Great Qoutes

"People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."

-GWB

You can find more of these golden oldies over at Slate where Jacob Weisberg has compiled his list of top Bushisms.

The Inside Scoop

I view my task as a douchebag occasional blogger to provide my readers (all five of you) with ground breaking, earth shattering information.  Well, check yourself before you wreck yourself, the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary) is considering including the word- conversate, as in we be conversating.

"TNC: Will conversate be included after the next revision of the OED?

JS: It's very likely to go in."

You read it here first, well, unless you read Ta-Naheisi Coates' blog, in which case you probably read it there first.

The Word of the Year

Here's a bit of belated new: The Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Year is hypermiling.  You learn something new everyday.

Grammar: The economy may increase or grow down, but you don't "grow the economy"

I'm not usually a traditionalist when it comes to grammar, but I've had enough with the expression "to grow the economy." It doesn't signal the end of the world, but it's bad.
Take note of this passage in Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage:

We used to grow our hair long or grow tomatoes in the yard, but now we are being urged to "grow the economy" or "grow your investments." Business and government speakers have extended this usage widely, but it irritates traditionalists. Use "build," "increase," "expand," "develop," or "cause to grow" instead in formal writing.

Link Sluttage

This term comes courtesy of Brad DeLong. It refers to the promiscous linking of sites.

Another Classic

Courtesy of D.C.'s former mayor (and unfortuantely Anacostia's ward rep.) Marion Barry (He of the "the bitch set me up" fame):

“Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

Note: Barry said this in 1991 while mayor. While no longer mayor, he remains a personal hero.

Pet Peeve

From time to time in conversation I will hear somebody say "well, the government can pay for that." Granted, the government should in fact provide certain services and carry out certain functions. But in the persons assertion that the "government can pay for that" there seems to be the presumption that the government has its own money. It does not. Rather it has other people's money, which it takes through coercive measures (not that it isn't necessary up to a point).

Odd Quote

"My body is far from a wonderland. My body is more like a pawnshop. There's a lot of interesting things put together, and if you look closely you'd probably be excited, but at first glance, not so much." —Jennifer Love Hewitt

I happen to think pawnshop and wonderland.

"Upward Redistribution to the Rich"

Over at TPM Cafe's book club Jonathon Chait spoke of the Bush tax cuts as an "upward redistribution to the rich". I find this positively orwellian. The implication is that the government is taking the money from somebody (middle class or the poor) to pay the rich when in fact they are simply taking less money from the rich. There are conceivably instances where the government redistributes from the poor or the middle class to the rich, some have argued that Social Security is mildly regressive (the tax is a flat tax, it's capped, and the rich live longer), but income taxes don't fit this description. What Chait really means is that the Rich should have less of their money so that the government can spend more on goodies (education, health care, farm subsidies, whatever) to benefit the middle class or lower income folks. In fact, I find the whole business of labeling taxes and the like as a redistribution a bit misleading as it presumes an original distribution. It is not as if one day we awake with our bank accounts full of our yearly allowance, rather, our income, savings, and debts are the function of millions of independent transactions.

Geeks Save the World

Clive Thompson has a fun post on Geeks and their potential contribution to world problems (he cites Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation as an example). I too believe that geeks and nerds are essential to our survival and prosperity. This is disheartening as I am merely a dork, which I define as being interested in geeky and nerdy things yet lacking adequate intelligence to be proficient in them.

Random Note

Paternity suits used to be called bastardy suits. This reminds of a story (it actually is the reason I don't use the word bastard anymore). A friend of mine was impregnated by her boyfriend the spring of her freshman year and then bore the child the following winter. The boyfriend as is often the case disappeared from the scene and ran from his responsibilities. Anyhow, my friend continued with her studies and from time to time would bring the child to campus. Anyhow, one day around the campus p.o. boxes I encountered her with her child. As she was boasting about what a good and handsome and healthy baby he was (which all appeared to be true), I remarked what a "cute little bastard he was." Fortunately she was a great deal more couth than me and charitable enough to overlook my poor choice of words and took the my remark as a compliment as I had intended.

NYC: Nanny State Edition

The New York City Council is contemplating banning the words bitch and ho.

New Phrase courtesy of Julian Sanchez

"Outrage kabuki: The disingenuous practice of hunting for any utterance by a political enemy that might serve as an excuse to work yourself (and your fellow travelers) into high dudgeon. It's a pointless distraction that has an unhealthy chilling effect."

From the Language Log

A little synopsis of the candidate's language abilities. They are limited. Interesting note: Mike Huckabee reads new testament (or classical) Greek.

Deletion Reviews

So there is a blogger that I avidly follow, Megan McArdle. She has a blog Assymetrical Information and writes for the Economist. Anyhow, her internet notoriety garnered her a bio in the Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia has a "deletion review" and apparently there is a threshold of notability which she has not met thus not warranting a bio on Wikipedia. So they are reviewing whether they should delete her bio. I hope I make it to the point where wikipedia debates deleting my bio, oh wait, I don't have one because I am not even close to notalbe.

Small Penis Rule, Part 2

I hasten to mention that I submit to Mr. Crowley's corollary to the small penis rule.

"The Small Penis Rule"

Check out this link over at TNR (The New Republic). It makes me want to become an author.

"Houses will begat jobs"

President Bush, trying to win some credit with the victims of hurricane Katrina in Mississippi, stated, “There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered. Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses.” Houses will begat jobs??? Even Google was confused when I typed that in, suggesting instead that perhaps I meant to type "Homes will beget jobs."

I can understand how jobs may beget houses, but I'm a little confused as to how houses beget jobs. Maybe President Bush wanted to convey the message that there are a lot of homes to build in the wake of Katrina, and therefore many people will be employed to build them. But to a person who lost his home, being told that "houses will begat jobs" or that "jobs will begat houses" is not a very hopeful message, to say the least.

"War on Terror": More than a Metaphor

Whereas a good metaphor brings us closer to an otherwise abstract reality, bad metaphors obscure and thus impede our ability to deal with reality. America's war on terror, as George Soros explains in a recent essay, is a war misguided by the metaphor "war on terror," which is unsuited to the phenomena to which it is applied. His fourth point bears repeating:

The war on terror drives a wedge between "us" and "them." We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world.

Phraseology: Pedantic

Though I've used Mandingo's "Phraseology" posts as occasions to question his linguistic competence, and more generally to make cheap shots at his pie-eyed posts, today I'll do him the honor of considering his recent post as worthy of this piece of phraseology. Besides, someone has got to keep an eye on the phraseology of the self-proclaimed phraseologist.

Before leaving from Minneapolis to D.C., Mandingo shot off a quick "ripost" to my "pedantic" remarks about the very definition of "phraseology." "Pedantic" was an apt word to use there. As Thomas Wolfe wrote in his short story "A Portrait of Bascom Hawke,"

there was something sneering and pedantical in the way he pronounced each word, biting it off with a prim, nasal and heavily accented enunciation in the manner of certain pedants and purists who suggest by their pronunciation that language in the mouths of most people is vilely and carelessly treated, that each word has a precise, subtle, and careful meaning of its own, and that they—they alone—understand these matters.

My attitude, vain of language usage, cannot be spelled out any better than that.