a graduate of Calvin College. I have nothing against Calvin, it is just that so much of what comes out of Grand Rapids turns me off.

- As a Christian I am appalled at what happened in the election, appalled that believers could be so duped, so fearful, and so ignorant of the Scripture that they could imagine Bush as their savior.

FROM THE RIGHTEOUS RIGHT:
- After reading yet another liberal commentary about their election defeat, I'm left wondering why Democrats still don't understand.

- One thing you forgot sonny. Kerry is pro choice, President Bush will over turn the murder baby law that none of us got to vote on. And if you also don't think you don't pay enough taxes feel free to send in more! Leave my 2nd ammendment rights alone and we are cool. As a Viet-Nam Marine vet I stand behind President Bush and our troops all the way. ...

- Well I'm one of 8 out of 10 voters who enthusiastically did the "Bush thing." ... As a rule, we will always try and install the morally driven man/woman into office as opposed to the secular leaning dude.

- HOGWASH!!!

- I don't think abortion and gay issues were the reason we all voted for Bush. ... The majority of the people I know voted for Bush, are not anti-abortion, and do not "hate" gays. You'll have to come up with another reason. Take your time. I guess to say Democrats Just Don't Get It is all I could think.

(And my favorite:)

- I guess at our local paper in metro Detroit, we ran out of liberals to write columns so we are starting to recruit them from neighboring communities.

Friday, November 05, 2004

Posted 2:13 PM by Nathan
From grammar maven James Vanden Bosch:

These structures are very much like absolute phrases, although they probably come into existence in a slightly different way than ordinary absolute phrases do. Absolute phrases are reduced forms of clauses, reduced to the phrase level in order to be subordinated to the main clause they are attached to. The structures in the nightly news broadcasts have, for all practical purposes, exactly the same internal structure, but they
are generally not subordinated to a main clause but instead exist as
stripped-down sentences, lacking a finite verb form or lacking the complete
verb phrase of a complete sentence. So although they have striking surface
similarities, the nightly news varieties usually are presented as stand-alone
sentences or clauses, not as subordinated materials providing context for a
main clause. But their grammatical similarity to the standard absolute phrase
is striking, not least because the standard absolute phrase is generally
assumed to be rare and formal, except for formulaic or stereotyped absolutes
(all things considered, all other things being equal, God willing, that said,
etc.). ...

One other striking thing--when I presented this paper at Oxford University,
many of the participants in the conference told me that they were immediately
persuaded that this structure was appearing in their own national news
broadcasts as well, and not only in English. So this may be much more than an
American or English phenomenon. Part of the appeal of the structure is its
economy, although economies are not guaranteed. But it also communicates a
breathless awareness of immediacy, together with the attractions of something
like headlinese, the stripped-down grammar of newspaper headlines. Notice the
regular references to "today" and "tonight" in the broadcast transcripts I [studied]. There is an almost manic insistence that this is all late-breaking news,
and that I alone have come to tell you. I think that this absolute kind of
construction adds to that impression, simply because of the avoidance of
communicating precise information about tense in such verb forms. ...

From the point of view of basic communication, there is nothing wrong with
such an omission [e.g. of the "is" in "is becoming"] because audiences assume the verb that is missing and gain an accurate sense of what is being said. But at the level of Standard Edited English, sentence fragments should have a really good reason to exist or else be edited into compliance with Standard English.

Television news is not exactly Standard English, although most newsreaders try hard not to seem uneducated, and this construction has proven to be very popular and, for most listeners, not even a noticeable distraction.

Still, a verb that communicates more nearly precise information about tense
and number is providing a little more information than a non-finite verb does
or can--not always, but often enough so that Standard English has not yet
gotten over its love for finite verb forms in grammatically complete clauses. ...

Such verb forms are called "non-finite" forms (the same meaning and
description as "infinitive," by the way) because they do not specify what
complete finite verb forms do specify, namely, tense, person, and number.
Technically, a gerund, and infinitive, a participle, and an absolute phrase can
carry someverbal information about time, but they do not carry that
information in the full form that a complete verb does.

The complete verb will specify exact tense plus information about person and
number (if in the present tense):

>They have been thinking about these structures for a long time.

"Have been thinking" is a complete finite verb--it shows that the subject is
third person plural, and that the tense is present perfect progressive.

[E-mail from Geoff Nunberg: 'If I have any quibbles, one would be with the label "absolutive," which to my mind usually implies a participle that refers to an event whose time is relatived to the time of some other (e.g., "The referee having arrived, the game began"). And while the impression may be one of headline style, I think the constraints on the two styles are rather different -- and in fact there's
no actual compression in these. The most striking instances, I think -- though
you didn't have any of these in the sample corpus you gave -- are the ones
where the participle doubles for a perfective, as in "The Navy using the island
since 1940."'

Monday, October 25, 2004

Posted 4:21 PM by Nathan
Rico the dog's vocabulary restarts linguists' debate
By Nathan Bierma
Chicago Tribune

July 1, 2004

... But while there was no question that Rico's skills were remarkable, the
study did reignite a contentious debate among linguists about whether
animals can actually understand language. Rico can fetch different toys, but
does he understand what his owner is saying?

