A Chance to Think

Let's Wordjam again like we did last spring

2009-07-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's easy this time.
Women is plural. Woman is singular. The part that's spelled differently is the second syllable while the part that's pronounced differently is the first syllable. It's OK; it doesn't make sense. It's something we just commit to memory.
Man is singular. Men is plural.
Woman means female person. It used to be Wifman. I am Wifman.
Man means person.
The old Proto-Germanic word for male is Wer. Werman sounds a lot like Wifman. It might have sounded too close and annoyed people who were trying to talk while washing clothes in a stream or steering a ship or sawing wood, so they started to say other things to be clearer.
Man therefore means person, humanity, and adult male human being. It seems unfair, but would you prefer to go around saying, "Not a werman, a wifman. He was talking to a strange wifman. I said...."?
Lord is short for Laefgeard. It means bread guardian. Lady means Laefdaeg. That is, bread kneader. Long ago, it wasn't the poor who made and guarded food and the rich who flew to the islands to watch the sunrise. It was the rich who made and guarded lots of food and the poor who rafted to the islands to search for food there.
Soon, Lord and Lady meant landowner. Owning food wasn't enough anymore. Most of the poor had that.
Master and Mistress mean major person and major female person. They also meant owner, boss. Mistress became Mrs. and Miss, which were interchangeable in the 18th Century. Master became Mr. Originally, when a man referred to the woman he admired as his mistress, he meant he would never touch her. She was his faroff ideal. He did things to impress her. And she was married -- he was a single man. Bachelorhood was a low rank of knighthood. A bachelor admired a mistress, the owner of his heart, and proved himself. When he graduated he married someone else. He was expected to be chaste during all that bachelor adventuring. Over the years and centuries the meaning nearly reversed.
Hussy is short for Huswif -- housewife. Husband comes from Husbond -- owner of the house. A man had to have a stable living situation to get married. And that might very well be more literal than anyone liked, if the stable was the only solid roof on the croft.
Knave just means boy. Girl means growing, and used to mean anyone, male or female, between around eight and fifteen. Maid was once unisex too -- long, long ago. It meant someone old enough to marry but usually not yet married. It comes from the word for marriage, the root of match, mate, meet, and many more words that sound like them. Maiden meant a small girl, and somewhere along the way the two words switched. Maiden became the term for a virgin, a woman never married, and maid meant a little girl. Since children served in homes before looking for spouses (the people who never served also didn't choose their own spouses), maid came to mean a servant woman, knave a servant man. Page means child and now means a messenger or office assistant, for the same reason.
What has happened to way back when? What has happened to then? What has happened, if I may clarify, to than?
Then is not the same word as than. In some places they aren't even pronounced the same way. Than rhymes with man. Then rhymes with ten, which means that if you are west of the Great Divide or south of the Mason-Dixon Line it also rhymes with thin and tin -- it just does. We like it that way.
If you had been here then you would know there is nothing more annoying than people from back east telling you to say then their way.
Suddenly the Internet has filled up with the use of than by itself. "I walked into a party and saw nothing than gossip." "He is nothing than a friend." "I don't know what to say than it's over between he and I". Stop saying that. Please.
It should be, "nothing other than gossip", or, "nothing but gossip" or, "nothing more than gossip". "He is nothing more than a friend." "He is nothing but a friend." "He is but a friend." "I don't know what to say other than that it's over between him and me."
I guess that's all, man. I have nothing more to add to that tonight.

