Tag Archives: journalism

Old Words May Help Us Understand a Minnesota Bridge

D’you mind if I share some things I read in the S pages of a massive Webster’s Second International? Thanks. You’re a peach.

Obsolete meanings of common words

Sorry is used as a noun in Scottish and some English dialects to mean “sorrow.” It was also once used as “to grieve.” And sorry grace was once a phrase meaning “bad luck” or “ill fortune.”

Sorrow once had a subtle use of causing actual damage, not just emotional stress.

Sore as an adjective once had a sense of criminal or wrong. As a noun, it once was used to mean disease, affliction, pain, or grief. As a verb, it used to mean “to wound.”

Sound was once used in the sense of understanding or relevance, as in, the speech had no sound for me.

Word combos

Also, on these pages are lists of combinations, like these archaic ones for sore: sore-beset, sore-dreaded, sore-taxed, sore-vexed, and sore-won.

These for sorrow are not marked archaic but have an unfamiliar sound to me: sorrow-blinded, sorrow-bound, sorrow-closed, sorrow-seasoned, sorrow-shot, and sorrow-streaming.

For soul, there’s a long list, including soul-benumbed, soul-blind, soul-boiling, soul-cloying, soul-fatting, soul-gnawing, and soul-thralling.

The Internet doesn’t have natural discoverability like this old dictionary. We could lose a lot of knowledge by limiting our systems to giving us only the answers to the questions we’ve asked, because if we ask what else we might want to know, the Internet just asks us what else we want to know.

Now that I’ve played the philologist for a minute, what else do we have?

More Words: Here are a couple videos on old words that should be brought back.

Journalism: There’s a pedestrian bridge crossing I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport that connects Bloomington to Richfield. Tyler Vigen wanted to know why it was built. Some of the readers of this very blog may be asking the same question, so Vigen did the research and has given us a full report (with excessive in-text notes).

Authors: C.S. Lewis versus T.S. Eliot with sharpened opinions

Naturalism: Does unnatural behavior exist? Is it true that “whatever is possible is by definition also natural”?

Photo: The sign on the old hotel by the tracks, Gulpwater, Wyoming. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

But How Are You Really? Well, Journalism Is Dead

This week, I had one of those frequently repeated conversations about what we mean when we greet others with “Hello” and “How are you?” An earnest person might think it’s dishonest to ask someone how they are doing without expecting an answer and may feel a burden to share transparently when others ask them. You may have heard someone argue that Christians shouldn’t say they are fine when they aren’t fine; they shouldn’t paint on a smile when they’re going through a hard time.

But honesty doesn’t require complete transparency. That would expose us all to the fixers, who don’t know when to listen and when to advise. Greeting one another with a word or phrase is essentially verbal acknowledgement. We see and maybe recognize each other. We ask each other how’s the day or the doing or life at large as a way of well wishing. If we’re close to each other, we’ll want more than that, but even then, it may not be the time for it.

We can thank Thomas Edison for popularizing the word hello as a good way to answer the phone. Alexander Graham Bell (why do we give his full name so often? why not Alex Bell or Alexander G. Bell?) wanted us to us say ahoy, as if we were called out to someone in the distance. Prior to the phone, hello was a common word of surprise, which I suppose is the reason Bertie Wooster and co. say, “What ho!” regularly. The Online Etymology Dictionary says there are records from 1849 that show hello, the house as “the usual greeting upon approaching a habitation” in the American west.

Yes, yes, I suppose we should get on to other things, shouldn’t we?

Vocabulary: Here’s a good word for everyday use.

via Cian McCarthy/Twitter

Journalism: News outlets aren’t dead, but their owners may be trying to kill them. Ted Gioia has a compelling piece on news sites that wanted our clicks so bad they killed themselves, and now big news outlets appear to want to die the same way. “The company tried to maximize clicks with shallow gimmicks, when it should have been worrying about the articles themselves.”

Conservatism: A right-wing movement wants a big reset. John Ehrett says critics label it different things, but vitalism is a good name for it. “In place of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘three-legged stool’—free-market economics, military interventionism, and religious conservatism—the new vitalists would burn the place down altogether, and host a festival around the pyre.”

Bruce Springsteen: “He paints his masterpiece of America as a brand and what it does to people. To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that’s been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.” That storytelling was formed by a love of Flannery O’Connor.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Don’t Read Newspapers

In 1807, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Norvell:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

Did Jefferson go on to summarize his thoughts by saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed”? The Quote Investigator explains.