No way, fumed Geoffrey Pullum, author and professor of linguistics at the
University of California at Santa Cruz. "Nobody doubts that mammals are
capable of associating large numbers of aural stimuli with particular
behavioral responses," Pullum wrote at www.languagelog.org. "It's the
confusion of that with `understanding language' that drives me nuts."

Pullum was especially displeased with the Associated Press headline,
"Research Shows Dogs Understand Language."

"It is my belief that no dog ever actually understands anything, in the
special sense of recognizing that it has been told something that might be
either true or false, or understanding the meaning of something . . . or
even dimly appreciating that there is such as thing as meaning," Pullum
wrote in an e-mail interview. "With dogs, despite the high degree of
sensitivity to humans' social cues, it's all tied to immediate behavior,
like Rico's fetching behavior."

In a 1987 study of Kanzi the bonobo, another gifted animal with a vast
vocabulary, researchers wrote, "Our view is that Kanzi's behaviors are more
like the use of tools than the human use of language. Tools are the
instruments by which we attain certain outcomes. They are not symbols."

Kanzi, they said, "does not know that lexigrams [words and pictures]
represent, symbolize, or name objects and events; rather, he knows how to
use them in order to effect desired outcomes."

In a commentary in Science on the Rico study, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom
voiced the same cautions. Although the study "seems to vindicate" dog owners
who "boast about the communicative and social abilities of their pets,"
Bloom wrote, Rico "learns only through a specific fetching game." Unlike
children, who understand that words "refer to categories and individuals,"
Bloom said, in Rico's brain, there may be no difference between "sock" and
"fetch the sock."

For now, Bloom concluded, "It is too early to give up on the view that
babies learn words and dogs do not." ...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0407010098jul01,1,60235
60.story

Friday, October 15, 2004

Posted 4:06 PM by Nathan
LCA Bulletin
Fall 2004
Lexington Christian Academy

A Way of Seeing
The Role of Literature in Cultivating Inquiry
by Theresa Morin

Honor. Morality. Truth. The acknowledgement of sin and the profession of faith. Tragedy, comedy, and everything in between. This is life. This is literature.

Like us, Achilles, the main character of Homer's Illiad, wrestles with what it means to be human and have to die. Like us, Sophocles Oedipus Rex struggles toward truth despite being blinded by pride and self-righteousness. Like us, Augustine, in Confessions, fights and then finds the freedom he is looking for in the will of God. And, like us, Elizabeth Bennet in Austen's Pride and Prejudice learns that the world is imperfect but love endures all things.

What I appreciate about literature is that it says what I can't say or haven't thought to say, and thus opens up aspects of experience, of life," says LCA English teacher Ellen Gabrielese. ...

"I think it's the very heart of literature to cultivate inquiry," states John Wilson, editor of Books&Culture and editor at large for Christianity Today. "C.S. Lewis said that we should not read literature because it makes us more moral. He mkaes the point that when we read literature we read things that we disagree with, and in some cases consider them wicked. When we read, we encounter an 'extension of being.' We see with someone else's eyes and heart. We connect with the inner life of other people. We'd never have those experiences and in some cases wouldn't want to. We implicitly compare their lives to our own experience and understanding." ...

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Posted 3:53 PM by Nathan
Sports Illustrated
September 22, 2003
Houston, We Have Liftoff;

With a weekend sweep of the Cardinals, the Astros took command in the NL Central and gave a football town reason to believe in its baseball team

By Tom Verducci

Baseball in Houston is a cup of tea at Starbucks, an order of salmon at The Palm or a car ride through Venice. It has an odd ring to it. Forty-one years after the major leagues came to Houston and pandered to Texans by naming the expansion team after a firearm--the Colt .45s--the fourth-largest city in America is a backwater outpost on the baseball map.

"It's not a baseball town," says Billy Wagner, the closer for the team that has been known as the Astros since 1965. "Football is king. It's hard to compare it to St. Louis, Chicago and other baseball towns where the fans are knowledgeable about the game. Sometimes here they're not sure when to cheer and when to boo."

Says Houston general manager Gerry Hunsicker, "Last month we had a series against the Chicago Cubs with first place on the line, and we had nowhere near sellout crowds. Baseball has always taken a backseat to football here."

The Astros, of course, have been easy to overlook, even when dressed in those famously loud-striped 1980s uniforms inspired by laundry detergent boxes. No city has waited more seasons for its first World Series than Houston. Worse still, the Astros haven't won a playoff series of any kind, losing all seven while dropping 22 of 30 postseason games.

Last Saturday night, however, a roar went up in Houston that seemed to echo across all those empty years. A sellout crowd at Minute Maid Park stood and cheered, and this time the bellowing wasn't in response to the announcement of college football scores, the appropriately twangy version of Deep in the Heart of Texas during the seventh-inning stretch, or the prices of natural gas, crude oil, unleaded gas and heating oil that are posted like out-of-town scores on a rightfield message board. This time it was purely about baseball, as Wagner whizzed a 99-mph fastball past an awestruck Scott Rolen to finish a 2-0 win over the St. Louis Cardinals.

