Chelsea can't handle earthquake descriptions

Comedienne Chelsea Handler spoke of the 5.4 magnitude Chino Hills earthquake in Southern California 7/29/08 as a trembler--a person who trembles or shakes. (Concise Oxford Dictionary)

Is Handler personifying the earthquake (using anthropomorphism)? But if she is personifying earthquakes--giving them human qualities--why would such a fearsome "type" such as an earthquake tremble?

Handler, a normally articulate funny lady, drew attention away from the punchline on her show Chelsea Lately when she meant to say temblor, which means earthquake. (Merriam Webster Dictionary)

Temblor is taken from Spanish which takes the root from medieval latin tremulare, literally to tremble. Thus, it's easy to understand the mistake, which itself registers a magnitude of perhaps 2.0 on the Richter Scale.

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The Fed may "impact" you, don't turn your back!

Here we go again with the word "impact." From a recent headline on a financial web site called "Seeking Alpha":

"How the Fed's Decision Impacts You"

This time, Ben Bernancke and the Fed might impact you. Oh nooo... Once more, "impact" used as a verb means: press against, collide, crash, affect strongly, influence (advised to use with an adjective); pack in, squeeze in.

The Fed will press against us, or worse, squeeze itself in! Into what? Into our very selves?! Of course not, but because the word was used literally, we might be wary of turning our backs on the Fed and its chief operator Mr. Bernancke.

The headline could have read: "The Fed might make an adverse impact on you." This way, you use "impact" as a noun which means "influence," together with a qualifying adjective which clarifies the point.

Otherwise, if the Fed and Chairman Bernancke impact you, they collide with you just as two NFL football bodies collide with each other, or just as celestial bodies make terrible collisions out there in the enormity* of cold, dark space.

*See Dr. Seth Shostak's comment 7/29/08.

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The universe is "enormous." Right?

Said physicist Seth Shostak of the UFO phenomenon on Larry King recently: "I think they're out there because of the enormity of the universe."


Because Shostak holds a PhD in physics and, therefore deals with the physical world on astronomical levels, we must believe he was referring to the physical largeness of the universe, not its "enormity": atrociousness, offensiveness; terribleness on a vast (abstract) scale. (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Probably Dr. Shostak meant to say "...because of the enormousness (or vastness, or massiveness) of the universe." Enormous meaning: very large, immense, huge in a physical sense. (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

While "enormity" begins with a cognate root, (from the same source), once more, it carries the connotation of "hugeness (in an abstract way) as of some terrible event." The point is, when using the word "enormity," its most common use is to refer to something "massively" terrible in the manner of a natural disaster or a world war, or some other immense fiasco which claims many lives, or time and energy on a very large scale.

H. W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage says: "The two words have drifted so far apart that the use of either in connexion with the limited sense of the other is unadvisable."

Dr. Shostak works for SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) which has been pointing its receivers toward the vastness of space for some time now without any response. If the undertaking ultimately fails, the enormity of the disappointment would be obvious.

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If you can't write, how can you be a good consumer or voter?!

The U.S. Department of Education has found in its "Nation's Report Card" (National Assessment of Educational Progress) that only in the City of Cleveland have students scored worse in writing skills than Los Angeles.

Nationally, "private school students scored higher than public school students, and Catholic school students scored the highest of all." Perhaps most interestingly, eighth grade girls are twice as likely to "score at proficient levels than boys."

Because Los Angeles has many immigrant children learning to write in English, its average grade has remained low each year. It is important to add that "California students fluent in English score near the national average. But let's look closely at the national average? "The report makes clear that many American students have barely a basic grasp on written expression of English, with just over a third of eighth-graders and fewer than one-quarter of 12th-graders scoring at or above the "proficient" level in writing.

Doesn't bode well for Democracy, not to mention literate consumers in the largest consumer economy in the world.

Go ahead, say "derring-do," I "dare" you

John Bollinger creator of the eponymous Bollinger Bands, an astute means of emphasizing "technicals" instead of "fundamentals" to gauge the strength of an equity and its movement in the stock market, recently bemoaned rising inflation and a falling market, yet with one "positive" sign of "strength" which he named as Wells Fargo, the large banking concern dating back to the 19th century.

"Wells Fargo, WFC. The name conjures up images of the old west, of blazing guns, trustworthy drivers, strongboxes filled with gold, daring do, simpler/happier times…. Wells Fargo unsheathed its Winchester and let the bears have it right between the eyes; they raised
their dividend, from 31 cents to 34 cents."