Matriarchy, patriarchy, patronization, matronization and the matrix

2009-03-12T14:52:00.000-07:00

I hear a lot of complaints about patriarchy. Since I willingly belong to an arguably patriarchal organization of some repute, I respond with a few years' thinking.
Patriarchy is leadership by fathers. Matriarchy is leadership by mothers. We must make some important distinctions. Matriarchy isn't feminism, egalitarianism, equality, equity or misandry, or even sisterhood.
Patriarchy isn't masculism, complementarianism, elitism, inequality, inequity, iniquity, misogyny or even brotherhood.
I knew you were going to say I was making it too complicated, but the reason one must at times make things complicated is to find all the knots at once so as to undo them and straighten the whole thread together, to make things plainer.
Feminism is the belief that women are good and smart and should have rights under law. Masculism is the belief that men are good and smart and should have rights under law. The two are not contradictory, only complementary, and in reasonable quantities both make a lot of sense. In unreasonable quantities both can be absolute insanity and can lead to cruelty and loss for the most helpless people.
Egalitarianism is the rule of leveling everyone, giving boys and girls the same opportunities, letting the children of the poor study with the children of the rich, taxing the wealthy to support the needy, and trying to make people's lives pretty much as equal as possible. Complementarianism is the belief that equity can be achieved by treating different things differently, as author Tom Robbins put it. A complementarian would give boys and girls different classrooms designed for their different traits to blossom, feeling that a mixed-sex schoolroom would favor one or the other depending on its design. Complementarians see males and females as having necessarily different lives because they are different, but would want to find ways to give them equal fulfillment and respect, through different, complementary, jobs and rewards. Elitism is the belief that some people are inherently more capable of good and smart actions and should be given the best of everything accordingly, to ensure that decisions are in the hands of the smartest, most virtuous persons at all times, and to prevent a seizure of power by others. These three value systems are in conflict with one another necessarily. Our American foundation of egalitarianism decides this conflict for us in most areas. However, elitism turns up here and there even now.
Equality means having equal value, but it is used as a substitute-word for equity. Equity is equal treatment and reward for work etc. The demand for equality is actually a demand for equity. Inequality is the lack of equality and inequity is the lack of equity. Iniquity is unconnected. It is a word for wrongdoing. Iniquity can be equitable or inequitable. It depends on the iniquity.
Misogyny is the opposite of philogyny. Misogyny is hatred of females. Philogyny is love of females. Misandry is hatred of males. Philandry is love of males. Philanthropy is love of people. Misanthropy is hatred of people. Arthropods are crawling little cold-blooded critters. They have nothing to do with this. Anthropology is the study of how people live everywhere else, and the habit of going to live among different people and ask them about their private business all the time and then leave. It's got nothing to do with apologetics, which in turn have nothing to do with being apologetic. We're talking about anthropology, matriarchy and patriarchy today. At least I am. Join me awhile.
A myth among the modern Western feminist activist or student is that the earliest societies were thousands-of-years-old idealistic, peaceable, prosperous, nature-nurturing identical matriarchies, crushed by advancing male armies imposing cruel, militarily-established patriarchies that stand to this day keeping women from being happy or free anywhere, but that women slowly become conscious and open their eyes and overthrow the patriarchalist oppressors and rebuild those perfect matriarchal communities and live happily ever after. Usually all a girl needs to get her started believing this silliness is a grainy shot of a goddess figurine from Sumer, and she's scowling at everything and wearing iron-on patches of red crossed fists all the rest of the way through college. Unless she takes anthropology.
Yes, primitive matriarchy exists. No, it isn't and never has been prevalent on any continent at any time at all. And, no, it has nothing to do with egalitarianism or equity or peaceful cooperation or nature-loving religions.
Some societies begin their lives in nooks of dense, close woodlands where the main nutritious foods available are nuts, berries, wild carrot-like roots, edible flowers, fungi, creek and riverbank fish and shellfish, eggs, snared critters such as rabbits and songbirds, and grubs of all kinds. What these foods have in common is that, A, they require good senses to tell the edible from the inedible or the snared from the loose, B, they require good place-memory and incident-memory to remind the gatherers not to return to a bush that poisoned someone e.g., C, they require a light footfall or light weight on a branch to get to them, and D, they require nimble hand-eye coordination to collect safely or to make snares by hand. Women have more of all those qualities.
As well as a stable woman-friendly economy, some also have good shelter from hostile tribes and don't get attacked often.
With no need for soldiers and plenty of need for gatherers, men in those societies need women, to survive, every day. Women don't need men more than a few times in their lives, to get pregnant. Therefore a man is willing to do whatever he has to to get a wife. Men braid flowers into their hair, promise obedience, dance and sing for attention, cry if women aren't interested in them, and wander off alone in hopelessness if no women will take care of them. Women relax in the sun and drink while contemplating the decisions of the tribe's future.
One day they are attacked. The trees crash and birds' nests fall. Berries and little food plants are trampled. The new growth in the next year doesn't feed the survivors enough. The birds stay away a few years. The enemy drags women away as slaves, men as conscripted soldiers, also slaves, and kills the children. The few who remain to rebuild the tribe's life know they need three new things: warriors, who are mostly going to have to be men, hunters, also mostly men, and bodyguards for the kids, same deal. Every home now needs a man. A woman will have to get pregnant at least twice as often to replace the dead and abducted, and she will have to watch the children carefully for their safety until they can fight. It's a little bit equitable for a few centuries. The attack didn't impose patriarchy, exactly. The matriarchy didn't last eons either. The attackers might have been anyone, from any of the majority of ancient primitive cultures, which were complementarian or patriarchal from the start due to different economies in their homes. Anyway, the matriarchy wasn't utopia. It was in many ways cruel, authoritarian and even often somewhat elitist. In any case, it started dying out when the need to be able to withstand competition occurred to them.
The need for hunters meant the power rested with the best hunter. The need for soldiers meant the supervisor and trainer of the best soldiers had power, too, and was logically the same man. That man, the war chief, was in a place to write his own ticket. He demanded several wives. Why wouldn't he? That made the leftover men dispensable. He disposed of them by sending them out to war. Women agreed to marry the war chief because to do so meant long lives for themselves and their children. Agriculture and pastoral living developed gradually from seed-saving of the best and rarest foods, herd-following and a semi-nomadic way of returning to land after being gone long enough to let everything regrow. With early agriculture and herd-keeping, wealth piled up for some families. A woman did her best to bear children for the best defender and builder of wealth she could find. To do so would give her and her sons and daughters a long, dignified, comfortable existence, while the women who married the cute boys who had nothing often died young and alone, their babies already dead before them. It made more sense to women to leave their families and join a wealthier family when they were ready to be mothers, and that was a year to seven years after menarche. Longer waits for motherhood were too risky. Earlier marriages could shorten the mother's life and thereby reduce her offspring. A woman was normally around 17 at the time she discovered she was first pregnant. That became the definition of womanhood: married motherhood. But a man had to prove himself qualified to marry before he could even be considered as a groom. Achievement became the definition of manhood, at around 19.
Women took their husbands' estate names to lay claim to their husbands' estates in case they were widowed. Parents sometimes resented rearing girls only to lose them to another family when they married. They demanded money in payment for their daughters. The concept of women as men's property came from parents' wanting to be compensated for giving their children up in marriage. It started seeming right to some parents that boys would get more of everything and girls would do more of everything; the boys would stay and fight for their parents all their lives, while the girls ran off with men who could never repay the parents enough to make it profitable to bring them up. Parents now and then even abandoned girls at birth. Women began to be sad at having girls, felt sorry for them and killed them in pity. Some women decried these cruelties to girls. They asked why it should be. But it came out of economic factors in combination with selfishness and materialism on the adults' parts. Greed and intolerance of needy persons cause atrocities.
Sometimes, matriarchy returned. Enemies wiped out almost all the fighting-age men and boys. Some women went to the enemy as slaves to survive. Others, especially those of warrior upbringing, stayed and fought using their brothers' weapons. These women war chiefs enabled their peoples to live through devastating losses and rebound. They earned respect for themselves, their people, their families, and women in general. When generations of surviving boys grew up in these rebound-defensive matriarchies, they were fine with being ruled by women. But soon enough most war chiefs were again males, and the legacy of the women heroes had to be instilled in each child or be lost.
In the industrial stages, upper-class people developed the assumption that they ought to be able to create the perfect life and solve all problems. Utopianism took root. Little utopian communes formed around the larger society. In a short while all dissolved, not because some were matriarchal, but because they were utopian communes. Something about needing people too much and knowing too little about people meant it all fell apart quickly. Sometimes a charismatic visionary figure could unite the commune and keep it going. The result was often a long way from the original vision. And then the visionary died of old age and there was nothing to keep the normal unfolding of utopianism from collapsing the whole community.
And sometimes at the very end of a society's existence, when its members become too emotionally shattered and mentally scattered to think about reality, and begin making idols of old ways and faroff countries and indulging themselves more and enjoying it less if at all, there is a kind of hidden decadent matriarchy. In decadent matriarchies women vie with men for the excess of the abundant world they live in, insisting on the chivalric benefits of the formerly-kept-down along with the full opportunuities of equity, and refuse to take responsibility for ordinary and obvious facts of cause-and-effect. Most wealth is in female hands. Men compete for female approval and women don't care what males say about them in the least. Women in official positions of power use their authority how they choose, the public being appalled if their husbands dare to suggest a modification, but men in power still take their wives' ideas into consideration when they decide anything. That kind of matriarchy is probably a consequence of the older generations' excesses of patriarchy. There is still misogyny in this system, but it is covert or communicated with an attitude of rebellion rather than of masculine authority.
Pagan Rome seems to have gone out somewhat like that. It's even more unsustainable than other forms of matriarchy.
I believe the USA hasn't been a real patriarchy since 1923, when decisions began to affect America that were made by men elected to national office by women. We have been a combination of uncomfortably cobbled-together patriarchy, decadent matriarchy, chivalric post-matriarchy, egalitarianism and complementarianism, made more bewildering by the number of pseudofeminists who are in fact elitists trying to frame their agendas as philogynistic in purely strategic ways, who don't actually care about women at all.