Not only did the victory keep Houston in first place in the National League Central and virtually remove St. Louis from postseason contention, but it also gave Astros fans reason to believe that their baseball team might--hold on to your 10-gallon hat, pardners--command their attention deep into football season. Ace righthander Roy Oswalt, making his second start after missing six weeks with a strained groin, dominated the Cardinals for seven innings. That outing followed a 14-5 win the previous night, in which righthander Wade Miller permitted St. Louis just two hits and two runs over six innings.

It was only the second time this year that Oswalt, who hit 95 mph on the radar gun, and Miller, who touched 97, won back-to-back games. The combined line for the Houston rockets: 13 innings, six hits, two runs, 13 strikeouts and one energized clubhouse. "That's the best they've been all year," catcher Brad Ausmus said after Saturday's win, "and it's the best possible time for it."

...

Houston is accustomed to getting its Astros kicked. Twice in 1980 they were six outs away from the World Series, only to blow, respectively, two-run and three-run eighth-inning leads to the Philadelphia Phillies in Games 4 and 5 of the NL Championship Series. Centerfielder Craig Biggio, 37, and first baseman Jeff Bagwell, 35, who rank 1-2 in franchise history for games played, have come up empty four times in October, losing all but two of their 14 postseason games since 1997.

The Astros have such a low profile--the most attention they've received in recent years has been because of their ill-fated association with Enron, whose name was originally on Houston's new ballpark--that 13 of the team's last 14 postseason games have been played in the afternoon. The not-ready-for-prime-time players have had to battle odd starting times and twilight conditions.

"We'd like to win a postseason series for Bagwell and Biggio because they're Hall of Famers and you don't know how many more chances they'll have," Miller says. "Hopefully I'll be here for many years, but I'd rather not be around five to 10 more years and have teammates saying the same about me."

Says Bagwell, "If we get to the postseason, the middle four hitters in our lineup have to get hot and the starters have to carry us to the seventh inning and let our bullpen take over. That can happen."

Bagwell, second baseman Jeff Kent, leftfielder Lance Berkman and rightfielder Richard Hidalgo--the heart of the order--had combined to hit a subpar 103 homers at week's end. Bagwell led the team with 35, though he suffers from an arthritic right shoulder that requires a painful cortisone shot about every six weeks and prevents him from taking pregame fielding practice. Also, he sometimes has trouble "getting on top of pitches" that require him to raise the shoulder during his swing.

...

The Astros, meanwhile, seemed to be peaking at the right time, even if that time is football season. Author Nigel Goslin wrote in 1967 that "Houston is six suburbs in search of a center." Not much has changed. The six-county metro area is larger than Connecticut, and the downtown area near Minute Maid Park is dotted with crumbling, condemned buildings. The ballpark, though, was abuzz last weekend.

Saturday's sellout was the team's sixth in 2003. (The club expects to draw around 2.5 million, about the same as last year, though down from 3 million when the ballpark opened in 2000.) The victory clinched the fourth straight series win for the Astros, who were 10-3 in those series, including a 4-1 contribution from Oswalt and Miller.

Maybe the stretch run will turn out to be another empty promise. Or maybe the happy noise rising from Crawford Street was, 41 years after baseball came to town, a new beginning. At the very least it was the sound of baseball that mattered, deep in the heart of Texas.

Monday, October 11, 2004

Posted 11:37 AM by Nathan
Linguist Anatoly Liberman, on whether "cream" was a blend of "cramum" and "cresme," as dictionaries speculate:

To begin with, Latin CRAMUM was recorded only in the 6th century,
whence the reference to LATE Latin in most dictionaries. The word is
usually believed to be of Gaulish origin, but good arguments have been
advanced that it is traceable to Latin. This circumstance is irrelevant for
the history of the French etymon of Engl. CREAM, but I am mentioning it just
in case.

Second, it is seldom possible to prove that an old word is a blend.
Sometimes we KNOW how a blend came about. For example, EURASIA is certainly
the sum of EUR(OPE) and ASIA. Equally incontestable is the origin of
BRUNCH, SMOG, and MOTEL, because the words have been coined in the full
light of history, as it were. But when we are not 100% sure, we are not
sure at all. Perhaps SLENDER is a blend of SLIM and TENDER (a reasonable
hypothesis), but perhaps it is not. That is why CREAM need not be a blend,
though it may be one.

Skeat thought that Old French CRESME 'cream' is the same word as (a
particular use of) Old French CRESME 'chrism.' If he was right, blending in
the reconstruction becomes unnecessary. But he cited Latin CREMOR 'thick
juice,' which, according to him, inflluenced the meaning of the Old French
word for "cream." That part of his etymology is probably redundant.

Finally, we see a puzzling look-alike in several Germanic languages.
English dialects still have REAM 'cream.' It goes back to Old English and
has respectable cognates in German (RAHM), Dutch, and Icelandic. Old
philologists did not doublt that CREAM and REAM were related, but the
disappearance of initial c- and the existence of Latin CRAMUM invalidate
their etymology. The ultimate origin of REAM and its congeners is unknown.

