Word-B-Gone

Lake Superior State University has released its annual list of "Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness." The university takes nominations through its Web site, selects the short list in December, and publishes the final outcome on New Year's Day.

These are the 16 terms marked for banishment this year:

• Gitmo: Meh. It's not half the mouthful that "Guantánamo Bay Naval Base" is (and doesn't have the annoying accent).
• Combined celebrity names: Like "TomKat." The real problem, of course, is that we're inundated regularly with vapid celebrity gossip masquerading as "news."
• Awesome: Not as in "inspiring awe," but "cool" or "nifty." Unfortunately for the folks at LSSU, slang that's been around for 20+ years has pretty decent staying power.
• Gone missing: Yeah, this is a perennial favourite with the language mavens - apparently a close relative of "near miss."
• Pwn or pwned: Banish it? I don't even know how to pronounce it. "Puh-owned"?
• Now playing in theatres: As distinct from "Now available on DVD and Blu-Ray" or "Exclusively on pay-per-view." I don't see the problem.
• We're pregnant: Yeah, if nothing else, it's cutesy.
• Undocumented alien: For people who don't want to admit that illegal aliens have snuck into the country without the permission of the government. Orwell would be proud.
• Armed robbery/drug deal gone bad: Yes, as opposed to one that was carried out successfully, without shots fired, hostages, or collateral damage. What's the problem?
• Truthiness: Incidentally, there's still more written about truthiness on Wikipedia than Lutheranism, which tells you something about the general worth of that resource.
• Ask your doctor: Yeah, I've often been persuaded by television advertising to ask my doctor if I need prescriptions to pharmaceuticals designed for diseases I don't have.
• Chipotle: Uh . . . and what are we supposed to call something chipotle-flavoured? Maple syrup, vanilla ice cream, chocolate milkshake, chipotle sauce. I suspect some people would rather have the flavour banished, not the word. (I love chipotles myself, but then I've been eating them since before they were trendy.)
• i-Anything: iAgree.
• Search: One comment says that it has been "replaced by'google.'" Only half true. I don't "google" my Word files.
• Healthy food: Specifically, as used to describe the nutritional qualities of foods. Come on: who actually says "healthful"?
• Boasts: As in "master bedroom boasts his-and-her fireplaces"; whereas, as the commenter adds, "kitchen laments pathetic placement of electrical outlets." Well of course not, that wouldn't be good advertising.

Just for your own edification, check out the inaugural list from 1976. See too many words on there that have been permanently banished from the English languages? No, me neither. Incidentally, I vaguely recall Charles MacKay's immensely entertaining 1841 history of popular hysteria, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, noting several slang terms he hoped would pass out of popular usage that are still commonly used a century and a half later. So bad language predictions aren't just a recent thing. They're a way of life.

(H/T: Rebecca Writes. Cindy caught it too.)

Taking the plunge

Now that New Blogger is out of beta, I've taken the leap of faith and converted the Crusty Curmudgeon to the new format.

So far, so good. At least, it doesn't look any different. But I suspect there are a few changes "under the hood" that I will need to get used to, and perhaps a kink or two in my homemade template that will have to be hammered out.

At the very least, I'll be starting soon to add tags to my old posts - and at 905 of them to date, that's no small task! At some point I will probably also switch over from Haloscan's comments to Blogger's own system: not that I have anything against the fine folk at Haloscan, but I just prefer to have as much functionality as possible in one place.

If you see anything that looks like it shouldn't be, just let me know.

Another year, another opportunity . . .

for the perpetually profligate, professional prognosticator Pat Robertson to say something stupid.

As if he hasn't embarrassed the Christian Church enough in recent years - by calling for the assassination of Venezuelan leader in Hugo Chavez in August 2005, then claiming (almost exactly one year ago) that God smote Ariel Sharon with a stroke for ceding the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, as well as many other generally kooky and uninformed antics - now he claims God told him the U.S. would suffer a massive terrorist attack:

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

[Full Story]

Oh, good. It's not going to be nuclear.

I'd award Robertson the coveted Dim Bulb du jour, but he's already won twice, and I don't want to look like I'm playing favourites.

2006 post-mortem

Looking back on the last year and the blogging goals I set for myself, I can summarize my feelings in six words:

Ha ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha.

