Andrew Ferguson writes, “Like most clichés it tells us more about the people who used it than about the state of affairs it was supposed to describe.” Do you think that’s true? Aren’t clichés usually well-worded phrases that everyone’s likes to use because they are so useful?
The elephant in the room, part and parcel, clear as mud, lies like a Clinton. Wait, one of those isn’t a cliché. Oh, now I can’t tell which one it is.
Media sales at Amazon.com are way up, and the new Kindle is playing a part. Chairman Jeff Bezos said the demand for Kindle “has outpaced expectations and that the company is scrambling to fill orders,” according to Publishers Weekly (by way of ArtsJournal.com).
Cold today, but merely cold. Nature did not add insult to injury, and for that I’m quiveringly grateful. Thank you, Master! Thank you for torturing me less!
If I were a leftist, my heart would go pitty-pat over this story (by way of the Thinklings). The guy who ran CleanFlix, a now-defunct service that served up sanitized versions of movies for family viewing, turns out to have been a p*rn merchant, and has been arrested for sex with underage girls.
The story doesn’t say whether he made any claim to be a Christian. And I’m not sure what the moral is—never do business with anybody until you’ve had a private investigator follow him around for a month? I remember an anecdote I read years ago, written by a guy who’d worked for a p*rn magazine. He once asked his boss, “What’ll I do with all these letters telling us we’re going to Hell?” And the boss replied, “Keep ‘em. Maybe we can sell them Bibles someday.”
But it’s a black eye for the pro-family movement, fairly or not. At least it’ll be spun that way.
Over at City Journal, Andrew Klavan has posted this tremendous, magisterial essay on the evolution of war films in American culture. You’ll want to take time and read this.
I’m going to stray into politics now, which I try to avoid within these precincts. However, I won’t be hyping any candidate, as you’ll see.
This morning I was listening to Laura Ingraham, as I generally do at work. She was criticizing some things fellow talker Michael Medved had said on one of the TV news channels last night.
“Now he’s saying,” said Laura, “that all the rest of us in talk radio are liberals!”
As proof she played a clip from the interview. In the clip, Medved said, not that the other talk show hosts (who generally oppose the candidacy of Sen. John McCain, whom he supports) were liberals, but that they were “thinking like liberals,” because they were (in his opinion) responding to McCain on an emotional rather than a rational level.
Laura apparently didn’t notice that her own response in fact demonstrated Medved’s point. She was making an emotional response to something she imagined Medved had said, rather than paying attention to his actual words and responding to them in a reasoned manner.
By the way, I’m not a McCain supporter. I admire the heck out of him for his Vietnam War service, and I respect his devotion to his principles. I’m just not sure what all of those principles are.
But conservatives ought to engage in reasoned, civilized discussion. Let’s leave the theatrical outrage over imagined insults to the other side.
Marvel Comics revives Captain America. No, the original man did not come back to life, but another character has taken up his mantle.
. . . killing off Captain America last year seemed to give him new life with readers. The editor was taken aback when newspapers even carried obituaries on the character. “Not since the 1940s have we seen Cap being this popular,” he said.
Why doesn’t Captain America have a good–I mean, good–movie yet? Maybe there will be one in 2009.
Today was actually colder than yesterday, but it felt warmer because we didn’t have that Ginzu wind that seemed to have something personal against us all on Tuesday.
News is that they’re having an unusually severe winter in China, and that all kinds of people are stranded in railroad stations, since this is a heavy travel period in that country (their New Year is next week). Normally, heartless Occidental that I am, I’m only vaguely concerned about what happens over there, be it never so cataclysmic. But as it happens my Youngest Niece is spending two years teaching in China right now, and she’s taking this holiday time for traveling too. I hope the worst that happens is that she’ll have some interesting traveler’s stories to bring back.
I’m reading Stephen Hunter’s Tapestry of Spies (originally published as The Spanish Gambit) right now. What strikes me most about it is the tremendous difference the lack of a strong hero makes. Tapestry of Spies is a fascinating fictional account of a proxy battle between Russian and English spymasters during the Spanish Civil War. There are sympathetic characters (in fact, most of the characters are sympathetic to some degree, which is a very good thing in a novel), but there’s no character you embrace with all your heart, like Bob Lee Swagger and his father Earl in Hunter’s Swagger series. (There is a “Bob the Nailer” in this book, but he’s a sniper on the Fascist side who never actually appears—at least as far as I’ve read to date.)