To conclude, blending in the history of CREAM is not improbable but is not a
fact.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Posted 10:07 AM by Nathan
Chicago Tribune REDEYE EDITION
February 20, 2003

Excuse me, can I ask a question?
By Jimmy Greenfield

The other night, on my way to the Red Line, a man who appeared to be in his early 20s stopped me to ask for money.

Actually, he didn't stop me. He approached me and I chose to stop. It was after midnight and there wasn't really anybody else around, so I'm not sure why I didn't feel more threatened.

Quickly, he told me how he needed money to get on a train after fleeing the mission where he was staying because of "a sexual thing."

That was all I needed to hear to hand over a few coins, just so that image could start to dissipate from my head.

Walking away, it occurred to me that it might be wise to re-evaluate my policy on giving money to beggars.

You may call them homeless people or panhandlers; I call them beggars. But this isn't about them. As usual, this is about me, but I suspect it's about you too.

My previous personal "policy" about whether or not to give a beggar some money seemed to be this: I didn't have a policy.

The new policy, in effect for 48 hours but yet to be put to use, is this: I still have none.

The only difference is now I consciously have no policy whereas before I never gave it much thought. I either did or did not give anything for no good reason.

Wondering if I was alone in this, I asked two of my closest friends, who are polar opposites, how they decide whether or not to give a handout. I'll call them Frick and Frack.

"It depends whether they annoy me or not," Frick said. "If I see them day in and day out I generally won't give.

"There was a guy who I saw every day at the Northwestern train station named Cecil. I used to talk to him and give him some money. One time I gave him a down parka. One Christmas I gave him a twenty."

I expected Frack to be virulently, uh, frugal, but his policy surprised me.

"I really don't have a policy," he said. "It just all depends. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I'm very unpredictable."

After hearing Frick's story about giving a twenty, I tried to remember a time I had ever handed out paper money instead of coins. Nope, never.

When I chose to give, it seemed to be based always on my ability to get past the beggar without feeling terribly guilty that I would be eating shortly and he or she might not be.

Another argument I've heard is that begging is all a scam. Beggars make up their stories to evoke sympathy and can have plenty to eat. Some may even have a decent place to live because they make a business out of it.

I have no idea to what extent that's true, and I'm sure you don't either. Some beggars are legitimately in need, others aren't.

Sometimes for my job, I have to hit the streets and ask people a question for what we call "man on the street" interviews. It's the journalistic equivalent of begging.

A few weeks ago I was out there, getting turned down while freezing my tail off, until finally somebody stopped and talked to me, only to ask, rather incredulously, "Is this what you do all day?"

Not all day, and not always from the street. Sometimes I do it from behind a desk, which brings me to a request.

I want to know how you decide whether or not to give money to beggars on the street.

Is it based on your mood? The beggar's sob story? If you're carrying too much change in your pocket?

Let me know your policy by sending an e-mail to jgreenfield@tribune.com and I'll sort through them to run in a future column.

---
Chicago Tribune REDEYE EDITION
March 6, 2003

Your 2 cents on how to handle handouts

RedEye columnist Jimmy Greenfield recently asked readers to write him and explain how they decide whether or not to give money to beggars on the street. Here are a few of the many submissions. To read about the story of one beggar, return to Page 2 for today's column.

If a beggar has on better clothes or shoes than I do, they get nothing.
Maggie Daly, 30, Logan Square

I was going into a Wendy's on Clark Street and this man asked me could I give him some change on my way out. I said I can buy you a hamburger. He said, "Nah, that's all right, I'm cool." So that's why I don't give money to "beggars"; because one bad apple does spoil the whole bunch.
Cheryl, 43, Blue Island

I used to give out money when asked, but it became too much of a safety issue to me, and I was never sure if it was going to be used for drugs or alcohol.
M. Lovejoy-Tillery, 40, Hyde Park

The thing I learned to do is to never look in anyone's eyes when walking downtown. If you make eye contact, they will come up to you.
Serge Dogar, 23, River West

My giving is religiously based. My faith calls me to "give to the one who asks you." From there, I apply wisdom.
Bill Verzal, 36, Grayslake

I seldom give change--it is likely that they get enough change in a day so that they have to walk crooked from the extra weight in one pocket. A paper dollar is the appropriate payment.
Roger DeGroot, 53, Oak Lawn

Out of self-defense I had to decide not to give money to anyone on the street. I believe them all and know that I'm fooled often. Where do you draw a line?
Jill Davis, Ravenswood Manor

I may give McDonald's coupons and food, but definitely no money. What are they using the money for, really?
Tricia Tvrdik, Schaumburg

There are two that just shake a cup with the coins clinking, thinking that will make me want to add to their collection. I never give to them because it is annoying to hear that clinking.
Jan Henn, 52, Arlington Heights

I don't usually carry much, which helps to determine what I give, if anything.
Chris Broholm, 32, Lombard

I am more likely to give to someone who is doing something that may be considered "earning" it. ... Street musicians in general garner more donations from me than others.
Charlene Vierke, 33, Crystal Lake