I don't even have to open up last year's post-mortem to know I didn't meet any of the goals I set.

In all fairness, everyday life always has a certain amount of randomness that long-term goal-setting can't anticipate. I certainly couldn't have predicted how a sudden career change would affect my blogging habit. Still, I don't like setting goals and then missing all of them.

So I don't intend to make any promises this year. Not any measurable ones, anyway: I've learned my lesson. So, broadly speaking, this year my goals are:

1. to blog more.
2. to blog more substantively.
3. to finish the projects I've already started.
4. to read other people's blogs more, and to revive "Fridays in the Wild" to acknowledge what I liked during the week.

What I need - and I think I've said this before - is not a lot of metrics, but a lot of self-discipline: in all areas of my life, of which the blogosphere is but one.

Lord willing, may 2007 be a blessed and prosperous year. In my fifth calendar year of public, opinionated curmudgeonliness,thank you all for your continued indulgence.

Na na na na, hey hey hey, Allahu achbar

As I write this, it's just been reported that Saddam Hussein has done the fresh-air jig at the end of a rope.

To [mis]quote Macbeth, "nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it." Good riddance.

Passages of note

My parents' PC is seven years old and seriously underpowered. They have high-speed Internet rather than dialup, which is its one saving grace. But the consequence is that I don't blog as frequently as I would like to. It's too much of a pain. Nonetheless, I always like to note the passage of someone whom I find personally significant for one reason or another. Better late than never.

James Brown (1933-2006)

Notwithstanding his many arrests, multiple marriages and other personal problems, Brown didn't earn the nickname "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" for nothing. A James Brown CD in my personal library was the "gateway" to other funk acts such as Kool and the Gang, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Barry White on the one hand; and more mainstream R&B such as Al Green and the Four Tops on the other.

The world is a less funky place due to his passing, and that's a shame.

Gerald Ford (1913-2006)

At 93, Ford was the longest-lived President of the United States, and the last living one of whom I had no personal memory, being too young to follow the news and international politics any time prior to the Carter administration. From everything I've heard of him, he was an otherwise unremarkable President, other than the fact that it was his job to pick up the pieces of the Nixon era (and the unique circumstance of his presidency, in that he was never elected to the office of Vice-President or President). Still, he served his country with integrity even if he wasn't a legend in his own time, and it's always sad to see a world leader pass into history.

Living in an Amish paradise

I went to school in Waterloo, Ontario, only a few miles away from the heart of Old Order Mennonite country. The local culture had me hooked pretty much from the first time I spotted a horse and buggy. There are relatively few places in the world where you can find a hitching post or stall standing outside a modern supermarket - or, as often as not, find it occupied as its owner shops for prepackaged groceries inside, while dressed in a long black dress, bonnet, and . . . Nikes. As I knew of the Old Order Mennonites and Amish only as a sect that had eschewed modern technology, the seemingly selective morality the Amish practiced in their day-to-day lives fascinated me for the eight years that I lived there.¹

In the aftermath of the Amish school shootings on October 2 in Lancaster County, I heard an interview on CNN with Donald B. Kraybill, a sociology professor at nearby Elizabethtown College and expert on Amish culture, give a background interview and discuss how the community would cope with the tragedy. Later the same day, I came across an article by Howard Rheingold from the January 1999 issue of Wired, also citing Kraybill, about the adoption by some Amish of cellular telephones.² This article suggested that there was actually a (more or less) logical rationale behind the selective rejection of technology. I decided to find Kraybill's book The Riddle of Amish Culture³ and finally learn something about this paradoxical sect.

The CUSA Thought Police win this round

I halfway figured it was a foregone conclusion anyway, but after five hours of debate last night, in the name of women's rights, CUSA voted to pass the infamous "anti-choice" motion limiting the rights of pro-life groups to assemble and speak on the Carleton University campus by denying them equal access to resources. The vote was 26-6, with one abstention and one absence.

I was not present myself (didn't realize until later that the meeting was open to the public), but Suzanne of Big Blue Wave and Deborah Gyapong were. You can read their reports of the night here and here, respectively.

