sisu

If you're lucky, you pull it all together with a twist of your wit

[George Stubbs's] portrait from life of a tigress that had been given to George Spencer, the fourth Duke of Marlborough (and a great great great greatgreatgreatgreat uncle of Princess Diana) by Lord Clive, the governor of Bengal, may have been seen by a twelve-year-old WIlliam Blake and inspired his famous poem The Tyger," writes Amba in a perfect little masterpiece of a blogpost. Tiny, above, pauses to read the silence after snowfall yesterday morning.

"I think cheating is the way to go, too. There's definite fodder there for a worlds-within-worlds blog post," writes Amba in her own comments in response to an extended comment we left at Ambivablog this morning, taking up her invitation to readers to consider themselves tagged for "the Page 123 Book Meme." She herself had been tagged by The Anchoress. Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

We couldn't resist. Here's some of what we wrote in her comments, first re her post itself:

My favorite kind of blogpost, suggestive of worlds within worlds. One thing leads to another, and if you're lucky, you pull it all together with a twist of your wit. A perfect little masterpiece! All that, and cats, too [Be sure to go over and check it out].

I may take you up on your "open tag," although I'll probably have to cheat a little, since Merriam-Webster's Unabridged -- on the bookstand right behind where I sit at the computer -- has virtually no complete sentences on page 123. Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club -- on top of a pile of books including your own A Return to Innocence! across the room -- on the other hand, promises world without end.

Tiny in context -- a fuller crop of the above closeup -- is as the full page 123 of a book is to a selection of the three sentences following the fifth sentence on that page, object of the "Page 123 Book Meme" that is the subject of this post. Leaving more to the imagination, the closeup assumes a poetic dimension that encourages our mind to "'float away' and let another 'train of thought' carry it in some other direction," in Amba's words (see excerpt from A Return to Innocence below). Kind of like blogging itself, we commented to Amba. Take this trio from page 123 of Instapundit Glenn Reynolds's An Army of Davids and see what comes to mind: "Well, sort of. Everybody knows it. But they don't know it, yet, down deep where it counts."

"Maybe I could convince myself that since your book is at eye level -- the windows to the soul and all that -- it is truly the nearest to me. Hmmmm," we continued, proceeding to pluck out the three sentences following the fifth sentence on page 123 of Amba's book and several others in that pile on the other side of the room. From Amba's A Return to Innocence: Philosophical Guidance in An Age of Innocence:

"The ancient Buddhist texts explain that it keeps the mind steady, instead of letting it bob about like a pumpkin in water ['Reminds me of blogging] -- it is the opposite of superficial attention. So when your Bare Attention confronts the object you're examining, your mind doesn't 'float away' and let another 'train of thought' carry it in some other direction.

We were particularly intrigued with the three sentences following the fifth sentence on page 123 of The Metaphysical Club. The topic was evolution, "simply the incidental by-product of material struggle, not its goal":

It is a process without a mind. A way of thinking that regards individual differences as inessential departures from a general type is therefore not well suited for dealing with the natural world. A general type is fixed, determinate, and uniform; the world Darwin described is characterized by chance, change, and difference -- all the attributes general types are designed to leave out.

And Amba's response:

In the terms of my favorite psychologist James Hillmen, A Return to Innocence is too monolithically spiritual; blogging is soulful . . . Spirit is supercilious and monotheistic. It looks down on digressions and attempts to dismiss or purge them. The ground-clearing, defoliating absolutism of the "spiritual" perspective, manifested in radical Islam and more gently in Innocence (defoliate the weedy ground of your consciousness!), "regards individual differences as inessential departures from a general type is therefore not well suited for dealing with the natural world." Darwin is soulful.

Echoes of Christian charity?:

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

-- 1 Corinthians 13

As Jean Strouse wrote in a NYT review of The Metaphysical Club, "Evolutionary theory did away with the idea of a supernatural intelligence governing the universe (although not with the human yearning for some higher order)." It's the "wired for belief" thing.

Update: Carnival of the Cats #202 now open for business at Bad Kitty Cats Poohbox Clan Journal.

Tea: The new gin

"Theaceous: adj. pertaining to or like the tea-plant; belonging to the tea family of plants." You can get the definition free online at Tiscali's Dictionary of Difficult Words or by subscription at the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. For the full monty we looked it up the old-fashioned way in our snail Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Image of p. 2369 above lists "theaceous" just about a third of the way between "the" and "their" and includes etymological roots: [NL Theaceae + E -ous].

