Not Even the Silly Season

Oh my, this (below) made me laugh. It’s from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, a website worth visiting and a newsletter worth subscribing to. It’s weekly, so sometimes hard to keep up with, but almost always full of gems. He looks at new words coming into use in English (both British and American (and other variations too)), the odd history of words, and funny misuses of words.

The following is from his most recent newsletter from the section called “Recently Noted,” about words coming to prominence.

E FOR EVERYTHING So many words in the public prints now come with the “e-” (for “electronic”) prefix that I’ve long since given up mentioning them here, or in most cases even reporting them to the Oxford English Dictionary. But a big row in the UK last week led to the terms “e-petition” and “e-petitioner” becoming widely known. It all started with some bright young person in the Prime Minister’s office—some papers have fingered the in-house Web guru, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, surely an escapee from a Wodehouse novel. He had the idea that the Number 10 Web site should allow electronic petitions to be submitted. Some spectacularly silly ones have been organised, one of them demanding that mice be allowed to travel free on public transport and another one—which has gained a surprising level of informal support—arguing that Spandau Ballet’s “Gold” should become the new national anthem. The row, however, was over very tentative proposals to introduce road-pricing—charging road users by the distance they travel. At the last count, 1.8 million signatures had been added to an e-petition demanding the scheme be scrapped, even though trials are several years away and full run-out could not happen for a decade. Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, was understandably displeased with the whole idea of electronic petitions. “Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat,” he said. (Prat: an incompetent or stupid person, from an old term for a person’s buttocks that also appears in “pratfall”.)

Don’t miss Gold on YouTube—priceless.

$10 Million an Hour

That’s what we’re spending in Iraq. Regardless of whether you think the war is justified philosophically or politically, it’s really hard to imagine it is justifiable economically.

Think of all we could do with that money. Years and years of $10 million an hour. My god, it boggles the mind.

We could have paid the salary every military person who’s been deployed, then kept them home to grease the wheels of the economy or sent them off as peacekeepers to Darfur. Could have rebuilt New Orleans and environs, set some smartypants types to work on alternative fuels, and sent enough humanitarian aid to disgruntled teenagers in desperate places that we might have urged them toward hope rather than hate. But I digress.

The $10 million figure came from an interview I heard with Stephen Flynn, who has been all over the FM dial this week with the release of his book The Edge of Disaster. He appeared in short bits on consecutive days on Morning Edition. On Tuesday night, driving home from basketball, I caught a longer interview with him on the Diane Rehm Show—really interesting and inspiring, if you can stand listening to the Diane Rehm Show. (You have to be in a certain mood to bear with her slow and creaky delivery that sounds like she will probably expire at the end of every sentence.)

I like what Flynn has to say: We don’t need so much emphasis on the prevention of every twisted terrorist possibility, but rather need more resiliency. A greater ability to respond and to bounce back from whatever it is—acts of terrorists, acts of god, accidents. By removing known dangers (his example was unnecessarily hazardous chemicals for such things as oil refining stored near population centers) and preparing for reactions to any crisis, we are much safer than with each new restriction on airplane carry-ons or state police orders to look for illegal aliens. (Here’s where the $10 million figure came in: Retrofitting an oil refinery from some particularly lethal chemical to the undeniably-yucky-but-not-so-deadly sulphuric acid would cost about $20-30 million. A tolerable sum in light of oil companies’ recent record profits, and, literally, three hours of government spending.)

Especially by giving people, citizens, and communities the information and the resources to rally and rebuild, Flynn argues, we make the “homeland” stronger. These are often “unsexy” and even simple things that occur at a local level (he refers to the the placing of luminescent strips and handrails on the fire stairs at the World Trade Center towers after the 1993 attack, which helped save so many lives in 2001). He makes really great analogies, all of which I’ve conveniently forgotten just now, but which make me want to read the book.

He’s also critical in the right places, about the lack of national leadership for example, without being emotional or apparently partisan. He was an old Coast Guard guy himself.

And there’s something comforting in his theory, despite his examples involving Bhopal-like terrorist acts. Comforting because, for one thing, he reiterates that natural disasters are much more likely than terrorism to lay us low. The results may be as devastating but to me the absence of evil makes it seem less like the world is rotting from the inside out. The other thing is that, by being resilient we make terrorism less effective.

Stephen Flynn for president!

Random Flickr Blogging IMG_1610

Dizzying plains.

by sjareb

(Random Flickr Blogging explained.)

Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”