The correct spelling is derring-do, (or derring do) Mr. Bollinger, not daring do. Derring-do means: boldness, great courage; (Concise Oxford English Dictionary); brave and heroic deeds (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary).

The derring-do Mr. Bollinger referred to was that although Wells Fargo's second quarter profits had fallen by 22%, it still managed to declare a dividend two cents greater than projected.

Yet, let's not pick on Mr. Bollinger (a brilliant market strategist). The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary provides a defense: Derring-do is a combined form of "two (old) words: dorynge (meaning daring), and don (to do), literally "daring to do." (These two words) were put together by a chain of misunderstandings and errors that have come to be treated as a kind of substantive (noun) combination taken to mean daring action or feats, desperate courage." Since "daring" and "derring" both branch from a common root, we must judge Mr. Bollinger's solecism as a very light one. Bollinger only misspelled the term, he used it properly--the more important consideration.

For those who may have deeper interest in the term, it can be traced as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer, 1374. (See the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary).

As for Wells Fargo, I don't judge their dividend announcement as so much a "heroic deed" as an act of "desperate courage." If the inflationary period we are entering doesn't end until 2010, as Mr. Bollinger speculates, we may all be engaged in acts of desperation, not all of them courageous.

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It's between cable & telecom, and "paramount" & "tantamount"

David Lazarus in a recent Consumer Confidential column in the Los Angeles Times quotes Michael Shames of the Consumer Action Network on the "duopoly* of "two titans battling for the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers." The two competing titans are posed as cable versus telecom, sort of like Coca Cola versus Pepsi Cola.

Lazarus writes that the three largest telecom companies: AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., and Qwest Communications International Inc. will all "work together" in Project Movearoo.com in the interest of serving customers who may move to a new residence and require switching services among other "good intentions." What's the catch?

Additionally, "six leading cable companies have banded together" for the purpose of targeting ads to specific viewers, Project Canoe. " It turns out that one group of "800 pound gorillas," the telecom companies (mainly telephone), is competing with another group, mainly cable and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol companies like Skype and Vonage) because the telephone group is feeling the competition. Thus, the two groups are forming a duopoly which pits each against the other yet with both large groups dominating the market. This way everybody wins. This is capitalism the way you like it.

But to the subject of the day: tantamount versus paramount. "Landel Hobbs, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable states that the goal of the cable companies is to "enhance advertising offering(s)...without compromising the privacy of our customers, which is of tantamount importance to us." Mr. Hobbs possibly meant "paramount," meaning of greatest importance, rather than tantamount, meaning equal to.

Hobbs is trying to tell the public through the medium of the Los Angeles Times that "protecting privacy is "most important" to his company, Time Warner. Protecting privacy cannot matter "equally" as much as the profit his company may make by dominating an industry, right? Protecting privacy is more important, right? Uh, yeah. Right. Or, does Hobbs actually mean tantamount? Should we take him at his word: "Privacy=Profit"?

paramount: adjective MOST IMPORTANT, of greatest/prime importance; uppermost, supreme, chief, overriding, predominant, foremost, prime, primary, principal, highest, main. (Concise Oxford Dictionary)

tantamount: adjective EQUIVALENT TO, equal to, as good as, more or less, much the same as, comparable to, on a par with, commensurate with,

*A true duopoly is a specific type of oligopoly where only two producers exist in one market. In reality, this definition is generally used where only two firms have dominant control over a market.

Sell into the rally, you greedy...

From the desk of Guy Geldworth:

Bob Pisani of CNBC, who reports from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, said of the plunging market 14 July: "It all began well, but in the end was disappointing because they (equity traders and futures traders) sold into the rally."

A little translation: The news prior to market opening had been that the government (that is you and I and our tax dollars) would infuse capital into the vaults of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (The giant U.S. Government-chartered corporations that purchase mortgages from lenders and re offer them to investors as mortgage-backed securities. Together, they hold 50% of the mortgage debt in the country.) That should have inspired buying which would have bolstered the two Fannies. It did, but only briefly.

More Pisani from his blog later: "What happened? Futures were up pre-open, we started strong...and then faded away. It is not a good sign that financials--the very group that was supposed to be helped by the Fannie/Freddie news--are flat to down."