"Tea leaves struck a cord with quite a few of your readers," observed Goomp this morning during imail chats, referring to the deluge of personal testimonials and theaceous pointers flooding into the comments in our previous post, "Something to drink if you can't drink liquor." Excerpts:

We: Tea: The new gin. Or, on a more trendy note, Tea: The new black.

He: The "new black" is too esoteric for me. I prefer "Tea: The new gin."

We'll drink a mug -- "Cups are too small and frankly poncy," counsels our British correspondent Peter McGrath --  to that and to our wonderful commenters. A few nuggets:

Laura Lee: Everyday after school when I was in high school I would come home to a cup of tea and vanilla wafers, a very simple pleasure, but my friends found out and gave me a new nickname, Lauratealeaf.

Goomp: I have a hunch tea may also have an economic advantage over alcohol.

Teresa: I find that tea is a wonderful thing to soothe nerves (which seems silly, but appears to be true) and I have also noticed that it aids digestion.

Pam: Growing up in the south, tea was considered the 'house wine', so you struck a chord.

Rowena: I've been teetotaling for over two years, and now I've finally got the tea!

Meanwhile we've just passed the two-week mark -- and counting -- on our  Cold Turkey Diet. Time for a tea break. 

"Muddy writing reflects muddy thinking"

"Amo-amas-amat" is where it's at. Or was, for high schoolers educated in our day mid 20th century. ("The Birth of Venus" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879 Oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris)

La Shawn jogged our memory today with her invitation to comment on "Which teacher(s), if any, had a positive impact on your life?" Her own post, a must-read that brought tears of joyous recognition to these tired old, cynical eyes, tells of the life-changing magic her high school journalism teacher worked on the self-described "slacker" she was back then by encouraging La Shawn's budding writing talent and urging her to be all that she could be:

Miss G. made us keep a weekly journal, a task designed to help us get the creative juices flowing by writing two pages in a black and white composition notebook once a week. All we had to do was fill up a page -- front and back -- to get an A. Most of the time, I went over the quota, writing several pages worth of adolescent angst over crushes on football players and going to the prom. One time, I wrote this sprawling “short story” about a dream fantasy, where the object of my affection was the singer Prince, an obsession at the time. I kept it clean, but I used my imagination to transport the reader into the fantasy, and ended the story on an enigmatic note. To my 16-year-old mind, it was cool.

Miss G. thought so, too. “You’re a good writer, La Shawn,” she wrote in the margin, the first time anyone had ever told me that. Comments like, “This would make a good column -- save it!” and “Excellent writing!” were sprinkled throughout other entries. Her encouragement gave me the confidence to experiment and open up in the entries . . .

While I barely completed other assignments for the class, that year-long, journal-writing project saved me from failing. I loved writing in that journal, but I didn’t like doing it as an assignment. Sometimes I was late turning it in, and my grade reflected it. But journaling created a “fire in the belly.” I had connected with something at last.

As we wrote in La Shawn's comments:

For me it was Miss Wood, my 10th-grade high school English teacher, who introduced us to Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” and was forever reminding us that “Muddy writing reflects muddy thinking.”

This is a thrilling post, La Shawn, well written -- of course -- full of life and tender love for a kindred spirit. How wonderful that you were able to tell your mentor what a difference she made.

There are other great teachers we could mention along the way, from Mummy and Daddy (Goomp) and Grammy (JuJu) and Great Aunt Helen on down, all those shining stars from infanthood through first grade and high school and college and on into graduate school who -- like La Shawn's Miss G -- each in her or his own way made us believe in ourselves and believe in learning to think. Our imail correspondent reminded us of Miss Rowe, the venerable high school Latin teacher who as a young hussy had seduced the older Latin teacher, Mr. Rowe, and then as an older gal herself taught us amo-amas-amat, veni-vidi-vici and a whole lot in between. There's food for a zillion blogposts in there. We learned to love language and became a seeker of wisdom of truth under their tutelage. All the more horrifying to think of what public education has come to in this day and age. This excerpt from Bird Dog's latest at Maggie's Farm says it all:

And it’s worth noting that in Criticism and Social Change, the left-wing theorist, Frank Lentricchia, announced that the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”

Seekers of ignorance and lies, unite!