Pour these wordjams over your consciousness and see whether anything is altered.

2008-11-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

It's about time for another wordjam.
You may or may not go to church. If you are Catholic, the correct rendering of that sentence is, "You must go to Mass." If not, the correct recasting is, "You should enroll in RCIA ASAP."
But we're going to be easy on you and just wordjam for now. You are in your church. There may be an altar. If someone has Dissociative Identity Disorder, there may also be some alters, and if someone has bought clothes that didn't fit, there may be alterations as well. But there is probably an altar.
Altar comes from the Latin altare, meaning a place for burning sacrificial offerings. Alter comes from Latin as well, from alter, meaning "other".
It's hard to learn words by sight without poring over them, but pouring over them won't help, because they'll just get soggy from whatever you're pouring. Pore is a noun and verb. Pore (n.) means a tiny opening or orifice, and one obvious example is where you sweat. That makes a nice memory trick: To pore over something is to look steadily at it or read it carefully. You could sweat over your studies if you really pore over them.
To pour something is to cause it to flow down, as the sky pours rain, but don't get confused by the idea of sweat pouring out of your brow during Dead Week. Imagine the U in pour as the raincatcher at the end of the roof drain line. It spills over the top and pours rain to the ground.
If this is taxing your consciousness, don't go unconscious, but don't be excessively conscientious about it either; it's a matter of grammar, not of conscience.
Conscious, conscientious and conscience are pronounced similarly and spelled similarly and come from the same place. It's tricky, but worthwhile, to remember the difference.
Conscious means aware, having sensory impressions, thinking, noticing and perceiving things. The opposite is unconscious. Consciousness is the opposite of unconsciousness.
Conscience is the moral sensibility, the sense of right and wrong, that which hurts after one does wrong; it is what psychopaths lack and the rest of us struggle with all day and night.
Conscientiousness is the quality of paying a great attention to detail, to every issue, and worrying endlessly about what is right. Someone with too little conscientiousness is a burden on others, annoying, careless, and mean, while someone with too much conscientiousness is slow to get things done, obsessive, fretful, as likely as not to annoy people with unnecessary apologies and efforts to smooth what isn't ruffled -- too much worry. The key is to develop the right amount of conscientiousness.
Some draftees are conscientious objectors, whose consciences will not allow them to kill. A draftee who tries to get out of combat as a conscious objector will make little headway.
Whether or not this serves as a wether for you, it won't help you predict the weather.
Whether is from Old English hwether and means either, in either case, and is used to introduce a clause about unknown facts: "She is a good singer, whether because she practices or because she inherited it." "Whether it rains or not I'm going now." "Go find out whether the show is on." "I wasn't sure whether he was here." "I don't care whether he's here or not, I'm going."
Weather is from the Old English weder and means the meteorological conditions anywhere or everywhere, to wait out a rough period, to wear down as by wind, rain, sun and sleet, and a kind of slope.
Wether is from weder, also Old English, and means what it meant many a century ago: a gelded male sheep. Flocks of sheep are often guided by bellwethers, wethers with bells on their collars.

