Category: Words

The heart is not only a lonely hunter, though it is certainly that. It is a drowning salesman, a bloodied clown, an incurable disease. We pay dearly for its every decision…
Steve Almond, “The Body In Extremis” My Life in Heavy Metal

The O’Reilly “So You Want to Write a Book guide is quite a good one and takes you from the proposal through the publication. The GNOME Documentation Project Style Guide is enough to convince anyone that technical writing is the opposite of style. Same for this article from the Chronicle in which a textbook author chronicles his discontents.

Steve Almond knows how to write really well. In the first story the narrator recalls his rock-out youth as a rock concert reviewer for a newspaper, cheating on his girlfriend, and says: “It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”

I, too, am still broken. I will always be broken, because I am human, and we are all inherently flawed. But it’s through the flaws that beauty comes in, I think. Or maybe just the rain.

Note that you can be investigated by the FBI for reading this.

O’Reilly Says: The failure of many technical manuals is that they simply describe the subject. Many fail even in that. But even if they succeed, that’s only half the job. What we try to do in our books is to do some of the thinking for the reader, just as you would if you were talking one-on-one with someone, trying to explain what she really needs to know about the subject in order to get her job done.

Market Crash Kills Nine. Not “nine people were crushed by falling stocks” but a physical crash in a farmer’s market. If it weren’t for the dying part, it would be quite funny.

Isn’t “Personal Responsibility” a Republican mantra? So what the hell happened with the false words coming from Bush’s mouth? Did he not speak them? Were they not false? Does it depend on my definition of what “is” is?
Slate’s M. Kinsley punditizes:

Who was the arch-fiend who told a lie in President Bush’s State of the Union speech? No investigation has plumbed such depths of the unknown since O.J. Simpson’s hunt for the real killer of his ex-wife.

Nick Kristof’s May 9 article No Time to Get Squeamish describes what I hope are somewhat exaggerated situations in the N.I.H. Still, I don’t doubt that any ant-AIDS education that mentions using rubbers instead of fearing Satan is going to be squelched. Which is a shame, because speaking in tongues often means not speaking the language of the people you’re trying to help.

Most AIDS scientists are terrified these days. They describe witch hunts by neo-Puritans in and out of the Bush administration, and many are so nervous that in e-mail and research abstracts they avoid using words like ”gays,” ”homosexuals,” ”anal sex” or ”sex workers.”

‘”I would recommend avoiding all electronic communication to any N.I.H. office,” one scientist warned in one of many e-mail notes buzzing among AIDS researchers. “Phone communication does not appear tapped at this time. Even so, I am advising staff to speak `in code’ unless an N.I.H. staff member indicates you can speak freely. In short, assume you are living in Stalinist Russia when communicating with the United States government.”

I sent a letter today and got a quick response, but it leaves me with more questions.

Dear Ethicist:
     I am confused by the recent supreme court ruling on sodomy. I understand that laws like the one in Texas have been ruled unconstitutional– so any ban on gay sex is out. But are generalized sodomy laws still constitutional, provided that they don’t discriminate based on gender? In other words, is oral sex still illegal in Pennsylvania? Where does this ruling leave mixed-gender sodomites?

Yours,
Verbal
Secretly Ironic Industries

Verbal:
    I think you need to contact “The Legalist;” I’m just “The Ethicist.” But as I, a non-lawyer understand it, you’ve read the decision too narrowly. Justice O’Connor made the equal protection case, arguing that what’s illegal sauce for the goose must be illegal sauce for the gander. But the court ruled more broadly, based on the right to privacy, arguing that the government has no business prying into people’s consensual sex lives. So this decision seems to me to disallow all of the sort of laws you describe with putative humor.
Yours,
RC

My questions are, where can I find a legalist? And does it seem to me that putative is an insult in this context?

No one wants to put words in J. K. Rowling’s mouth, but it’s safe to assume that when she hails her readers’ creativity, she has in mind something other than tales wherein Professor Snape is fellated by the Sorting Hat.

I suppose Rowling didn’t really intend to delve into behavior which was, until recently, a crime in many parts of Our Great Nation. On the other hand, authorial intent, as they say in academe, is something of a fiction itself. Or that’s what Andy Berman said when he got caught forging Kostabi paintings.