The Bible states: "Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach him how to fish, and he will eat for life." I look at beggars on the streets that I see every day as not worthy of receiving my money. Why? Because they don't want to learn how to fish. So I refuse to give them a fish every day.
Ross E. Bagwell, 33, Elk Grove Village

My "policy" that I have taken to over the years is this: Every time I give, I get a blessing in return. As the old saying goes, everyone is just one check away from being homeless.
Stacy Miller, 36, South Shore

I don't give money to anybody who lives within three blocks of my condo building or along business strips nearby. I figure that if the neighborhood isn't good for begging, the beggars will go elsewhere.
Fred Nachman, 53, Near North Side

I do not always have money to give, but I can always acknowledge them.
Sandy Armstrong, Loop

---
Chicago Tribune REDEYE EDITION
March 6, 2003

Policy on beggars hasn't changed
By Jimmy Greenfield

A couple weeks ago, I asked RedEye readers to send me their policies on why they give, or don't give, to street beggars.

The issue presented itself to me after I came across a beggar one night. It was late and I gave him some change.

He said it was for CTA fare, but I didn't stick around to see what he did with it.

For all I know he forwarded it to the Bears to help them buy a decent quarterback. But the fact is, once I handed over the money, I had no say in what he did with it.

Two central worries among readers who wrote in were what the beggars would do with the money and whether their stories could be trusted.

But does it really matter?

"The homeless are at least as honest as everyone else in society," said Michael Cook, executive director of Interfaith House, a West Side homeless shelter. "Everyone needs to eat regardless of the story that they're telling."

Cook suggests giving away food vouchers. If that sounds good to you, you can contact Chicago Shares, a non-profit that aids the city's homeless by supplying food vouchers. For more information, call 312-573-4469 or go to www.chicagoshares.org .

Looking for a beggar to talk to the other day (it took about 10 seconds once I hit Michigan Avenue), I found Timothy, a 35-year-old man who said he was a salesman.

He was hawking copies of The Onion--a free publication--to pedestrians.

I offered to buy him some food after we sat down in a nearby McDonald's, but he said he wasn't hungry. I'm not sure why, but I took that as a sign he would be honest with me about his situation.

"The very first time I did it I felt so, so bad," said Timothy. "Because I didn't feel it was for me. I felt so out of place when I started begging.

"For me in ... it all started with drugs. I'd get my paycheck, mess it up in a whole day and be out on the weekends on my days off begging for money."

Now that he's been on the streets for a few years, Timothy can't get into a program to beat his heroin addiction and he doesn't know any other way to support it.

"They're buying [The Onion]. How am I supposed to put it down?" he says. "The money is tempting. I'm poor. Here is somebody giving money for a free paper. What am I to do? I'm not going to stick anybody up and take anything."

I asked if there was any way to tell which people were more likely to give him money.

"You can just tell by the mood," he said. "If a person's got a happy look on their face ... you know you're going to get some money."

Around Christmastime a couple of years ago, a man Timothy had never seen before walked up to him and gave him $400.

"I bought myself a few things that I needed like shoes, a coat," he said. "I also partied. Heroin, cocaine, that's where most of the money went."

While telling me about his struggles to turn his life around, tears rolled down his face. While we were speaking, Timothy never asked for money.

When I wrote the first column, I stated my policy on giving to beggars was scattershot, based only on a whim. Nothing has changed in that regard.

"I don't have any answers," wrote Pam Crumb of La Grange. "I look forward to hearing what others think of this dilemma."

Please go to page 36 to see what RedEye readers had to say.

---
Chicago Tribune REDEYE EDITION
March 7, 2003

Giving from the heart
Letter

Read your article on the bus to work this morning and it's strange that you should ask this question.

While waiting at the corner of Adams and State Streets on Wednesday evening for my 145/146 northbound bus, I decided to run over to Berghoff and make use of the bathroom before getting on the bus and crossing my legs until I got home.

Headed for Berghoff as I eyed a beggar in his wheelchair panhandling the 5 p.m. crowd. My thought was "Should or shouldn't I give to him?" I passed him up as I headed into the restaurant, but as I came out I thought to myself how easy it was for me to use the toilet and what he would have to do in the same manner. So I reached into my pocket and gave him the spare change there, just over a dollar.

Here he is braving the cool temperatures, while we sit at a desk all day long to get paid. If my situation is right, I give from my heart.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Posted 3:04 PM by Nathan
From wordcraft.infopop.cc

A dumbbell is a fine tool for exercise, but what does it have to do with a bell? A church's bell ringer would pull down on a rope, causing the bell to swing and toll the hours. Since bells were heavy, bell ringers developed great upper body strength. Their work also required a good deal of practice. (I presume this was, in part, to learn to time the pulls to match the bell's swing-period.) Apprentice bell ringers practiced on a rope and pulley apparatus that mimicked the action but which used a deadweight rather than a bell, thus saving money and avoiding noise pollution. In other words, it was a bell that was silent, or "dumb", and quite naturally came to be a "dumbbell". Gentlemen in the 1700s adopted the same apparatus for healthy exercise, and "dumbbell" became associated with weights for exercise.