Oh, the Irony of It All.

2008-08-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Sarcasm is America's first language.
Sitcom writers have studied sarcasm and irony so closely that if you don't understand every detail of the life experiences of fictional characters, you can't keep track of what the live studio audience is laughing about.
Phoebe says, "Don't get all testosteroney", and Chandler looks perplexed and a little didactic as he often does, and says, "The real San Francisco treat, by the way." What does that mean? It's not just a play on words. To get it requires sharing the writers' ideas of the intended main viewership's attitudes toward everything they are expected to associate with testosterone, San Francisco, 1970's TV commercials for convenience foods, convenience foods themselves, spacey semi-alternative people such as we are to think Phoebe represents, the attempt to invent words, and fairly straight but perfectly open-minded people such as Chandler is supposed to represent, and possibly other culture mileposts. And most viewers do. But it depends on sarcasm. Chandler is saying, "It would be ridiculous to use the word testosteroney, it would be ridiculous to be very serious and professorial about TV commercials or convenience foods, especially from our childhoods, and it would be ridiculous to try to understand Phoebe."
All sarcasm and irony can express are infinite grades of , "it would be ridiculous...." In the wash of absurdity we choke under daily, that is an indispensable statement.
But it states the problem. We know there is a problem with absurdity. We seek solutions, as people with a problem always do.
Sarcasm can never offer a solution.
So don't abandon irony.
But never depend on it. Every time someone says, "It would be ridiculous," ask what would be true. Help the sarcasts (real word) finish their sentences.
Until next time, think clearly.

Why you need a foreign language or twelve

2008-05-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

Is it going to be English? Not if the English-speaking countries don't start remembering what words mean long enough to communicate. Will it be Spanish? Maybe. Arabic? Could be. Mandarin Chinese? Perhaps, but Westerners would have a hard time learning it. Or will some dark horse run out and take the blue ribbon? Everyone wants to know what the last language alive will be.
But why should we let any of them die? Four hundred languages lived side-by-side in the Americas five hundred years ago. A thousand years ago, Europe and Western Asia were equally polyglot. Africa, too, has many tongues, each unique, irreplaceable. Eastern Asia and the Pacific have their hundreds and the Southern Sea has its own indigenous languages as well. Listen to one next time you watch a travel show. Listen beyond the voice-over, to the beat, the thrums and trills of another way of making sense, and tell me if you're hooked. I dance to language. I slip it through my fingers like a harp string when I go to sleep and feel it vibrate against my hand like a drum skin when I wake. Never throw away a language. If you don't have room for the whole thing, cut a piece and stitch it into a quilt with your old one; use it as a patch. Take at least a hundred words. Take a way of ordering words, it doesn't take up any room. Learn the African language Shona or Xosa, Luganda or that big crazy-quilt, Swahili. Learn the European tongues: Magyar, Euskari, Italian, Finnish, Polish, Irish, Welsh, Catalan. Pick up something from Asia: Why not Vietnamese or Thai, Hmong or Tibetan or any bit of the patchwork that is India. How about some Hindi? Keep a bit of real early America alive in your head -- study Hopi, Apache, Inuit, Cherokee, which has an alphabet of its own, or Creek. Maybe you'll fall in love with something else: Maori or Tagalog, Incan or Samoan or Hawaiian....There are three thousand languages officially living, but they die for lack of a home.
Learning new ways of doing things and remembering words are two of the ways neuroscientists say you can prevent Alzheimer's before it starts, and slow it or even reverse it once it sets in. Learning a language fills both those needs.
Additionally, a language is a way of perceiving the world. In French, there are two ways of saying, "I love you." One means something like "I like you." The other means "I adore you." Neither would mean the same thing with the formal/plural "you".
If you want to say you like someone and want it to be clear you aren't in love, you say, "I like you plenty." Spanish is similar. The meaning of liking and loving people thus has specific degrees and kinds, each with a name. In Spanish, animals' legs aren't legs. The parts of animals have animal words to describe them, unlike human appendages. In English, we accept animals as part of the family, with the same names and the same limbs; they are almost our relatives. But in Spanish, animals are little like us. One doesn't even use the same hand position to indicate the height of a human, of an animal and of an inanimate object. The language reflects, affects and maintains the unique cultural attitude to other creatures.
In Hmong, there are no plurals nor verb tenses. Context tells the hearer whether the speaker sees a house now, saw one at another time, expects to see one under other conditions, sees the house, rather than a house, or a few houses. In that language, to leave the context out is to leave the hearer out of the picture. When a language dies, a way of thinking dies, and with it, a whole world.
Pick one up today. Keep it alive. It just might do the same for your brain -- and your heart.

