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ArchiveAUGUST 2023

 
AUGUST 29, 2013 flashback    WHAT'S A DICTIONARY FOR?

English teachers’ heads literally exploded this month when dictionaries admitted that literally can also mean not literally.

Webster, Macmillan, and the Cambridge Dictionary have all added a second definition for literally.  Even Google has two options:

1.In a literal manner or sense; exactly.

2.Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling.

Webster’s authors commented, “Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposition of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse.  Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis.”

Those who deplore this development may not understand one fact about modern dictionaries.  They are descriptive, not prescriptive.

The website English Plus+ explains, in part, “Many times discussions or arguments about correct usage in English are settled by looking things up in a dictionary.”  But that’s not really the purpose of such a book.  “When I was young,” the article continues, “most of us had been corrected by teachers, if not parents, not to use the word ain't.  My teachers had told me there was no such word.  Imagine my surprise when, just for fun, I looked up the word, and there it was.  It was in the dictionary.

“Dictionaries are very helpful tools for finding the meaning of words, and even spelling in most cases.  However, for more information on using words in a standard manner, use a grammar text or reference.”

In other words, grammar books are prescriptive.  They prescribe the official rules.  Dictionaries, however, are descriptive.  They describe the living language.  They illustrate how words are actually used by real people, whether or not those usages conform to the rules.

“I don't get objections to twerk and selfie being added to the dictionary,” writer Eric D. Snider tweeted yesterday.  “It's not like they had to kick other words out to make room.  All words were new at some point.  Many eventually fall into disuse.  Acknowledging their existence in dictionaries doesn't ruin the language.”

Why should dictionaries include nonstandard or “incorrect” usages?  Imagine someone to whom English is a second language.  He encounters the nonstandard sentence,

“Doris ain’t missing; her troubles literally broke her heart.”

He wants to know what it means, but he’s not familiar with a couple of the words, so he looks them up.  If his dictionary says ain’t doesn’t exist and there’s no second meaning of literally, he has to assume the sentence means,

“Doris’s missing; her troubles actually broke her heart.”

So she must have crawled off somewhere and died from a fractured left ventricle.

 

AUGUST 27, 2023    CIVIC DISENGAGEMENT

A few years ago, an author appeared on a panel discussion to promote her book deploring a decline in Civics instruction for youngsters.  The host misunderstood her to be warning of a decline not in Civics but in civility.  The other panelists agreed that rudeness was rampant and we must try to be more civil towards each other, and even the author had to join in that conversation.

Civics, of course, means the study of how government works and of the rights and duties of citizens.  It's a vital part of democracy, empowering each of us with the knowledge to change the world around us.

Tomorrow will mark the 60th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights.  Little more than a year later, high school Civics teacher Frank Zirbel listened to a report from my classmate Kelly Drake while Carl Martin, Dave Bickley, and Dan Rush took notes.

Nowadays, however, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that 12 states no longer require high school graduates to have passed a Civics course.  Nearly one-third of eighth grade students can't describe the structure or function of government.

Many conservatives don't want kids to learn that the nation isn't perfect — in particular, that some races and ethnicities and genders have been excluded from a full participation in American life.

 

AUGUST 24, 2023    WATCH OUT! 

This Saturday night during the Coke Zero Sugar 400, NASCAR drivers will be racing out of the tri-oval and glancing to their left to see whether other cars are exiting the pit road.  They may notice a huge UH-OH painted on the asphalt.  Is it a warning of an impending collision?  Not at all.  It's an ad.  I explain in Uh-Oh! Diesels!

 

AUGUST 21, 2023    SCHLEMIEL, SCHLIMAZEL

In the TV listings, I noticed the title of a talk-show series on the E! channel:

If We're Being Honest With Laverne Cox.

I assume that the complete version of the title must be something like “If We're Being Honest With Laverne Cox While At The Same Time We're Lying To Shirley Feeney, There's Gonna Be Trouble.”

 

AUGUST 19, 2023    THE BIG CARET

Sports pundits are desperately trying to make sense of ongoing major-college realignments.  The most egregious might be the Big Ten.  With its recent West Coast additions, the conference will include eighteen universities by 2025.  The Oregon Ducks' travel plans, for example, will look like this.