Tony the Riveter

"As with the Marines, Baby's and Aslan's focus 'isn't on their weapons and tactics, but on leadership,'" we captioned this "There will always be an England" animated giff published on our birthday, December 15, last year. Go here to vote for sisu in the "Best of the Top 250 Blogs" in Wizbang's Weblogs Awards 2006.

"Britain stops talk of 'war on terror,'" headlines a Guardian article, apparently pleased as punch that the Foreign Office can no longer stomach the calling of a spade a spade:

Many senior British politicians and counter-terrorism specialists have always been uneasy with the term 'the war on terror', coined by Bushitler the White House in the week following the 9/11 attacks, arguing that the term risked inflaming hot-headed Islamofascists opinions worldwide. Other critics said that it was too 'military' and did not adequately describe the nature of the diverse efforts made to counter the new threat.

A bit of a letdown in the wake of Tony Blair's riveting "The duty to integrate" speech yesterday -- dubbed by our sis "the most thrilling speech I've heard since Winston Churchill." 'Course WW II was history by the time she was born, but you get the point. Fortunately, not all British government figures are taking orders from the Foreign Office's Orwellian "Engaging with the Islamic World Unit":

Writing in the Sun recently, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to 'our police and armed forces in the front line of the war on terror'.

A few savory tidbits from the Telegraph's glorious reportage of Blair's speech yesterday [via TigerHawk]:

Mr Blair's volte face -- just eight years ago he was a multiculturalist champion - was the culmination of a long Labour retreat from a cause it once enthusiastically embraced. In recent weeks, Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly, John Reid and Gordon Brown have all played their part in a concerted revision of the Cabinet's stand which began in earnest after the July 7 bombs in London last year.

Mr Reid, in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday on GMTV, said he was "sick and tired" of the sort of the "mad political correctness" that led to Christmas being devalued. "I think most people just find this completely over the top and I would rather have a bit of what I call PCS -- Plain Common Sense -- than PC -- Political Correctness," the Home Secretary added.

"Plain Common Sense" is music to our ears, of course, and as we've blogged early and often, words matter. Michelle Malkin cites Merriam-Webster's "Word of the Year" winner, the toe-curling "truthiness." The American Dialect Society's definition evokes visions of Dan Rather, Jimmy Carter and pretty much every Utopianist that ever came down the pike:

Truthiness (noun)

1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)

2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

Michelle is soliciting "your favorite word of the year . . . Send along other nominations, and I'll put up a poll later today." Again, words matter. As we blogged last year:

"War on Terror" engages the imagination and rolls off the tongue, but who could ever remember the colorless "Struggle Against Violent Extremism"? [Although its acronym, SAVE, has a certain je ne sais quoi about it] It sounds like something a U.N. committee would come up with after months of study.

Or maybe something a group of elder statesmen like the Iraq Study Group would come up with after months of study? If we can have "wars" on all manner of diseases -- from Aids to cancer -- not to mention wars on drugs and poster children of other human failings, why can't we have a war on the behavior of the good folks who want to bury us? We're sticking with the words of wisdom of Miss Wood, our 10th-grade high school English teacher: "Muddy words reflect muddy thinking."

Update: Lots of purrs from Mini of House of the (Mostly) Black Cats, who "gets a treat for each bloggy that signs up to celebrate" Carnival of the Cats #142, dedicated to the memory of Laurence Simon's beloved Piper.

"The reign of terror, then, is to be transferred to Washington"

From "The Caning of Senator Charles Sumner" at the United State Senate website: "Mocking the South Carolina senator's stance as a man of chivalry, the Massachusetts senator charged him with taking 'a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight -- I mean,' added Sumner, 'the harlot, Slavery.'"  (Caning of Senator Charles Sumner, May, 1856, NY Public Library collection)

"That is a classic Brian Lamb question, and I should have thought to prepare for it," emails the delightful and erudite Senate Historian, Dick Baker, whom we'd caught the other morning on C-Span being stumped by a caller's query re the origin of the expression "lame duck." After a little googling, we came up with a few interesting tidbits and emailed Mr. Baker with our results. Here's what he wrote back:

Many thanks for taking the time to help out with the “lame duck” question . . . I frequently get the question “When was the U.S. Senate first called the `World’s Greatest Deliberative Body’?” The best we can do with that one is to suggest the mid-19th century. After we had moved on to other callers, it occurred to me that the mid-18th century would have been a good guess for the lame duck.  Now, you have confirmed it.  Thank you very much.

