The Wordy Gurdy Plays On

I have always been fond of words. They were my best friends when I was a latchkey kid with a library next door.

My hearing is acute when one of my "friends" gains currency - particularly in the world of politics, which also interests me.

What brought this to mind was realizing that the phrase "writ large" has been springing to the lips of many commentators with unusual frequency. It's a colorful term only in that it wears the hoary coat of time long gone. Isn't this the vocabulary of the 18th century, at the latest?  What brings it back into modish use? Apparently, someone  resurrected it or simply adopted it from lawyerly language and it caught on.

I first noticed this coattail effect in the 80's. I was working for a weekly newspaper and became aware that no one I quoted or interviewed had conversations anymore. They were all having "dialogues." Nothing wrong with that except it became so universal as to be risible.

Now "risible" is a good word that, in the misty dim past, I  found used frequently in Taylor Caldwell's early works, and rarely anywhere else. But it, too, is making a comeback and I am reluctant to credit her since her books are dusty with time.

Who then?

"Redound" is a perfectly fine word but not one that rushes to everyone's mouth. It's one I have always liked and was pleased to hear Rachel Maddow use it. It is now circulating with a degree of enthusiasm.

Was it Rachel?

Probably the word that seemed to gain its highest degree of popularity among the goppers around the time of George the Better's single term was "demagogue."  When I first noticed it I have to admit I had to look up the definition. Naively, I thought that is what  people do when they don't know the meaning of something. However, I was mistaken.

In an interview just after her husband's defeat, Barbara Bush kept referring to the "bad effects" of all the "demagoguery" being the cause of his loss. She spoke with disarmingly candid certainty.

Amazingly, the interviewer (a newsman whose identity is lost to me) asked Barbara what "demagoguery" meant. I credit her with honesty but I am still blown away by her answer. "Well, I don't know," she admitted.

There is a lesson here but I don't have a word for it.

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A Sunday Missile

Can the American electorate recognize ersatz anything? Or have entities like Monsanto and Fox News and Citizens United   succeeded in supplanting not only Mother Nature, but every other thing we consume,  including information? 

You have to be comatose not to recognize the insincerity of these slugs who want to manage your soul, your reproductive organs, your diet, your vote and all your household goods, and then agitate for the defeat of a man whose main concern is our access to good health.

I just turned on MSNBC's "Up" and am watching a clip of Paul Ryan, the goppers' VP candidate who sounds like a sophomore running for class president. Please deliver us from these opportunists who likely got an  "A"  in high school public speaking and acquired their morals from an unholy and archaic priesthood.

It may be overly-optimistic to think that we have had the good fortune to see Romney and Ryan slip and slide and that voters will recognize their brand could be bad for the country.

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, but I am going to pin my hopes on a measure of perspicacity summoning from and to the general public.

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Little Things Mean a Lot

Has anyone noticed that Romney and Ryan have bloodless lips that seem to signify all the passion of  lemons, the souls of snakes and the hearts of artichokes?

Look closely at those tight, compressed lines across the bottom of both their faces after every lie or exaggeration. The mouths must be telling us something above and  beyond the words that come out of them.

Do you think this an unfair observation? Well, it could be - if it were not part and parcel of a bigger package.

Leslie Savan in The Nation  (http://www.thenation.com/blog/169232/what-mitt-romneys-body-language-trying-tell-us) gave us an interesting portrait of Mitt by using his body language to tell us things he probably would prefer we not  know:

"...[d]uring a photo op in Israel earlier this week, as the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States stood next to the relaxed and voluble Benjamin Netanyahu like an animatronic prop".

"...[c]heck out Mitt’s arms: they’re held stiffly at his sides, hands below the belt; no gestures for him and no self-assertion at all. Maybe the problem was that, even though Romney was trying to talk “tough” about Iran, his body knew that simply parroting whatever Bibi (and Sheldon Adelson) want him to say is anything but tough. So his body tried to shout, “Weak!” Just look at the symbolism of the old chums’ relative body language: Bibi grabs the mic, Bibi grabs Mitt’s hand for the shake; Romney, meanwhile, is all deference and obedient schoolboy, and about as commanding as one." 

A scary assessment of a potential leader of the free world.

And even Dan Ackroyd noticed his "funny walk," suggesting he might be wearing a girdle.

Are we being unfair? I don't think so.


Think of the lives that might have been saved if, before we allowed the Supremes to choose Bush the Lesser, we had noted the swagger, the beady little eyes and the fact that he dropped everything he touched.