Conferences are expanding to get more lucrative TV contracts for football.  Playing only once a week, a football team should be able to afford several five-hour charter flights across the country.  And, writes George Will with a bit of sarcasm, “More transcontinental flights mean more uninterrupted time for the student-athletes to read Proust and organic chemistry.”

But consider the “non-revenue” sports.  Can the Oregon golf teams, men's and women's, book multiple commercial round-trip flights to the Eastern and Central time zones, perhaps laying over in Chicago and missing lots of classes?  How about the tennis teams?  Track and field?  Cross country?

I can think of a couple of ideas.  One solution might be for those eight squads to pool their meager funds and charter an airplane plus some New Jersey buses.  The whole group could visit Penn State on Friday, Maryland on Saturday, and Rutgers on Sunday.  Then on a later weekend, the Eastern athletes could board a westbound charter flight for a similar festival in Eugene.

A simpler solution would be to formulate comprehensive conference schedules for only football (and basketball).  The others, the so-called “Olympic sports,” would be allowed to compete in smaller regions, the way college sports used to be.  Divisions could be called West, Midwest, Central, and East.  Each could ignore the rest of the far-flung Big 18 until a championship tournament for the four division winners. 

If the dividing lines trisected the existing Big Ten like this big blue caret, the typical non-revenue team would have only three division rivals and play them home-and-home every year.  That six-game schedule could be filled out with other nearby opponents.

(Exception: each East Division team, with five division rivals, would schedule only one of them home-and-home.)

Something like one of these solutions must prevail!  

 
AUGUST 17, 2023    NOT ENOUGH PROGRESS

Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report on the state of racial equality in the 60 years since Dr. Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech.

More than three-quarters of Democrats (78%) say that efforts toward equal rights in America have not yet gone far enough.

However, less than one-quarter of Republicans agree (24%).  And they're outnumbered by the 37% of Republicans who say equality efforts have gone too far and we're now excessively equal.



 

Some 35 years ago in Ohio, I observed one small instance of biased treatment.  It's the subject of this month's 100 Moons article.

To read more, click this box for a classic article I posted to this website more than a hundred months ago.

 


AUGUST 14, 2023   
FLATNESS, FIRE, LEECHES, ETC.

Back in 1985, literally half a lifetime ago, I got to spend two weeks in Hawaii working on a corporate TV production.

We stayed at the Maui Marriott Resort on Kaanapali Beach, a couple of miles north of Lahaina.

I had some time off one day and decided to play tourist for the afternoon.  I took the Sugar Cane Train into town, where the giant banyan tree dropped a tiny fruit at my feet.  I browsed up and down Front Street.

In a bookstore I noticed the Dover paperback edition of a certain famous math fantasy from a century before.  In it, Edwin A. Abbott describes the journeys of “A. Square,” a mathematician in a flat land where there are only two dimensions.  I bought the book for $1.75 and read most of it that night.  It's still in my bookcase, though I haven't opened it for decades.


Now, of course, Front Street has been flattened by fire, along with almost everything else in Lahaina.


Back in Pennsylvania, last Saturday morning at 10:23 AM, another disaster on a smaller scale took place just seven miles south of me.

Four adults and an 11-year-old were killed when a house exploded.

The moment was captured by a neighbor's Ring doorbell camera.

The homes on either side burned down and a dozen or so had windows blown out; some will have to be demolished.  In addition to the five deaths, three other people were hospitalized and 57 firefighters were treated on scene for minor issues.

It was the third such explosion in Plum Borough in the last 15 years and the fourth since 1996.  All were presumably caused by leaking natural gas, but the investigation into this one could last “months, if not years.”

I've been to Plum and worked on telecasts at Plum High School.  But I've never driven down Rustic Ridge Drive, so I checked online maps to determine where the explosion took place.

I discovered that the high school is not far from the scene.  It's adjacent to a small unincorporated crossroads with about ten houses — and the name of the crossroads is Leechburg.  Really?  I always thought Leechburg was seven miles east of me.

Further investigation reveals that there are two Leechburgs in my neck of the woods.  This sort of duplication is not unheard of.

And, as if local geography needed even more confusion, between the two burgs there are multiple Leechburg Roads (in blue).