Some idle thoughts: What I've given you is the standard story, and it's interesting enough. But isn't it odd that the word first appears so late as 1711, though church bells are centuries older? If bell ringers needed a training apparatus, surely one was built, used, and given a name long before 1711.
The first known use of the word is by Joseph Addison in The Spectator of Thursday, July 12, 1711, copied below. Addison seems to be making an implied pun that the exercise dumbbell renders the ladies silent; that is, it renders the belles dumb. His very next paragraph also makes a witty analogy between an exercise method and the larger world. An idle speculation: could it conceivably be that Addison concocted the word 'dumbbell' as a term that would describe the apparatus and also make his word-play? That would certainly explain why no prior use of the word has been found.
For my own part, when I am in Town, I exercise myself an Hour every Morning upon a dumb Bell that is placed in a Corner of my Room, and pleases me the more because it does every thing I require of it in the most profound Silence. My Landlady and her Daughters are so well acquainted with my Hours of Exercise, that they never come into my Room to disturb me whilst I am ringing.
When I was some Years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious Diversion, which I learned from a Latin Treatise of Exercises that is written with great Erudition: It is there called the skiomachia, or the fighting with a Man's own Shadow, and consists in the brandishing of two short Sticks grasped in each Hand, and loaden with Plugs of Lead at either End. This opens the Chest, exercises the Limbs, and gives a Man all the Pleasure of Boxing, without the Blows. I could wish that several Learned Men would lay out that Time which they employ in Controversies and Disputes about nothing, in this Method of fighting with their own Shadows. It might conduce very much to evaporate the Spleen, which makes them uneasy to the Publick as well as to themselves.

Posted 3:02 PM by Nathan
Nathan VanderKlippe
CanWest News Service
Yellowknife, N.W.T.
Sept. 2004

Somewhere in the murky depths of the continent’s deepest lake lurks a
monster.

Jim Lynn is sure of it.

This week, the 66-year-old Roman Catholic priest was looking out from
his home on the shores of Great Slave Lake near Yellowknife when he saw
an object trailing a small boat across the water.

“I got the goggles because it was moving fast and I was kind of curious
as to what it was. It was high, six to eight feet above the water and
moving at an incredulous speed,” he said. “It was like the head of a
dragon - just coming out of the water at just a ferocious speed, just
moving like crazy.”

Lynn watched as the creature, which looked green in colour, hurtled
behind an island, then disappeared. He quickly called Yellowknifer, the
local newspaper, to place a classified asking the person on the lake
that day to call him.

“I would think they would have felt the waves (from the dragon),” he
said.

Step aside Nessie and Ogopogo, there’s a new mystery leviathan on the
block. And according to Chris Woodall, it’s called Ol’Slavey.

Woodall is a Yellowknifer columnist who wrote earlier this summer that
Great Slave, with a depth of 614 metres, must hide some weird and
wonderful creature.

To his surprise, his phone soon started ringing with stories of people
claiming to have seen just such a thing - and he gave it the name
Ol’Slavey, after one of the aboriginal languages in the Northwest
Territories.

It’s a fitting name, since the Dene abound with stories about an
unknown creature in the waters.

When Antoine Michel was growing up in the traditional community of
Lutsel K’e, about 200 kilometres east of Yellowknife, he was taught
that a creature lived in the waters off Utsingi Point, about 80
kilometres to the south-west of the community. To appease the nameless
creature, people boating by the point pass by in silence and pay
respect to the lake with tobacco offerings.

“We usually stop the motor and go around the point, paddle quietly,” he
said.

Years later, he saw the creature himself, on a calm moonlit night as he
and his wife returned by boat from a caribou hunt.
“We seen a rock there - I thought it was a rock first time, there was
seagulls around it,” he said. “I just turned away from it, I didn’t
want to hit it, (then) it just went down. … I felt the waves, and then
I just took off. I didn’t take a look back.”

Boaters have seen strange creatures suddenly surfacing in the water in
front of them - and near Lutsel K’e are some of the deepest pockets of
Great Slave Lake, a natural habitat for a beast of the depths.

Naysayers will tell you it’s just a big fish, but the northern divers
who actually swim those waters will tell you differently.

A decade ago, Arctic Divers was sent on a deep-water body retrieval
near Lutsel K’e when one of its divers saw a terrifying beast.

“It looked like much like an alligator, but with a head like a pike,”
said Wayne Gzowski, the company’s district manager.

“I really do believe that there’s unknown marine life in a lot of these
areas,” he said, in places that have never before been explored by
humans.

And if you don’t believe him, believe the Dene elders. According to
aboriginal legend, the great Mackenzie River was created by a giant
beaver. Rene Fumoleau, a retired Oblate priest and respected northern
historian, remembers a Gwich’in elder telling him that a dragon now
lives in the waters of Canada’s biggest river.

“There are some places where the water never freezes in winter, and
that is because there is that monster somewhere at the bottom of the
river that stirs the waters,” he said.

The Mackenzie flows out of Great Slave Lake; perhaps Ol’Slavey moves
between haunts. Whatever the case, Archie Catholique, the chief of
Lutsel K’e, is a believer.