Loyal to the economy, these market traders. "Selling into the rally tells us they expected the news of an up market in the beginning, then took their profits." Is this any way to run an economy? Do these people really care about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who need the help of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? "Selling into a rally" is just greed. It has nothing to do with empathy or even a hint of patriotism shown toward less fortunate fellow Americans. It's just selfishly taking advantage. A lot of unethical acts are legal. Not all "selling into rallies" is a bad thing. This one was. If you know someone who profited from selling into today's rally, point the finger.

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Let's not "go all Kumbaya" on Obama

"Let's vote for Obama, ...but let's not go all Kumbaya either," former California senator Tom Hayden said recently when asked about the upcoming national election. Kumbaya (also Kum Ba Yah), probably comes from Gullah, "a Creole dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia." (Wikipedia). If you study the lyrics of the song, you'd clearly have to be an unempathic human being not to respond to them with compassion: "Hear me crying lord, hear me singing, hear me praying..." Many folk artists have recorded the lyrics over the years. Perhaps too many. The song has become a kind of anthem sung by progressive thinking people hopeful of change. Not bad. But, like most art, even the exalted kind, if over-used, or used in any-and-all contexts, it may fall into mere banality, or worse, become the subject of parody. Of late, "Kumbaya" has been used to describe a political naïef, an ingenuous (innocent, trusting) person operating with good will, but lame with "real world" instincts because he or she tends to think in a "childlike" way about "grownup" things.

Thus, Senator Hayden warned those who might be placing too much burden on Senator Barack Obama not to be naive (adjective), that is, one who lacks worldly wisdom, one who is unsuspecting, gullible; childish, innocent, simple, unsophisticated." (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

I, myself, will vote for Ralph Nader unless Barack Obama is in trouble in California. If there's a large turnout Obama should get it. But, and here we go, lest folks "go all kumbaya" concerning Obama and his famous by-word "change," he is at best a center-left, moderate with at least passing ties to the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman, et. al., (not academic friends of working class folks), we still need to get him in. Obama is at least holding an oxygen tank for us to breathe easier, whereas Bush used his to explode over Baghdad, "shock doctrine" man that he is.

Assumptions about an economic meltdown are warranted, yet what's kept the criminal class on Wall Street and on the Beltway going is the deep wealth of the nation's resources, i.e. its people, (certainly including the current immigrant slave class), its ingenuity (we are different from other nations in this respect), and, of course. the natural resources not yet squandered. We'll come back from this latest (Iraq debacle, housing melt-down, current oil bubble), but the rank-and-file (we) will pay the bill, as always. Look at the Bear Stearns bailout, look at the cash infusions for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was Bush, et. al. who deregulated, let them and their social class pay the bill. Not likely. The "folks" are asleep. If we are to carry on in the fashion of the past half century since WW2, giving our lives over to speculative profit, imperial war mongering, sound bite politics, and greater numbers of "the distracted" playing video games, all trance-like and spell-bound, it would still take another century to bankrupt the nation IMHO. If they succeed in continuing to rob the Social Security Fund, it would push this meltdown date forward. Read "Citizens," a history of the French Revolution by Simon Schama. Citizens do take control, once-in-a-while, but you'd rather not have it like the French Revolution, which spilled blood on everyone. You'd rather have the "folks" participate in the still-existent, workable political structure. Do you see any evidence of this apart from the heady kids in Seattle and Genoa. I don't. More of the same, even if a bit less shady.

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As writing goes, so goes the ability to discern truth, as truth goes, so goes the democracy

Language Truth & Logic, and the Essay Form

If we are simply a nation which absorbs information through sound bites (see below) and have become "visual junkies" deficient in our abilities to read information in full context, how can we be literate users of information in the world-at-large? That is, how can we be good consumers in a consumer marketplace, or more importantly, truly informed voters in a democratic republic? If we cannot write or think in a literate fashion, how can we test the truth of an idea?

The argument for writing literacy (the essay and documented paper form) goes like this: If a means of verifying truth is brought by studying the propositions found in sentences, and sentences are used to build arguments in everything from commercial promotions to political speeches, then we need to teach writing as a means of thinking. In this way writing can be used by a thoughtful public to improve its own social condition. Here, we are not referring to elementary reading and writing, that is, merely decoding language in order to read a cereal box or scribble on a Post-it note, but something much more.