There must have been a whole family of Leeches who settled this area a couple of centuries ago.

 

AUGUST 11, 2023    NOT FOUNDED AS A HATING NATION

“If the Bible be true,” wrote Robert Green Ingersoll, “the supreme and infinite God was once a savage.  Read the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, and you will find that he commanded his chosen people to destroy other men for defending their native land and to pierce, with the sword of war, the unborn child.  The maidens were given to the soldiers and the priests.  It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being.

“From my childhood, I had heard and read the Bible.  I had no love for God — that God who made heaven for the few, hell for the many, and who will gloat forever upon the writhings of the damned.  A God who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved.”

One hundred ninety years ago today, Ingersoll was born in Dresden, New York.  I've visited his birthplace.  “The truth is,” he wrote at the age of 40:

-
Our government
     is not founded
          upon the rights of gods,
               but upon the rights of men. 

Our Constitution was framed,
     not to declare and uphold
          the deity of Christ,
               but the sacredness of humanity.

Ours is the first government made 
     by the people and for the people. 
          It is the only nation with which
                the gods have had nothing to do. 

And yet there are some judges
     dishonest and cowardly enough
          to solemnly decide
               that this is a Christian country,
                    and that our free institutions are based
                           upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.
-

Remember our third President, Thomas Jefferson?  In the August/September 2023 issue of Free Inquiry, Robyn E. Blumer recalls that he “directed that his tombstone note only three accomplishments, [including] the first nondenominational institution of higher learning.

“Jefferson was deeply skeptical of religion, knew well of its pernicious history of persecution, and was disgusted by the pain it inflicted on society.”

He wrote in an 1816 letter:

 

 

-
On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
-

Ms. Blumer concludes, “For those Christian nationalists who now claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, Thomas Jefferson and the Founders like him stand as impregnable rebuttal.”

 

AUGUST 9, 2023    ON THE GRIDDLE

Tomorrow, while football players are strapping on the pads, Catholics will be observing the feast day of St. Lawrence.

The saint is often pictured with a “gridiron,” the rectangular metal rack for roasting large slabs of meat.  It's tinted here in blue.  According to the story, it was in the year 258 that Lawrence met his martyrdom, bound to that craticule and laid over a fire to be roasted to death.  There's even an antiphon about it.  “On the gridiron I did not deny you, oh God.  And when they put me in the fire I recognized you as the Lord, oh Christ.  You tried me with fire and found no wickedness in me.”

More than 1700 years later, when North American football was developed, the field was divided into five-yard squares resembling a giant gridiron.    This early view shows Syracuse University's Archbold Stadium.

An offensive team tried to advance the ball from one square to another nearer the goal.  When a tackle was made in a certain square, the ball would be spotted within that square for the next play.

In this diagram from 1904, the smaller boxes (only five feet wide, not five yards) would have centers only 30 inches from the sideline, too close to “out of bounds” to run a proper play.  Therefore, the ball would not be spotted there but in the middle of the adjacent square (X), an acceptable 20 feet from the sideline.  Later, hash marks would serve a similar purpose.

By 1920, it became apparent that the stripes parallel to the goal line were important but the stripes parallel to the sideline were less meaningful, so those cross stripes were eliminated (except for one pair reduced to those vestigial hash marks).  Now the field resembled this simpler version of a gridiron.

When I was a student manager at Richwood High School, every August I'd help create a gridiron at Memorial Stadium.

First I'd rake the newly-cut grass off the sideline.

Then I'd go to the southwest corner of the field, get a three-wheeled lime spreader out of the equipment shed (arrow), and fill it with white powder.

Starting from the flag socket at the back corner of that end zone, the coaches would stretch a string 360 feet to the corresponding socket at the eastern end zone.

It was my job to wheel the lime spreader over the string, trying not to wobble too much.  Then we'd do the opposite sideline.

Following that, the coaches would use a measuring tape on each sideline, holding the ends of the string every 15 feet.  I'd mark one yard line, turn 90°, walk five yards as they moved the string, turn another 90°, and follow the next yard line.  I'd need to retrace my steps every few weeks during the season.



Big-time football couldn't leave well enough alone, of course.  Other markings were added:  numbers, arrows, single-yard tick marks, extra-point lines, kickoff tee locators, sideline team boxes, team logos, sponsor logos.