Even animals understand body language. We ignore these revelations at our peril.

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"I'm Not a Witch"

I know the literati have long since read it or dismissed it and moved on, but I am just now reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. 

His thesis is a fairly fascinating  reminder that it is a marvel of modern life how extraneous and serendipitous  events separate people (and products, apparently) who are  fortunate because of birth, geography and circumstance from those who are unfortunate for the very same reasons.

Having just begun reading, I don't know if he visits our prehistoric roots to conjecture if success in simple  survival is the result of the occurrence of these same kinds of conditions. Whether or not he does, I've concluded life, even in these munificent times, really is a crap shoot.

I'm not breaking new ground here. I just felt moved to share my reactions to Ann Romney's last night's plea for recognition that she  is one of us. She and Mitt know what it is to worry about prices at the pump, escalating food costs, having enough to make the mortgage payment.

She seems to be channeling Christine O'Donnell:  "I'm not a rich bitch....I'm you." 

Granted, she is very glamorous looking and sounding. I understand she's had medical problems. I am sure Mitt is a wonderful  husband. She's raised five boys, all of whom haven't had much of a challenge beyond reproducing more well-to-do little Romneys with good hair.

The Romney phenomena make me think of Lucky Pierre.

Pierre was up to his ears in naked women. The Romneys are up to their ears in naked money. 

I don't envy anything they have (well, maybe the car elevator), but I do resent the aggressive attempt at mimicry. You are not me, Ann; nor are you anyone I have ever known well. Don't condescend; take a page (albeit a rather pedestrian one) from your husband.

"I yam what I yam....and that's all what I yam."

And likely that's all you will ever be, if the powers that be have any sense of fairness.

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August is the Cruelest Month

It is unbearably hot and humid in Virginia and I have no reliable connection to the Internet. I'm hoping September will be better.

This is especially irritating for a blabbermouth, but it must be equally maddening for those who simply take it all in and refrain from tirades.

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Mitt's Mystery Money Machinations

 A Minor Sunday Morning Pensee

This morning, I listened to Fareed Zakaria (who never sounds hysterical) and Steve Rattner (who doesn't, either). 

For the first time in more than a year I have heard an understandable explanation for the much-vaunted and  convoluted financial gymnastics of the goppers' Presidential candidate - Willard Mitt Romney.

What I have gathered is that our boy, Mitt, is not so much a bad man as he is an enthusiastic and unscrupulous gatherer of wealth and power.

As Rattner said, "As a private equity guy, I am familiar with many of the things that he did,  and I know many people who have done many of the things that he did. I do not know anyone who  did EVERYTHING he did." (Emphasis mine.)

And that seems to be the crux of the argument and the mystery of Mitt Romney:  

He does everything; he says everything; he takes every side of every issue; he attempts to represent himself as "every man" in the currency of democratic values - and tries to look confident while he throws everything at the wall, hoping something will stick.


I remember as a teenager testing the doneness of spaghetti by doing this. It made one hell of a mess.

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Philistines: Spawn of 21st Century Goppers

Maybe I'm not the egalitarian I thought I was.

I've come to recognize one of the biggest drawbacks to democracy is the absolute ability for ignorant asses to spew their hatred and ignorance with equanimity.

And, damn it!.... it has an effect.

Other boobs, finding their own denseness mirrored in the ravings of clods no better educated than themselves, take courage and feel no constraint in broadcasting whatever fool thing occurs to them, with the assurance that some idiot is bound to give it credence.


Back in feudal times, an uneducated peasant would be pulling on his forelock and saying, "yes, sir" and "no, sir. No unlettered oafs would feel free to back talk their "betters" in the rude and stupid fashion that has become manifest in society today.

Reading the comments on Internet blogs, and viewing the handwritten signs carried by the teabaggers, leaves those of us - who truly are not really part of a grammar gestapo, but who have taken some pains to educate ourselves beyond the fourth grade - gagging with disbelief.

This lack of education and respect for culture, wedded to an unholy trinity of avarice, ambition and iniquitous hypocrisy, provides the 21st century a new strain of philistines.


It has become axiomatic for the clear-eyed to observe that the goppers of today are not the GOPers of yesteryear.

Yes, there are some illiterate and venal Dems....but, as my liberal daughter, Paige, says, "Blindly following liberal views doesn't limit people the way blindly following conservative views does."


Goppers, plodding their parochial path, have reached beyond bilious and become a plague on the country.

 “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

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