Have we become reduced to a society of specialists who may be "numerate" ("good at counting beans") and who increasingly turn to electronic games for diversion, or can we return to mid twentieth century form and once again value literacy (skill at using language as a tool for thinking)?

In mid last century, philosophers (logical positivists) like Alfred Jules Ayer spent their careers trying to determine, through language, how ideas can be verified. These people might have been moved by their experience of living through the attack on language (and democracy) brought by Fascism. Nevertheless, what concerned them then should concern us now. (Isn't it obvious?). We must decide if such endeavors in our schools (and out of them--grownups can continue to practice thinking!) are useful or not. Or, do we prefer the narcotized state of the world of sound bites and meaningless visual glitter currently raining down upon us? Has our ability to think become so much confetti?

Soundbite: In film and broadcasting a soundbite is a very short piece of footage taken from a longer speech or an interview in which someone with authority or the average "man on the street" says something which is considered by those who edit the speech or interview to be the most important point. As the context of what is being said is missing, the insertion of soundbites into news broadcasts or documentaries is open to manipulation and thus requires a very high degree of journalistic ethics. Politicians of the new generation are carefully coached by their spin doctors to produce on-demand sound bites which are clear and to the point.

Professor Ayer, referred to above, formulated that a sentence can only be meaningful if it has verifiable empirical import, otherwise it is either "analytical" if tautologous, or "metaphysical" (i.e. meaningless, or "literally senseless"). (Wikipedia).

Don't be daunted by all this. Get with it. Support writing as a tool for thinking. The essay form remains an unexcelled platform to teach thinking and to test it in others. How many of us "numerate bean counters" are truly literate?

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Suicide according to Jan Wenner and Montaigne

Jann Wenner on the Charlie Rose interview program commented on the late, provocative (read gonzo journalist*) Hunter S. Thompson's death by suicide. Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone magazine and producer of an oral biography of Thompson, spoke thoughtfully on the profound subject which also intrigued the 16th Century writer Michel de Montaigne.


A little back-and-forth between Wenner and Montaigne might interest us:

Wenner: He (Thompson) was a comic genius; he loved the character he made (even if) it took him over; he became a cartoon character." (Cartoonist Garry Trudeau invented the character "Duke" after Thompson). Click for "Duke" bytes for the gonzo journalist. In the end, (Thompson) was suffering from drink, drugs, and a terrible fall disabling him with a broken leg, preventing him from walking very well.

Montaigne: That Monsieur Thompson took writing seriously is a good means by which to judge him. How else but by the assay of art can we know ourselves? However, that he abused the drink proved poor, for the worst estate of man, is where he loseth the knowledge and government of himself'.

Wenner: Nevertheless, it all had a bad effect on the guy. He was a very debilitated person who struggled physically helping you to understand why he decided to commit suicide. It got to the point where life just wasn't fun anymore."

Montaigne: "Fun." I don't know the word. I will agree that if thou livest in paine and sorrow, thy base courage is the cause of it, to die there wanteth but will, and M. Thompson had much of it. To extreme sickness, extreme remedies, certainly.

(Being a skeptic and the inventor of the essay, which permits a testing of many ideas, Montaigne might add):

Montaigne: But this goeth not without some contradiction, for many are of the opinion, that without the express commandement of him, that hath placed us in this world, we may by no meanes forsake the garrison (responsibility) of it, and that it is in the hands of God only, who therein hath placed us, not for our selves alone, but for his glory, and others service, when ever it shall please him to discharge us hence, and not for us to take leave....
(pause)
You understand, it is a particular infirmitie and which is not seen in any other creature to carelessly set ourselves at naught...it is of like vanitie, that we desire to be other, than we are."
Wenner: Yes, Hunter had vanity, yet he suffered physically and emotionally at the end, and he found himself unuseful.

Montaigne: Once more, "fun" I don't know, but "useful," I think shows some purpose. Being humbled before lesser figures, this I understand. And again, to avoid a worse death, a man should take it at his own pleasure."

It is important to note that when Montaigne provides numerous examples of suicide in the history he cites, the suicides usually occur because of some political misfortune where one might have to endure torture and eventual death at the hands of an enemy who lacked virtue. Our perception of virtue differs from the ancients whom Montaigne refers to.

*Gonzo journalism is a style of storytelling that mixes factual events into a fictional tale. It uses a highly subjective style that often includes the reporter as part of the story via a first person narrative; events can be exaggerated in order to emphasize the underlying message. (Wikipedia English).

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