Here’s a tip for any writer who wants to write a bestselling series. Give us a big, strong, courageous, admirable hero to adore. I’m not saying he has to be perfect. Bob Lee Swagger, for instance, is a recovering alcoholic, and his social skills are lousy. But I still want to be him, and that keeps me coming back to the books.
Almost thirty years ago, an American graduate of Kings College, Cambridge, reinvented the university’s old magazine, Granta. This week, it’s one hundredth issue is in the wild on both sides of the Atlantic.
Whoo-boy. That was like a one-two combination from George Foreman. No, that’s wrong. It was like someone giving you a big warm kiss, then knifing you in the back. With a knife they kept in the deep freeze. I’m talking about the weather, of course. After yesterday’s (relatively) tropical temperatures, we woke this morning to plunging mercury and a carborundum-honed wind. The wind chill temperature tonight is predicted to be about 30 below. And tomorrow will be colder than today.
I tell you this because I know you care. Because I want you marvel at my sheer, primal will to survive. Because I want someone to persuade me to move south!
No, not really. I tried living in Florida. I missed the titanic struggle, the clash of man against nature. Also I missed spring.
Today’s subject: long words. If you read an older book in English, and then read a contemporary book, one of the differences you’ll note is that the older book will have used a lot more big words. Since the time of Hemingway, big words have gone out of fashion in the Anglosphere. There are good reasons for this change, since most every writer has discovered that cutting out the big words and going for simple ones adds considerable punch to prose. Whenever I give advice on writing, one of the first things I suggest is replacing long words (which usually come from Latin by way of French) with short words (which tend to be Anglo-Saxon ones). Write “door” instead of “portal.” Write “cat” instead of “feline.”
This is odd in a way, because Anglo-Saxon was a Germanic language, and German is notorious for its long words. In a bizarre twist, it was the infusion of French/Latin that permitted us to avoid the famous German monstrosities that read like “gerfundenlieberanbrachtsblechtzheitzgrund.” (That’s not a real word, just in case you were wondering.)
I talked about this with a friend in the Viking Age Society a while back. He used to work as a machinist, and at one point his company had to install a piece of equipment made in Germany. The installation manual was in German. My friend isn’t fluent in the language, but he knew a little, so got stuck with the job of figuring out how to put the thing together. He found one item missing, and had to order it. It was a special kind of cotter pin. He told me what the thing was called in German, and it was a ridiculously long name for a very small piece of steel. “But,” he said, “that name was incredibly precise. It described exactly what the pin was for. In English, we just say, ‘cotter pin,’ and that doesn’t really tell us anything.”
It was his opinion that this extreme precision of vocabulary is one of the reasons Germans do so well in the world of engineering. Our English language, compared to German, is sloppy and inefficient.
On top of that, our really technical words are generally borrowings from Latin or Greek. This worked well when it was assumed that all educated English-speakers knew Latin and Greek, but that’s no longer the case. When a German looks at one of his millipede words, he can break it down into its constituents and figure out what it means. When we English-speakers look at our long words, we generally go away as ignorant as when we started.
What’s to be done? Shall we surrender our English-speaking primacy in the world to the greater efficiency of Germans and others?
No, I say. I say we must institute a program of English compounding. From now on, instead of saying, “philanthropic,” we should start saying “humankindlovingandgenerous.” Instead of “polygamous,” we should say, “marryinglotsofpeople.” Instead of “progressive,” we could say, “happytospendotherpeople’smoney.”
I share these ideas at no cost, because I care about making a better world for all of us. Because I’m humankindlovingandgenerous.
I haven’t seen snow like this except on a screen, much less the sleds they are using.
Again Bill meditates on strong truth: “In the Bible hope is strong, it is virile, it is tough. Hope is a warrior. Hope sees the victory, before the battle has even begun. Hope bursts forth, the fruit of suffering that has produced endurance and a character strong enough to hope. . . . Hope charges the bunkers of despair, hope outflanks its lines, hope takes the enemy camp. Hope is the flag raised on the Mount Suribachi of our fears, and hope doesn’t give heed to the bullets.”
Do not be afraid, but rejoice in the hope the Lord has for us. “Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight.”
“If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas,” writes Clive Thompson in Wired. (via Books, Inq.)
I’m not sure Thompson is right, because crime fiction or mystery explores some deep ideas about humanity, community, God, and life. I think science fiction may be the best label for this kind of praise because it can include almost any story with unreal elements, even overriding other genres or labels. When Thompson starts throwing out examples to support his argument, he picks three fantasy series first.