“The elders were saying that this thing here doesn’t bother anybody -
it’s not there to hurt anybody,” he said.

But, he added, “people see it.”

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Posted 1:48 PM by Nathan
From wordcraft.infopop.cc

The classical Greeks, like any other ethnic group, used ethnic slurs upon their neighbors. This week we'll present some of those slurs that have come into English.
Yes, I can foresee you saying for some of these words, "That wasn't ancient Greek. It was coined by later speakers versed in the classics." Or, "That referred not to the ethnic group, but to the traits of a prominent person or mythological figure from that place. " Or, "That wasn't a slur. It was just descriptive, or the negative meaning came later." To all of which I respond, "Pooh! Let's not let quibbles stand in the way of the tale."

laconic [using or involving the use of a minimum of words; concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious]
Lakonia's chief city was Sparta, and Spartan speech was short and to the point.

abderian
? given to laughter; particularly, inclined to foolish or incessant merriment

But is the dictionary definition correct? The word abderian is too rarely used for me to glean its meaning from context. The sources agree that it comes from the Thracian town of Abdera, a town in Thrace, or from its prominent philosopher Democritus. [One says Abdera's "citizens were considered rustic simpletons who would laugh at anything or anyone they didn't understand".]However, the stories about Abdera and Democritus don't really support a concept of "foolish merriment". In general they show the townsfolk as stupid or as subject fits of nutty emotion, and show Democritus as a worldly-wise man laughing at the follies of mankind, in an attitude of "Lo, what fools these mortals be." ... Here's one:

Richard Strauss based his last work, Des Esels Schatten ('The Donkey's Shadow'), a 1774 satire set in ancient Abdera, Die Abderiten by Christoph Martin Wieland. The plot is a legal dispute over the question, "Who owns the donkey's shadow?" The renter of a donkey cooled himself in the donkey's shadow, whereupon the donkey's owner demands more money, claiming he leased the donkey, not its shadow. The legal dispute rages; the city and its citizens are sharply split on the controversy ? and everyone forgets the donkey, who is neglected and dies of starvation.

sybarite
? a person devoted to pleasure and luxury; a voluptuary
from Subaris (Sybaris), from the notorious luxury of its inhabitants

[Ben] Franklin's personal habits aroused even greater ire in [John] Adams. Franklin lived the grand life of a sybarite, attended by nine servants, feasting daily frorn a table generously laden with unimaginable delicacies, in command of a wine cellar stocked with more than one thousand bottles, and borne about Paris and Passy in an elegant carriage driven by a uniformed coachman.
? John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

This is a deplorable street, a luxurious couch of a street in which the afternoon lolls like a gaudy sybarite.
? Ben Hecht, Michigan Avenue

Why would there be 22,000 books on, for instance, the enigma of Richard Wagner? The supposed enigma is that a man who wrote some music that is sublime (Parsifal), some that is noble and romantic (Lohengrin), and some that is wise and gently humorous (Meistersinger) should have been an active anit-Semite, the seducer of a loyal friend's wife (Cosima Von Bulow) and at various times a liar, cheat, politician, egomaniac and sybarite. Why on earth not? There is no enigma in Wagner if you remember the Anything Goes Rule. The real enigma is that experienced people who must know that traits of character and talent have complex, shifting causes, can believe or pretend to believe, that a personality must be all of a piece morally.
? Richard Brown, Social Psychology

boeotian
? a dull, obtuse person. The emphasis seems to be on rude ignorance and illiteracy (think "country bumpkin") rather than stupidity.

Boetia is a farming district in ancient Greece, whose inhabitants the urbane Athenians found thick and stupid, with no understanding of art or literature. Think "country bumpkin". Brewer gives another explanation: "The ancient Boeotians loved agricultural and pastoral pursuits, so the Athenians used to say they were dull and thick as their own atmosphere." But the slur seems unfair, since Hesiod, Pindar, and Plutarch all hailed from Boeotia.

It was called Boeotia; and in Hellenic minds the word 'Boeotian' had a quite distinctive connotation. It stood for an ethos which was rustic, stolid, unimaginative, brutal ? an ethos out of harmony with the prevailing genius of the Hellenic culture.
? Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History

Boeotian bliss is not conducive to invention: the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.
? Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

Posted 10:30 AM by Nathan
Ethnic News
Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education

2004 Spring; Vol. 15, No. 3; Pg. 8-9
1235 words

Native Languages: a Question of Life or Death
By Ambler, Marjane

During the Vietnam War, a Blackfeet man, Marvin Weatherwax, and three other
soldiers were captured by the enemy. They hung the soldiers by the arms
along the wall and asked, "What unit are you from? How many are in your
unit? Where is your unit?" The first man spit on them and started cussing,
and they cut him with a knife from kidney to kidney. The same thing happened
to the second and the third.

When they came to Weatherwax, he told them what they wanted to know--but he
told them in the Blackfeet language. They kept him prisoner for over three
years and tried to figure out what he was saying, but Weatherwax spoke only
Blackfeet. To this day, he believes that his language kept him alive.