Wordjam II

2008-04-01T02:48:00.001-07:00

I've heard it one time too many and can't listen another time without saying something.
Please don't confuse "flaunt" with "flout". To flaunt something is to show it off. If you flaunt my advice you are proud of it. If you flout it, I can't do anything for you.
It's easy. "Flaunt" puts a thing "on" and wears it proudly. "Flout" throws it "out" in disdain, and ignores it.
I know languages change and grow. But they also change and die. If English dies, we have no replacement. Most Americans don't speak Spanish today. Business Spanish doesn't count. It can't translate Dante. It can only do business. Arabic is the tongue of a very different way of thinking. To learn it would challenge almost all of us. Mandarin, even more so. I would love to switch America to a Celtic language, but since it's this hard just to hold onto a scrap of memory of what English sounded like when words all meant different things, I have little hope of getting gum-snapping strangers across counters to want to learn the declensions of Gaelic nouns and their exceptions.
So we must cling to this life raft we have, battered as it may be, this raft of words tied together by straggling strands of grammar in this storm.
Strand One: Parts of speech are different. The noun (name) is a person, place or, broadly defined, thing. I will tell you all the words I know. Here the nouns are bold.
The verb (word) tells of a deed or action. Don't go out in the street where the cars speed and you can't see where they come from.
The adjective (attributive) describes. Long hours and monotonous work are terrible for one's mental state.
The adverb (added word) describes a verb or adjective. it's a kind of second-generation adjective. It doesn't have to end in -ly and not every word ending in -ly is one. Finally, we meet again.
The article (thing) is what tells people which one you mean. That man said to the cashier that he wanted a bag for these socks.
The particle (little bit) fills in where words no longer change forms. the verb to do has become an interrogative particle and an auxiliary (helping) negative particle. Do you know what an interrogative particle is? It's just a little word that helps make a question. Does that help? Don't hesitate to say something if you still don't understand. Do is also an emphatic particle. You may not think you know what emphatic means, but I think you do.
Will, which really means "want", has become our future particle. Would is the past tense of will. Verbs have tenses. That means we hold them in different positions, toward the past, present, future and beyond. Nouns go in cases. Shall is the real future particle but we hardly ever use it anymore because it preserved a distinction between what we intended and what we just expected, and that was depressing. Should is the past tense of shall. Pull it back into the present and it becomes shall again.
Shall we discuss grammar further someday?
I think I would like that.

Why legalizing drugs wouldn't increase drug abuse

2007-09-24T17:50:00.000-07:00

In Amsterdam, according to Reason Magazine, psychedelic mushrooms sell in stores over the counter. Only one-twelfth of the city's people surveyed have even tried them and one in a few hundred has shroomed in a month, the article says.
In parts of the USA, police and guards routinely kill civilians in drug raids, sometimes based on wrong addresses or bum steers. One recent victim was a 92-year-old woman.
Drug abuse kills US citizens often, and usually early in life.
Long ago, we lost the war on drugs; the drugs were making more sense than the war was.
Drug abuse is a plummet into the pits of despair. It isn't funny. It isn't glamorous. It isn't a game. It kills children. I don't take it lightly at all and neither should you. So, what causes it? And what can stop it?
People are living things, and when living things need something, they go out to find it. Warning young people that getting high will endanger them is like warning starving cats that the steaks they have found are two days past date and not cool enough. Talk away, but stand back and be ready for a disappointment.
When heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, mushrooms, hashish, marijuana and alcohol were legal, over the counter, at any store that felt like stocking the items, for anyone with the small bit of money to buy them, abuse was rare, though use was common. Most people in 1900 had too much to look forward to to mess up their lives with dangerous chemicals.
By 1932 many of these substances were illegal. Abuse was common. Crime over drugs had skyrocketed.
Why? Americans had seen the countryside spill into the cities in search of work, families scatter, jobs turn more mechanical and less human, all for money -- money that one day had vanished. There was no going back, and little faith in tomorrow.
Meanwhile, drugs were hard to hide, in their sweet thinners. They had to lose weight to fit in the shoe and in the floorboards. The condensed forms were less palatable and much less social but far easier to sell. And they were far easier to become addicted to and to die on.
It started to take a certain type to be a successful drug salesperson. Your mother's friend down the street wasn't selling Mrs. Winslow's Syrup anymore, but you noticed cold-eyed men in alleyways whispering their pricess to passersby. These men didn't ask how your mother was. They just told you to get moving and keep your mouth shut.
Prices rose fast. Stealing financed drugs. Murder covered the anonymity of the market. Despair drove people to try "harder" (more concentrated) substances in search of hope. Drugs made their own pressures and fears and users fell faster into deeper horrors as they struggled to feel like going on. Eventually we had the world we live in today. It's not over yet. Prohibition is still seeing what will happen if it tries a little harder.
The prohibition forces are now pushing to ban tobacco. What will happen when they succeed?
I would guess that tobacco will become dirtier. Filters will be a forgotten old quirk. Theft and murder will increase somewhat. Underground smokehouses will open everywhere. These will be enclosed and suffocation will become common. Innocent people will die at police hands during mistaken arrests.
The answer to tobacco deaths is probably not prohibition. Perhaps the passing of time will wear tobacco out of existence. Generations that grew up smoking grow too old to enjoy taking risks. New generations don't want to smoke, aside from the odd fad, and those fade.
The answer to alcohol deaths is probably not prohibition, either. It is likely to be a more mature approach. Cultures where parents give small children tastes of liquor, where learning to drink slowly is part of learning table etiquette, have few drunk drivers and few deaths from cirrhosis of the liver or alcohol poisoning. Alcohol is the food that's a drug, the drug that's a food. It takes an adult to handle it alone, but kids can learn to be adults about alcohol if adults can teach them. Relaxing the liquor laws might result in fewer "binge" drinking youths; by the time men and women are alone all weekend, they will already see beer and wine and margaritas as something to accompany meals.
The answer to drug deaths is probably also something saner than prohibition. Perhaps the law could distinguish highly addictive, easily lethal drugs from less risky ones and regulate them more moderately, according to their usual dangers. There could be age limits, dilution laws for the strongest ones, and restrictions on the transfer of large quantities. Parents who get high and leave five big lines of cocaine on the table where the toddler can get to it could be punished for child endangerment, which is their actual crime. Drug education could be taken more seriously if it were more truthful.
What if we say "No" to drug prohibition and "No" to drug abuse too?