For your enjoyment and edification, here's what we found in two separate entries from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Lame duck, originally Stock Exchange slang for "defaulter," is first attested 1761.

Lame-duck was originally (18c.) "any disabled person or thing;" modern sense of "public official serving out term after an election" first recorded 1863 in Amer.Eng., attributed to Vice President Andrew Johnson, in reference to Col. Forney.

Challenged by Mr. Baker's reference to "the world's most deliberative body," we headed out into cyberspace once more for some answers. The best we came up with was the standard issue:

The Senate is regarded as a more deliberative body than the House of Representatives; the Senate is smaller and its members serve longer terms, allowing for a more collegial and less partisan atmosphere that is somewhat more insulated from public opinion than the House.

"As uncivil as Senatorial debate may seem in our day, we've failed to reach the level of the caning of Senator Charles Sumner," we emailed Mr. Baker, adding a bit of polite political rant:

If only we taught our children the all-too-human facts of our own history, they might be more critical of the ahistorical hysteria fed to them daily by an agenda-driven press.

Regarding Senator Sumner, we were referring to a notorious example of deliberative debate described at Mr. Baker's own superb United States Senate website:

On May 22, 1856, the "world's greatest deliberative body" became a combat zone. In one of the most dramatic and deeply ominous moments in the Senate's entire history, a member of the House of Representatives entered the Senate chamber and savagely beat a senator into unconsciousness.

The inspiration for this clash came three days earlier when Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts antislavery Republican, addressed the Senate on the explosive issue of whether Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state.

This from a Boston Atlas [Republican] editorial at the time:

The reign of terror, then, is to be transferred to Washington, and the mouths of the representatives of the North are to be closed by the use of bowie-knives, bludgeons, and revolvers. Very well; the sooner we understand this the better. If violence must come, we shall know how to defend ourselves. We hope, for the credit of the State, that every man in it will feel this outrage upon Mr. Sumner as a personal indignity, no less than an insult to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that there will be such a general and spontaneous expression of opinion, as will fully manifest our deep disinclination to submit to any repetition of the contumely.

Mr. Baker's latest response was a corker:   

We considered organizing a Senate-sponsored conference on “civility” in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Sumner-Brooks affair. The idea elicited only laughter, so we’ll wait for the 200th.

Too bad it was laughed -- nervously? -- off the agenda. A conference on "civility" referencing the Sumner-Brooks affair would be just the thing to lend some much-needed perspective to the overwrought national "debate" in these troubled times. Plus ça change . . .

The last word of the year

"The dictionary will define 'blog' as 'an online journal which produces fame without wealth for pajama-clad scribes, known as bloggers, who write so well they don't need editors and who survive by eating ramen noodles and Tang powder from a spoon,'" writes Scott Ott of ScrappleFace re Merriam-Webster's "Word of the Year":

Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, today announced that 'blog' was the most-searched word on its website in 2004 and will be added to the dictionary in 2005. However, the term 'Instalanche' failed to make the top 10, delivering another crushing blow to blogger Glenn Reynolds.

'Instalanche', which missed a top-10 ranking despite a vigorous lobbying effort, is a brief but powerful spike in blog traffic, generated by a link from InstaPundit.com, which creates in the affected blogger a fleeting sense of euphoria and heightened self-esteem, followed by weeks of doubt and progressive self-loathing."

InstaPundit creator Glenn Reynolds could not be reached for comment. However, unnamed associates said that the Instalanche production business has such a small profit margin that Mr. Reynolds must moonlight as a law professor just to make ends meet.

What makes a great humorist?  Ask Mark Twain -- in this attributed quotation -- re the secret of the satirist's art:

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

That's ScrappleFace. With the news stories of the day as his raw material, he fashions parodic satires of MSMspeak that make us laugh -- sometimes, like today, out loud -- at our own and others' all-too-human folly.