The young-adult pastor of my church was also in attendance (along with a few of our Carleton students). He stayed a little longer than Suzanne or Deborah, and so I heard from him something about the presentation made by Don Hutchison, legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. As a former constitutional lawyer himself, he shredded every argument CUSA could make in favour of the motion, and chastised them for taking it upon themselves to interpret the law (which, he argued, was the purview of the higher courts).

Ironically, Hutchison also said that during the 1970s, as a lawyer, he had argued in favour of of pro-choice groups receiving CUSA funding on the basis of freedom of speech. Too bad the present incarnation of the student Politburo has their heads too far up their "collective" rear (pun intended) to return the courtesy.

Another part of the discussion supposedly hinged on CUSA's defining themselves as a "political organization" rather than a student government. Someone asked how he/she could opt out of membership in the "political organization" and having to pay fees to it. That didn't go over too well with the CUSA people. (So much for "pro-choice"!)

All in all, this has been a disgusting episode, and one that current students, employees, and alumni of Carleton University should be ashamed of. In the name of "free speech," CUSA has presumed to define the limits of what you can say about abortion as a dues-paying club member. You can now say that a woman should carry a baby to term, or that abortion on demand is immoral, but if you dare to suggest that it should be illegal, the Kampus KGB will be coming for you.

I have no doubt that the long, public debate was nothing but lip service to public opinion; the outcome of the vote was a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, of course, their PR machine has been vilifying the pro-life movement, calling it "discriminatory," "violence against women," and 'hate speech," and drawing comparisons to the KKK and other white-supremacy groups; CUSA president Shawn Menard actually falsely accused the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (which sponsors the Genocide Awareness Project and employs pro-life debater Jojo Ruba) of Holocaust denial. This bit of slander has resulted in the threat of legal action against CUSA, and I hope CCBR carries through with that.

Anyway, on that sour note, I'm officially wrapping up my commentary on this particular issue and moving on, though if anything interesting further transpires, I might come back to it now and again.

Note on the image: The original propaganda poster shows Stalin pointing to a map of Russia, which I have replaced with an aerial photo of the Carleton campus. The original motto was along the lines of, "Under the leadership of Stalin, Communism moves forward!" I have used Carleton's official motto, "Ours the Eternal Task" - or, at least, as close as I could get using Babelfish's English-to-Russian filter, as I don't speak Russian. (The trick was to find an English equivalent that translated into Russian, then back into English halfway sensibly. The closest I came was "We own the eternal task.")

CUSA president slanders; CCBR pushes back

Uh-oh.

I guess the folks at the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) heard Carleton University Student Association (CUSA) president Shawn Menard on CFRA last Wednesday morning, when he told radio host Mark Sutcliffe that the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) was, "as you know, a group that talks about the fact that the Holocaust did not happen."

This, I'm sure, came as a great surprise to Stephanie Gray and Jojo Ruba: the latter referenced the reality of the Holocaust several times during the October 30 debate on abortion on campus, including his closing remarks about Corrie ten Boom, the sole survivor of a family that helped hide Jews from the Nazis and was sent to the camps for it. Indeed the very premise of GAP, which calls abortion a modern genocide, relies on the fact that the Holocaust (and other genocides) actually happened.

Well, Menard's slander didn't go over very well with Gray. Big Blue Wave has obtained a press release from CCBR demanding "an unambiguous retraction and apology." Specifically, they demand that such a be submitted to CFRA and the Charlatan student paper, and posted on CUSA's own Web site. If this doesn't happen by this Friday, it'll be lawyer time.

Man. I thought that one way or another I'd be blogging about something else by tomorrow.

CUSA gears up the damage-control machine

CUSA needs to remember the First Rule of Holes: When you're in one, stop digging.

This week, there was a blogstorm and a small media frenzy concerning a motion proposed at the November 21 meeting of the Carleton University Student Association, affirming that CUSA is "pro-choice" and banning "anti-choice" groups from using CUSA resources. This came about after an October 30 debate sponsored by Carleton Lifeline, on the question: "Should elective abortion be illegal?" Some campus womyn [sic] were upset that their "safe space" was violated by having someone disagree with them. Hence this motion has been, rightly in my opinion, viewed as a restriction on freedom of speech on Carleton campus.

Since then, various CUSA members and sympathizers have been active in the media and the blogosphere trying to do damage control. Here's a look at some of the more common talking points.