What is the World's Smallest Political Quiz?

2007-09-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

(Copied from the Advocates for Self-Government)
The World's Most
Popular Political Quiz
How the World's Smallest Political Quiz redefined politics, took over the Internet, impressed the experts, and made politics fun for more than 9 million people
After taking the World's Smallest Political Quiz, the famous online test that instantly pinpoints your political ideology, no two people have exactly the same reaction.Consider Courtney, a self-described "young Republican." She took the Quiz and was surprised by the result. "I [scored] libertarian centrist," she said. "I really think I lean to the right, but apparently some aspect of my social liberalism has centered me. Interesting."For blogger Jessy, the Quiz confirmed what she already knew. The avowed liberal landed smack-dab in the liberal quadrant and said, "I could not agree more."Then there's Krzysztof -- nicknamed "Critto" -- from Poland. For him, the Quiz was exciting. "I am a libertarian, after taking the Quiz!" he said enthusiastically. "I love the World's Smallest Political Quiz, for it is cute, small, and very useful."Cute? Well, OK; let's not argue with a guy named Critto. Small? You bet. It takes less than two minutes to zip through. Useful? Absolutely, if the surge of people taking the Quiz is any proof.Every day, the Quiz is taken more than 5,000 times at the Web site of the Advocates for Self-Government (www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html). That's over 200 times an hour, 24 hours a day. In fact, as of March 2007, the Quiz has been taken more than 9 million times. Why the enormous popularity -- especially when so many other political quizzes clutter up the Internet?Sharon Harris, president of the Advocates, has a theory. "The Quiz offers a more diverse way of looking at politics," she said. "It gives people a fast, accurate way of determining who agrees with them most."That "more diverse" insight is the key. Before the Quiz came along, politics was a two-way street. You were either liberal or conservative, and that was that.Enter David Nolan, an MIT political-science graduate. In 1969, Nolan realized that traditional political definitions didn't make sense. He observed that liberals usually supported personal liberty (they defended free speech), but opposed economic liberty (they liked high taxes and strict regulation of business). Conservatives were the opposite. They supported economic liberty (low taxes and minimal regulations), but opposed personal liberty (they applauded laws against pornography).So far, so good. But what about people who supported both personal and economic liberty? They didn't fit. Nether did people who opposed both personal and economic liberty.Nolan finally resolved the paradox. "I began to doodle around with the idea of trying to reduce the political universe to a graphical depiction," he told The Liberator magazine in 1996. "I thought, 'Maybe we can delineate this on some kind of map, using a two-axis graph.' "That was the breakthrough. Instead of looking at politics as a two-way line, Nolan designed a political chart that went in four directions -- high or low on economic issues, and high or low on personal issues.Conservatives and liberals fit in this new political spectrum. So did libertarians and statists, who Nolan added to the mix. Libertarians scored high/high on liberty issues; statists scored low/low. Later, centrists were added in the middle -- and the Nolan Chart, a new way of looking at politics, was born.In 1985, Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, added 10 questions to the chart. He squeezed it all onto a business card-size handout, dubbed it the World's Smallest Political Quiz, and took it to a local print shop.The rest is history. Over the years, the nonpartisan Advocates distributed 7 million printed copies of the Quiz to help spread the word about libertarianism. In 1995, the Quiz made the jump to cyberspace where it immediately became the Internet's first and most popular political quiz, with 13,400 Web sites linked to it today.But is it accurate? After all, the Advocates is a libertarian organization. Did they rig the Quiz so everyone would score libertarian?No, says an expert. Cynthia Carter, professor of History and Political Science at Florida Community College at Jacksonville, said, "Although this quiz is provided by a Libertarian organization, it does not lead you to answer in any particular way." That may be why instructors around the USA use the Quiz in their classrooms. If you peeked into classrooms at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Carnegie Mellon University, or Texas A&M University (to name just a few) over the past few years, you'd find find students answering the Quiz's questions.Even cynical reporters -- always eager to expose a phony -- have been impressed by the Quiz's insight and honesty. For example, the Washington Post reported, "The Quiz has gained respect as a valid measure of a person's political leanings."And the Quiz is being used in high school and college classrooms all over the country. Over a dozen major textbooks site the Quiz, either in the books or as an online supplement to the books.But don't let the scholarly recommendations fool you. The Quiz isn't a boring political science project -- it's fun. In fact, that is the one reaction that just about everybody who takes the Quiz does have in common.Professional astrologer Adze Mixxe said it best. No matter what your political identity is, he told people, "You will get 100 percent enjoyment from the World's Smallest Political Quiz."
And isn't that a political score everyone can agree on?

