Language Follies 17 (It is to Laugh)

I will ask you to keep reading although nothing that follows this first item can match it for hilarity.

Title of an opinion piece in the New York Times the other day:

Trump Can Win on Character

(It’s not what you might think.)

The article was by Rich Lowry of the National Review, a one-time believer in a Trump apocalypse who is now a major Trumpian brown-noser. (1) The real knee slapper of a joke is that Lowry doesn’t argue for Trump’s character; he argues that Trump should use his schoolboy name calling to smear Harris’ character. 

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OK, if you’re still here.

Is anything more inane than the song lyric “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world”? 

Then again, how about the emptiness of “You always showed me that/

Loving you was where it's at” (from “You’ve made me so very happy”)? 

Lotta crap in 1960s pop music hits.

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In the last two posts I wrote about the 1960s Family Circle scolds who produced a list for college enrollees to read. Well, lo and behold, a couple of 2024 scolds wrote an article last week for The Atlantic entitled “WHAT THE FRESHMAN CLASS NEEDS TO READ”; here’s the link (but don’t bother to read it). (2)

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I guess if you really need guidance on life, you could follow the advice of a statement I saw on the web: “Rely on Stone Island for your moral compass.” I had to look up “Stone Island” to find out who (or what) my new leader was. Turns out it’s an Italian sportswear outfit. I wonder if The Atlantic authors placed Stone Island next to Plato on the book shelves of college freshmen.

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Two weeks ago, in the middle of August 2024, the New York Times decided that the future couldn't come fast enough:

“Predicting Which M.L.B. Players Could Represent the U.S. at the 2028 Olympics”

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I will end with the Neatest Trick of the Week:

(from an email)

Good afternoon,

 

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(1) I will not link to the article, nutty as it is, but here is a link to its perfect putdown by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/08/the-conservatives-who-sold-their-souls-for-trump/679623/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20240826&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily

(2) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/what-freshman-class-ought-be-studying/679530/ 

Language Follies 16 (Part 2)

In my previous blog entry (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2024/08/language-follies-16.html), I included a quote from George Bernard Shaw, “Every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.” I also included a list of books that Family Circle magazine claimed  

I did not, at the time of writing the previous entry, tie the two citations together; let me do so here.

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I think Shaw’s statement can be turned around: “Every earnest is a jest in the womb of Time.” In this form it shares space with Karl Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, first appearing as tragedy and then as farce. 

The Family Circle list is just one of many produced by scolds over the years: “Read this,” Listen to that,” “Eat this.” “Visit here,” “Climb there.” The preening self-satisfaction of the scolds gets up my gorge.*

But what I want to focus in on today is something else: how the vicissitudes of time makes a jest—or, better yet—a joke of the scold and his efforts. Look at the FC list. 

It’s six decades later, and we can expect values and judgments to change. But transporting ourselves back to 1965, shouldn’t we have seen what important works were omitted, their places usurped by middling efforts suited  to a middlebrow taste. Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Somerset Maugham are in; James Joyce and Marcel Proust are out. Lawrence of Arabia and C. P. Snow are in; Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, Moliere and Voltaire, Sophocles and Euripides  among the missing. There’s more (like, for instance, only 3 works by women and none by Black writers), but let’s leave it at that. 

I am not proposing my own list to replace the FC one that really didn’t need gestation in “the womb of Time” to prove to be a joke. Somehow human beings (that even includes college students) find their way to sources of knowledge, thankfully, each person’s list being different from everybody else’s. Thus, we expand the collective wisdom of our species.

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* I discussed another scold’s list (in the form of a smart guy list) here: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2015/01/dont-bother-me.html

 

Language Follies 16

Quotes of the Day

Every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

(George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island)

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It’s very easy to have a simple theory, if it is completely false.

(Daniel Kahneman)

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How to Get Clean (Warily)

There’s “Naval Diplomacy”

Or  

“Krakengard”

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Euphemism Watch

From The New Yorker (1965)

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We Don’t Mean It When We Say It

Restaurant patrons who order chicken wings marketed as "boneless" can't expect them to actually be boneless, according to a Thursday ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court. . . .

[I]n Thursday's 4-3 ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court said "boneless" wings refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should have been on guard against bones since it's common knowledge that chickens have bones. The high court sided with lower courts that had dismissed Berkheimer's suit.

"A diner reading 'boneless wings' on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating 'chicken fingers' would know that he had not been served fingers," wrote Justice Joseph T. Deters for the majority.*

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Family Circle magazine contributed this wake-up call advertisement to The New Yorker issue of October 30, 1965:

As of today, almost 60 years later, I have read only about 15 of those books. I guess they shouldn’t have let me in to college.

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* https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicken-wings-sold-boneless-bones-221548080.html