To add the comma or not to add the comma

"I've been haunted most of my life by the 'Oxford comma' (adding a comma before the 'and' in a sequential list)," writes Cory of Fried My Little Brains:

OK, like, so I bought Eats, Shoots & Leaves last night. Now I'm reveling in its and it's as contraction and possessive (but never in the latter instance), explanations all rendered in the loveliest, feistiest, most piquant English, and I've never been happier . . . All through school I was taught to use it, then in the early 1990s, when I got into newspapers, I had to unlearn it, only to be required to add it back almost a decade later when I changed jobs.

We ourselves have assiduously avoided the Oxford comma at least since the seventh or eighth grade, when our teacher inculcated Funk and White's The Elements of Style upon our formative mind.  Its (but never it's) call for simplicity and clarity of expression made a big impression that has stayed with us.  The original 1918 edition by William Strunk Jr. before he teamed up with E.B. White is available online at Bartleby.com:

Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature, it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.

[via DeAnn's blog]

Update.  We are mistaken . . . Just checked the online Elements of Style, and it's pro Oxford comma.  We must have learned it somewhere else. Hmmm.

Update II.  We never worked for a newspaper, but DeAnn comments on Cory's post that AP style says no to that last serial comma:

Don't use a comma before a conjunction in a series: The national flag is red, white and blue. Check the comma section in the "A Guide to Punctuation" in The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual.

I didn't know the word was loaded

Merriam-Webster's Unabridged defines "imminent" as "hanging threateningly over one's head," and President Bush may be feeling as though the word itself is hanging threateningly over his head these days as enemies try to spin his use of it to their advantage.

Safire has the story behind the story of that loaded word in his "On Language" column today, quoting from a white paper issued by the White House shortly after the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

''For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack." The legitimacy of ''preemption'' was often conditioned ''on the existence of an imminent threat -- most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack.'' Because rogue states and terrorists strike without such warning, ''we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries."

. . . Evidently Bush had been briefed on the weight of that word. On Oct. 21 of that year, asked by Ron Fournier of The Associated Press whether North Korea was ''an imminent threat to the U.S.'' in its nuclear buildup, the president replied carefully: ''You know, that's an operative word. . . . I believe we can do it peacefully.''

Okay, so it comes down to a legal issue . . . Hadn't known that before . . . You don't use "imminent" lightly:

A White House spokesman used the word in February 2003 in the context of NATO protecting Turkey from retaliation, but Bush used it in his 2003 State of the Union address in a way that disputed its necessity: ''Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?''

That said (as they say), you can't win:

So . . . did Bush claim an imminent threat? Interrogated in detail on this by Tony Snow of Fox News, Senator Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who said in 2002 that ''I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat,'' replied about the Bush address in 2003: ''If the word imminent threat wasn't used, that was the predicate, that was the feeling that was given to the American people and to Congress."

Pardon my French

What bothers James Lileks about gutter language in the public square seems to be the fact that "there's a small child present":

If naughty words crossed my lips, they would not necessarily require a road map. And, of course, that makes me an utter hypocrite, I suppose. So, you can say it at home, but Bono can't say it on network TV? Yes! You've grasped the nub of the gist, you have.

What bothers some of us, though, isn't the doggy doodoo connotations of gutter language per se so much as the poverty of language resources its excessive use betrays.

[via Lucianne]

Totium orbium lingua

The center of Classical Latin news broadcasting nowadays is Finland

Mel Gibson may have breathed a little life into a dead language when he announced last year that his new film “The Passion" would be made entirely in Latin and Aramaic. But according to an article in London's Economist, there are some out there who have never given up the ghost. We weren't surprised to learn that the Vatican has a five-man team that meets every Thursday to translate modern words into Latin, but this one caught us off guard:

Latin has a surprising number of advocates in the modern world. And these are not merely classicists or arty types entranced by the glories of Virgil, the cockiness of Catullus or the breathtaking fall of the rhythms and words of Horace. They are people who believe Latin has a future, as well as a past.

Small wonder then, that some people still prefer their news in Latin, and that the centre of Latin news broadcasting nowadays should be Finland, a country of translucent birches, lakes and blondes, and with a language the opposite of universal. The Finnish Broadcasting Company (aka Radiophonia Finnica Generalis, or YLE) puts out a five-minute bulletin, "Nuntii Latini," every week and has done so for 14 years. The bulletins are broadcast worldwide, and are also collected and published as books.

[via Arts & Letters Daily]