Captivity

2007-09-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

Animal-welfare supporters say the cage does strange things. Captive animals are much more likely to abuse, abandon and kill their young; hurt themselves; eat, vomit, then eat their vomit; obsessively groom themselves; fail to mate; fail to nest; and pace, rock, and scratch themselves all the time.

Scientists found decades back that rats subjected to an ever-more-crowded home in captivity showed social changes.

First they fought more and took lousy care of the kids. Soon they killed their own kind more. Then gang rats started running from one section to the cage to another, across territories. These pubescent animals fought when they met another gang. The females watched the males tangle, then mated with the winners. When they had young they abandoned them. Some parts of the cage became rich in food and nest materials. Other parts became too poor to sustain life for long. The rich females grew a subculture that ran in small groups into the poor parts and back for no apparent reason. Males who refused to nest took food from mothers and children and moved on. A few males and females lined up along the darkest edge of the cage avoiding light. There they hung out all day and night, rarely sleeping, hardly eating, never mating or nesting, just chattering to no one in particular, grooming themselves to the point of self-harm. I used to be like that. These trends developed around the time the sexual deviance increased. Males mated with the dead, with the young, with everyone they could catch, male or female, family or not. Rape, sadism and fetishism increased drastically in the final stages. This is not typical wild rat behavior. Many females decided they had no interest in mating.

The experiment wound up with suicide and failure to thrive bringing the population down again. This study has often been held up as a warning against overpopulation. But is it really more a warning about captivity itself? Being pushed to the sides of the cage the rats can see the bars more clearly.

I have no patience at all with people who harm people and blame society. Humans have self-control in a way rodents don't.

The issue is, why are there so many people making such bad choices at so many ages just when we are supposed to have reached a safe, warm, aware stage in our culture's development? Maybe we have pushed ourselves or let someone push us right to the bars.

Those who react by hurting or killing their own kind, especially adult humans who kill children and youth, are to blame for their actions.

As for the rest of us, those struggling to make life in the cage worthwhile, how can we protect ourselves without making the cage any tighter? How can we shelter the young and the weak without shrinking our range even more?

Any thoughts?

Short story: I'm Glad I'm Socialized

2007-09-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

I got up today eager for a day of painting and an hour or two working on my novel. I scarfed a bowl of bright cereal and ran for a bus. Oh, I could work at home, but the government says that I'm better off with people my own age.
So I stood in a neat line outside the door of West Hometown Workplace, behind three chefs and a dogcatcher, who hates me and kept stepping on my foot. We are all the same age give or take a few months. I dared not look behind me to see where the warm breath in my hair came from, but I think it was my friend Julia, a soccer coach. I hoped I'd get a chance to talk to her after work.
Next to my line I saw an artist I admire who is a year younger than I am. I couldn't talk to him; it would have been against the rules, and anyway, the workers in my line would have pestered me for months for talking to a younger person like a human being. That's just the way it is.
Finally the bell sounded. A supervisor marched us through the door. Any show of eagerness would have meant a humiliating trip to the back of the line, so I plodded in step with the rest.
First job was architecture. I had to go to remedial architecture because I don't have much skill at building design. There, the trainers talked to me as if I were a small cute animal begging at their door. "Can you hold a pencil?" Of course I can hold a pencil. What I can't do is make a skyscraper that can withstand an earthquake. Can I paint now? It would waste much less time.
Well, bike repair, oil refining and business consulting were similar. In B.C. I tried to signal to my friend that I would meet her after lunch, but the supervisor caught me. I had to sit in the corridor and avoid any contact with others until the bell rang.
Finally I got into single file with everyone my age and marched to the dining area. One man stumbled trying to tuck a loose shoelace in. The supervisor called him to the back of the line. Everyone laughed at him.
Julia found me and sat with her head in her arms, shaking. She'd been mugged. It happens to her a lot. Once one person mugs you, the word gets out that you have money. She sat, crying, knowing she wouldn't get her money back. The worst of it was that she knew her next assignment: to spend half an hour molding plastics in a corner station with just two people, the men who had mugged her. I urged her to have them arrested. She said she had tried that. They always spent a day in an empty workspace and then returned to rob more co-workers. The sentence could not exceed that. I gave her my salad and brownie. It was just a couple of bites but it cheered her up.
I had a bad muscle cramp. I toughed it out, wanting to skip the tangled process of getting permission to take one of my own painkillers. Julia and I had five minutes to hang out in the fenced lot before it was time to line up again. We talked as fast as we could, running back and forth for much-needed exercise.
"What are you painting?" She asked.
"A landscape. What are you doing?"
"I just met someone I think I like a lot. And I got a kitten...."
The bell rang. We stood straight and still. The door swung. We marched.
I went silently into the workspace for a job I dreaded: waiting tables and bussing. In this task, not only did I have no talent for the job, not only did a puzzled-faced short woman keep whispering that she hated me and would "get me" when I passed her -- no, I have no idea what her problem is -- but the supervisor was inexperienced and constantly gave what even I could often see for bad advice.
I trudged in a straight line to astronomy and, just as I was finding some interesting constellations, the bell rang. I lined up and went to webhosting. I don't understand how to write code. Back to remedial with me. "Can you find letters on the keyboard? Do you know what the keyboard is?" Yes, I just don't absorb information about this topic very fast. It goes past me while I'm taking notes. And everything I see has to become a sketch, so that slows me down.
The bell rang, freeing me, and I marched to the art studio at last. There I looked for my work in progress.
It was gone. A new term had started and the old work had been recycled. "Where's my painting?" I howled. "I wasn't done."
"You have to learn to turn it in on time. You lose it otherwise," the supervisor said.
"I didn't know that."
"That doesn't matter."
"Well, where are the oil paints?"
"Today we're working in macrame."
"I have no interest in macrame. I have a landscape in mind and I want it on canvas before I forget what I want to do with it."
"You need to keep up with the workforce or go to the security office."
I macrame'd, weeping and brooding all the while. I saw the supervisor writing a report on my laziness and bad attitude but I knew it would be worse if she caught me peeking so I knotted away.
We went to novel writing, where I changed a character's name and cut out a subplot that slowed the action too much. The supervisor called for a word count. My assignment came up lower than the last session. I watched him put a minus on my record. I said, "I cut some stuff I didn't need. It makes it better."
"That doesn't make any difference. You have to produce a hundred words each session and turn it in."
I sighed. I decided to keep my mouth shut. He didn't care about fiction. If he wanted words, I'd give him words. I gave him the first page copied and pasted a few times. "See?" He said. "This just proves you can do a good job if you try. I want to see this every time." He pasted a "satisfactory" sticker over my report.
I stood, feeling as if I didn't exist, in line again.
I sat out logging claiming a fear of sharp objects. Into my file with that and so what. They'd test me on it later. I'd decide what to do then.
A final bell released me to the open air. Men and women streamed, screamed and sped to the street. Husbands, wives, parents, offspring and friends waited with open car doors to catch the frustrated passengers. Buses lined up, doors open. I leapt on my bus.
But wait -- Julia! I should help her with the fare. I climbed down. "Julia?"
She was nowhere to be seen. A man said she had gone home early.
"How did she do it?"
"She tried it all. She gave herself a temperature with a hot paper towel. She made a fake note from her brother saying he needed her. None of it was good enough."
"So what did the trick? How did Julia escape?"
"I think she jumped. Security's still looking for her."
I rode home. I considered that eventually security would grow as tired of the search for Julia, whose job wasn't on her schedule today anyway, as they had for her repeat muggers. And maybe one day she would no longer have to work with the attackers.
I reflected on the years I'd spent in school and the benefits of the socialization they gave me. Without those lessons, today might have seemed weird.