None of that appeared at Richwood High School except hash marks and extra-point lines.  (Having consulted an NFL diagram, we once marked the latter at the two-yard line, forcing the referee to pace off an extra yard.)  The bleachers were only a dozen rows high, so the fans wouldn't be high enough to read all the numbers anyway.  Also, we were conserving lime.  And I was not required to add a portrait of Saint Larry to our version of his gridiron.

On the other hand, in 2023 I can't resist Photoshopping the martyred saint onto a view of the new field at a Division III school in New York State.  SUNY Morrisville's team colors are green and black, but green uniforms on a green field don't stand out.  Therefore, despite global warming, they've chosen black artificial turf!

Grayson Weir writes that this griddle “is going to make the players' lives absolute hell during the summer and into the fall.  It will feel like the surface of the sun.  That would be borderline torturous, no?!”

 

AUGUST 6, 2023    PICK A LANE

All right, Johnny.  You wanted to know about the “choose rule,” right?

Well, as you know, when there's a spinout or a wreck in a NASCAR race they drop a yellow flag to declare a “caution” period.  All the cars slow down and continue circling the track in single file until the debris can be cleared.

Then, one lap before the race is going to be restarted, they need to recreate the double-file starting formation.

There's an orange “choose” symbol painted on the track to represent a virtual traffic cone.  As each driver approaches it, one at a time, he decides to swerve either left or right depending on which of the two lanes he wants to be in for the restart.

That's important because once the green flag drops, it will be difficult to switch lanes; everyone will be staying as close as possible to the car in front.


I'm far from being a racecar driver, but I too like to avoid changing lanes when traffic is heavy.  When I get a chance, I choose the lane that I'll want to be in later.

Soon after I leave home, there's a place where one lane divides into two.  The street will continue to have two lanes of slow-moving traffic until I arrive at my destination.  I usually keep to the right, but I if I'm planning to turn left into the shopping center a mile away, I get in the left lane.  That way I won't have to force my way into that lane later, cutting off other drivers who might be less than courteous.

Near the turnpike, there's a section of highway where there are three lanes.  I usually move into the middle one when I can.  Thus I don't impede the progress of anyone who will be using the right-lane-must-exit ramp 2.7 miles later.  And I stay out of the way of the scofflaw speeders coming up behind me, who can continue breaking the speed limit by passing me on the left.  I'm always thinking, trying to minimize difficulties!

 

AUGUST 4, 2023    BAKED BABY

I don't remember the day clearly, because I was only five months old.  But it might have been on this date 76 years ago that, according to my mother, I turned red from the heat.

My mother and father regularly traveled to western Kentucky, staying with his parents in their home on Main Street in Livermore.  All the relatives would have been eager to see the new addition to the family.

Records show that on August 4, 1947, temperatures hit triple figures including 100° in Owensboro and 106° in Paducah.  On August 5, the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer reported a high of 103°.

Recalling the house from subsequent visits when I was a little older, I think that like this one, it was covered in dark heat-absorbing faux-brick asphalt shingles.

I must have been very uncomfortable, breaking out in a heat rash like this baby.  Later, my mother remembered anxiously carrying me out onto the porch, searching for a little breeze.  That must have been when I vowed:  never again!  Give me air conditioning!

AUGUST 2, 2023    WE WANT THAT SECRET INSIDER KNOWLEDGE

Why are conspiracy theories so widespread these days?  They're driven by the fear that “they,” the devils, are planning to grab more power and destroy “us,” the righteous.

Two editors at The Atlantic note that the theories offer simple explanations — whether or not they're true.

“Stories help explain the hard-to-understand, if not the unexplainable,” writes Kelli María Korducki.  According to Ellen Cushing, “Conspiracy thinking is incredibly compelling.  It promises an answer to problems as small as expired light bulbs and as big as our radical aloneness in the universe. 

“The intoxicating feeling of having insider knowledge about the fate of the world — or at least believing you do — is self-sealing in its logic and self-soothing in its effect.”

We want to have faith in that soothing worldview.  Conspiracy thinking, Cushing says, “posits a world where morality is plain, where every person has agency, and where every piece of information has divine meaning and nothing happens by accident.”