Native languages meant the difference between life and death for not only
Weatherwax but also for countless World War I and World War II soldiers.
Recent publicity has honored the work of the Navajo code talkers in World
War II, but during both world wars, American Indian code talkers helped
bring victory by using various languages, including Choctaw, Comanche,
Lakota or Navago words.

Today, learning Native languages continues to be of crucial importance to
American Indian people, sometimes perhaps life or death importance. In
Indian Country, the frequency of suicide among adolescents is more than
double the national rate. Their despair and hopelessness have many causes,
of course, but may be related to loss of culture and language.

Dr. William Harjo LoneFight, the president of Sisseton Wahpeton College, is
one of the most passionate Native language advocates. He says, "When people
spoke Dakota, they understood where they belonged in relation to other
people, to the natural world, and to the spiritual world. They truly knew
how to treat one another."

Research has shown that when Native children know only English, their
families and communities suffer from a breakdown in intergenerational
communication, which sometimes leads to juvenile gang behavior and drug
abuse.

An innovative government TANF (welfare) program in California recognizes
this. The director of the Owens Valley Career Development Center in Bishop,
CA, Paul W. Chavez, believes that culture and language programs provide a
sense of identity to young people. The center puts the vast majority of its
funds into prevention activities, such as the vocational education, Even
Start, and language. This model is being expanded to serve four additional
counties in the area.

The TANF-funded language program has a staff of 18. The language program
director, Laura Grant, says, "We believe in starting at the earliest level
[preschool] and building individuals from the ground up so they don't get
into these patterns that lead to welfare."

More than a Fad

This generously funded program is the exception, however. While the needs
for and the community interest in language work skyrockets, the availability
of federal and private funding plummets.

Veteran language fundraiser Marina Drummer of the Advocates for Indigenous
California Language Survival says funders have difficulty understanding the
importance of language revitalization work in the context of issues more
clearly associated with life or death, such as homelessness. They tend to
think of language work as arcane and specialized like linguistics instead of
the "absolute bedrock of culture."

Funders sometimes see language programs as a fad, according to Janine Pease
(Crow), the author of the immersion article in this issue. "Saying language
programs are a fad is like saying that tribal colleges were a fad 30 years
ago. The work is much too difficult to be a fad," she says.

To build fluency, language programs need sustained funding for many years,
not three or four-year grants. You can't take a Berlitz course. Short-term
grants are like "throwing a potato chip into the wind," Pease says.

Outsiders also tend to feel that efforts are futile, merely putting off the
inevitable time when all American Indian people will speak only English. For
the past couple of hundred years, the American public largely has bought
into the End of the Trail syndrome, a symbol created in the 1800s by
sculptor James Earle Fraser. Artists such as George Catlin, Edward Curtis,
and Karl Bodner also strived to capture images of the Vanishing Red Man,
assuming that those Indians who were not killed would assimilate.

In 1877 the Secretary of Interior forbade children in the American Indian
boarding schools from speaking "barbarous" languages, saying, "If Indian
children are to be civilized, they must learn the language of civilization."

The assumptions behind the Vanishing Red Man syndrome continue. Yet despite
200 years of concerted efforts to eliminate them, most of these tribes have
survived, and many of their languages also have survived.

Today English Only advocates annually ask Congress to make English the
"official language" of the United States. Nevertheless, in 1990, Congress
passed the Native American Languages Act, which said that saving languages
is part of the national policy. Funding has been totally inadequate,
however.

Churches Should be Involved

Richard LaFoune (Yupik) and the Heart of the Earth, Inc., organization have
a unique proposal for a private/public partnership that would infuse
resources into language revitalization work following a Canadian model.
Their proposal would involve churches, three agencies of the federal
government, and Native organizations, such as the American Indian Higher
Education Consortium and the National Congress of Americans.

The federal government in Canada has decided to fund language and culture
projects as part of its reparations for physical, sexual, and emotional
abuse through the boarding schools, according to LaFortune. In Canada, as in
the United States, the boarding schools harshly punished children who spoke
their Native languages as they tried to purge them of their "barbaric"
cultural practices.

Canada has proposed $47 million per year for 50-60 Native languages,
according to his calculations. LaFortune compares this with the $2 million
that the United States government is providing to save over 200 languages.
LaFortune includes the churches in the reparations plan because of their
significant role in boarding schools and assimilation. He says it will take
more than a generation of funding to fix things since boarding schools spent
more than a generation trying to destroy cultures.

A handful of foundations are responding to the arguments of Native language
advocates and providing significant funding for language projects - W.K.
Kellogg Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Grotto Foundation, and recently Ford
Foundation. The Congress is considering legislation that would provide
additional funds for Native language immersion projects. We commend these
efforts and hope that other foundations, members of Congress, and churches
will study the Heart of the Earth proposal.

The late language advocate Ken Hale said every language lost is like
dropping a bomb on the Louvre. Native languages are important to the
economic, emotional, and physical survival of Indian people. They are also
an important part of the world's heritage. Like petroglyphs carved into
rocks, these languages are fading and disappearing with time. They hold
precious stories and knowledge that need to be preserved.

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