How to stop confusing words without memorizing the dictionary

2007-08-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

It's happening more and more often. People who can fly planes, fix arteries and gain public office are saying "imply" for "infer" and "flaunt" when they want "flout". Why? I don't know. But I used to do worse things than that. Oh, I not only spent years sorting out "habilitate" and "habituate", no, I still struggle with "imminent", "immanent" and "eminent". At least I can tell "immolate" from "emulate", for which my role models must feel some gratitude. (Look it up if you don't believe it.)
But to the rescue comes the past. Under the bark of a word runs a grain of history. Its meaning is somewhere in that past. Whole teams, companies, labor to plot them for us. We pick up these records -- dictionaries -- and we find the story in the brackets.
To imply is to "fold in". The one adding a meaning implies it like a note concealed in a folded paper. Inference is different. It is from the Old French, from the Latin, "to bear in". It is to draw from evidence. One carries in one's inferences with the newspapers and leaves one's implications neatly tucked into the payment envelope, little tips. "Flaunt", though, hides its origins. Could it come from some corruption of "flavescent", "turning yellow"? All we can be sure of is that "flout" means "to scorn or disregard" and seems to have once been a French word, "flauter", to play the flute. A flautist flutes today, as does a flutist, the same thing. A flouter, though, flouts. She doesn't flaunt, except when she flaunts her contempt for society by flouting its laws. She waltzes off playing the flute at them all.
To habituate someone to your company, you may guide him to make a habit of visiting you. But if you don't want to manipulate, try just habilitating him to come and see you. That is, give him some gas money or let him know when you are available for company. Give him the ability, that is, from the Latin word for ability, "habilitas".
It is imminent that I start remembering what immanent means.
Here we go. The dictionary says, "existing or remaining within" (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New Collegiate Edition 1976). The source? "In" is a Latin word that gives us our own word "in", and "manere" means "remain". It comes to us from as far away as the PIE "men", to remain, which has remained pretty much the same for at least a few thousand years.
Imminent is "in" and "minere", to project, from another word "men" that is also thousands of years old. And you were probably going to say this was confusing. We haven't even started on eminent yet.
Eminent: That's a "minere" combination too, but this time the first syllable is a shaved-down form of "ex", which means "out". The imminent projects in like the future looming over us, but the eminent project out like the noticeable, for they are the outstanding and the giants, the very famous, the unignorable ones. Not hard, was it?
So how about "immolate" and "emulate"? Well, OK. "Emulate" appears to be related to "imitate", and that is what it means, but not just to imitate. Doing impressions isn't emulation. It's imitating in hope of being more like someone, aspiring to be someone, walking in someone's footsteps.
"Immolate" was once "in" plus "mola", meal, that is milled grain. It's how people prepared sacrifices. They sprinkled grain on them. To immolate someone is to sacrifice him.
Please don't immolate anyone. Just emulate those you admire. And admire them for their eminence in good habits, ones worth flaunting.