Strangelish

I am a word nerd, a fanboy of William Safire who made a living writing words about words. With his "On Language" column for NYT and books such as The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time, No Uncertain Terms and Take My Word For It, he set the standard for erudition.  What a great gig.  (William Safire died in 2009).

According the the OED, English has 171,476 words in current use + another 47,156 that are classified as obsolete. Including obsolete, Olde English, multiple forms of words ... you get over a million. You probably know 20,000 - 40,000. 

English's longest word is a medical diagnosis - of course. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (look it up. It's on page 625-629 in your dictionary)

There's a 2-way tie for shortest word.

These are a few of my favorite words.

Dohicky - as I age seems I am always finding one of these

Fika - slow down and appreciate. (Visit the Fika Cafe in the American Swedish Institute)

Quixotic - exceedingly idealistic, a la Don Quixote

Unleave - what happens to trees in the fall or a creative way to say 'return'
Lede - and you always thought it was lead.

Copasetic - my father's favorite word. How are you?  Copasetic.

Invaluable - as in accurate/inaccurate.  You are 'invaluable' may not mean what you think.

Procrastination - become good at this and you need be good at nothing else

Dicker - derived from the Latin decum.  Bargaining for a lot of 10 items.

Gerrymander - from Elbridge Gerry's electoral maps 1800.  Curses upon him.

Bailiwick - everyone should have one

Bedlam -  see also: a London prison

Fudge - a fine example of a double meaning word

Canard -  no not the shipping line

Miscreant -  an excellent behavioral condemnation word (see also: scofflaw)

Nabob - made infamous by Spiro Agnew's "... nattering nabobs of negativism".

Malaprop - see 'foot in mouth'

Diphthong - sounds like an insult, but no ..

Schadenfreude - a character flaw in the most of us

Onomatopeia  / Catamaran  / Rigamarole - fun to say

Serendipity - see also: Eureka 

Language of course is the combination of words. 

And so we move on to phrases.

Fat Chance - see also: Slim Chance.

Sticky Wicket  - see also: Wicked Googly

Ill at ease

The Sounds of Silence

Aim to please

On the fritz - see also: Gone haywire

Skate to the puck

...

Which leads to poetry.

"She walks in beauty like the night ..."  Byron

"One equal temper of heroic hearts ..."  Tennyson

"The Lord to me a shepherd is ..."  Psalm

"Lord, thank you for the goddamned birds singing ..."  Lux

"A people sometimes will step back from war: elect an honest man; decide they care ..." Pugh 

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone ..." Wilcox

"When your father dies, say the Irish, you lose your umbrella against bad weather ..." 

Der-Hovanessian

Which leads to the ultimate: novels.  Here's my 2021 favs list.

Copyright ©  2021  Dave Hoplin 

 

The Quirky Cup

The Quirky Cup

Every Thanksgiving, Patrick Reusse, sports columnist for the Star Tribune, would offer up his "Turkey of the Year" award, given to the year's most egregious sports fail, usually a Minnesotan. This award went defunct in 2017 but made a brief reappearance in 2020 . 

To fill the gap I am instituting a coveted new award, The Quirky Cup, to be awarded to that person who has exhibited the most consistent quirky behavior, one prone to behaving in strange, sometimes comical but mostly harmless ways. We have more than enough celebrity awards, it's time to honor the common man.

The inaugural 2021 award will go back in time to my childhood memories and tap the robust history of quirky folk from my little home town of Lowry.

The Candidates.

The Lowry School  served grades 1-8. In the 50's, Lloyd was the principal and 7th-8th grade teacher. Every teacher had 2 grades, a staff of 4.  (That's my Lowry School math education at work.)  Lloyd had pets that he brought with him to school. Every noon, he would drive around town in his '52 Dodge with one of the pets at the steering wheel.  Quirky. He was also a target for the 8th grade yahoo boys. They apparently thought it was funny to plug the Dodge's tailpipe with a potato.  Lloyd drove it home that way, sputtering down Hedlin's Hill. Quirked.

Boo had an old Studebaker with "suicide doors", rear doors that swung opposite of a normal 4-door. He'd give kids rides. In one frightening case, taking a corner at reckless speed, the rear door popped and Johnny went rolling out into a ditch. Yikes. Boo on another instance put a railroad spike on the tracks and nearly derailed a train.Yikes. Soo Line didn't think so and sent a detective to Lowry to investigate. He also played chicken with a school bus, driving at it on the wrong side of the road. Yikes. A bit beyond Quirky.

Arnold was a world-class ditch digger. My father relied on him when the village installed city sewer and water lines to all homes within the village limits. He was also a accomplished grave digger. Perfect vertical 6' deep rectangles to receive the casket. I never heard Arnold speak - but I did hear him laugh. He liked to prank. My father was stranded on the canopy of the hardware store when the ladder somehow disappeared with Arnold walking away chuckling. Arnold would also spend hours rocking back and forth from back foot to front standing by McIver's store.  Quirky.

There was a window well about 5' deep on the south side of the bank, covered by a metal grate. Howard would drop coins through the grate on random summer days and watch laughing from across the street while kids tried to retrieve the nickels. Quirky. Big Time was the king of coin harvesting as he had a long stick handy and chewed baseball card bubble gum. A model Boy Scout. 

