Language opens a window on the mind of the speaker.
So when President George W. Bush warned conferees of both parties yesterday that if they didn’t approve his proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street “this sucker could go down” he just about summed up the class, intelligence and leadership he has brought to the White [...]
Those of you who ordered Far From Algiers from Kent State University Press in advance of last Friday’s publication date have received notice that it’s “on the truck.” Thank you for this vote of confidence. I hope you will be rewarded. If you contact me, I will be happy to inscribe a bookplate for you.
I [...]
The business of The New York Times, like that of any media company, is language, and as newspapers go The Times is the most literate. That is why I was disquieted to read this passage in a Times editorial yesterday:
“Mr. Bush’s father deftly managed the Soviet Union’s dissolution. President Bill Clinton did a poorer job [...]
(Transcript of Hot Copy No. 44, a podcast for The Student Operated Press).
There is nothing like reading something you have written aloud for finding and correcting its infelicities. An article, maybe just a headline, may be perfectly grammatical and yet awkward. If it sounds smooth it will read well. But what is just as [...]
It was our own moral failure and not any accident of chance, that while preserving the appearance of the Republic we lost its reality.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
FactCheck.org ferrets out and corrects the lies, distortions, half-truths, spin, exaggeration, misinterpretation and [...]
In a certain plot contrivance in television serials and films the conscientious subaltern makes a fool of his pretentious jerk of a supervisor. The gimmick is overused to a fare-thee-well in such productions as the three CSI shows. What intrigues me about it is that, as so often in television scripting, it seems to appeal [...]
Read More...The gray region between sexism and misogyny is a gloaming filled with turned around street signs and delusions. I ought to know because I’ve been wallowing in it. I wrote in this space that Senator Hillary Clinton was marching like the Energizer Bunny off a cliff. I faulted her for playing the race card. I [...]
Read More...Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it [...]
Read More...Is that your start scuffed in your coat? I asked my wife the other day. I meant, of course, to ask if that was her scarf stuffed in her coat. It was a humble example of a spoonerism. I love spoonerisms. I think if we declared one day a week Spoonerism Day and observed [...]
Read More...Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.
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