Doc Wright managed the Lowry town team in the mid-50's. Tubba was the batboy. They made a trip to a Benson sporting goods store to buy some bats. On the way back to Lowry, Tubba told the Doc that black bats were bad luck. He immediately turned back to Benson and swapped the black bat for a standard Louisville Slugger.  Quirky.

Before the separate cafeteria building was built, the school lunch room was in the basement. Along the ceiling above the steps leading down to the lunch room were exposed steam pipes. The temptation to tear down the steps and leap to swing on the pipe was overwhelming to some. Kenny jumped and missed, landing on his back to some ill-effect. No more pipe swinging.  Quirked.

The school bell tower room doubled as the nurses office, although there was no nurse. During a time of a flu epidemic, Big Time told the teacher he felt sick and was sent to the "Nurses Office" and told to take his temp. He held the thermometer against a steam pipe - 103°F.  “You get right home and don't come back until you have a normal temp”. Creative truancy.

There are a number of Spook stories that are NSFW - or anywhere else for that matter. Extreme quirky.

Gary would walk all over town on stilts made from 16’ 2x4's. He stood 8-10' off the ground.  How he got on/off those things is a mystery. And how he avoided breaking his neck is another. Quirky.

Courtesy of Davey. On Halloween, Bennie & I would cover the town twice. I had a Sylvester the cat costume. After the first round, we would change costumes. At Loftingmoes, Mrs Loftingmoe said: "You've been here before. You're that little fat kid that's was here before." Ha. That ended it. 

Hank operated a small grocery store in the former Farmer's & Mechanics Bank that had failed during the Great Depression. He lived there and slept in the vault. He also stashed cash in cereal boxes. Quirky.

Lee the Barber somehow managed to procure the Lowry bank president's chair for his waiting area, the bank president who committed suicide in that chair, the chair with the bullet hole. Freaky Quirky.

There was a local braggart named Mitchell, just discharged from the Great War, who claimed he was the best shot in the county. Dave set up a contest with targets against some hay bales. Unbeknownst, Dave had positioned a few sticks of dynamite behind the bulls-eye. 

Hank Applequist was a traveling salesman and every time he arrived in Lowry he invariable made a beeline to the basement to use the hardware’s toilet facilities. On one occasion he discovered the toilet covered with what turned out to be peanut butter. Dave, the mischievous prankster.

I’m sure you noticed that all these candidates are men or boys. That is a pity, but it is just a testimony to the limited knowledge of feminine wonkiness of the nominating committee. Submit your nominees for the 2022 award - of either sex. You do not have to limit yourself to Lowry. Feel free to range as far as Farwell, Starbuck or New Prairie. Contribute in the comments section!

And the 2021 Award goes to ... drum roll ...

Runner-up:  Hank the Grocer

Winner: Lee the Barber.

Copyright ©  2021  Dave Hoplin 

There is no Planet B - Postscript

The Glasgow COP26 Climate Summit is over.  Unfortunately, it met my expectations.  Expecting politicians to gather and come up with the dramatic action the warming world requires appears to be a delusion. 

The one-word change in a declaration on coal usage tells you all you need to know. "The conference ended on a sour note when delegates from China and India proposed a last-minute change to crucial text around moving away from coal, saying they would agree only to “phase-down unabated coal,” rather than “phase out.”

Some sorry outcomes.

• Climate experts state that the COP26 actions will shave 0.1°C off.  “The 1.5C goal was already on life support before Glasgow and now it’s about time to declare it dead,” Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheim . “There is no plausible way to limit warming to 1.5 or even 2 [degrees] if coal is not phased out ... and as rapidly as possible, along with oil and gas,” Jon Sterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 

•  The United Nations calculated that to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, countries need to cut their emissions in half by 2030. Emissions are now going up, not down, by about 14% since 2010,  United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa said. 

• The final agreement at COP26 did recognize the scientific reality that putting the brakes on climate change will require nations to speed efforts to cut emissions soon, rather than merely commit to far off “net zero” targets.

So the world was asking these questions of the Glasgow conference: 

1. Can nations muster the political will to deliver on the soaring rhetoric that marked the summit’s start? 
2.  Can COP26 mark the start of a “decisive” decade to turn the tide on global warming? 
3. Can the lurching progress of these annual conferences keep pace with the problem they were designed to solve?  

Grade: F or D- if you're feeling generous.

And here's a couple further depressing items end to this post. 

• Shortly upon the close of COP26, the US Government is proceeding with the largest offshore oil & gas leasing in history.
• White House negotiators and a group of senators struck a deal on a bipartisan infrastructure agreement on Thursday that slashes measures to combat climate change

We must demand more from our leaders. We are betraying our grandchildren.

Further reading:  There Is No Planet B 

Addenda: December 2021. The Build Back Better bill, containing ~$500B towards climate initiatives is dead, with a single senator blocking its passage. American leadership in the climate crisis is non-existent.   

Copyright ©  2021  Dave Hoplin 

Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics

Mark Twain, or perhaps Benjamin Disraeli, is credited with the proclamation:  "Lies, damned lies and statistics" which cleverly warns of the dangers of misinformation.  Sounds more like Twain to me. Of course, we're all aware that 79% of all statistics are false. [I jest, I hope you realize.]

Were Twain alive today, I am sure he would have something insightful to offer on "gaslighting", which is putting forth false narratives to deceive and make people doubt their own perceptions, a bright light on a topic intended to blind. It's an epidemic in our country. It's so common you likely don't realize it is operating on you.

Big tobacco wrote the book on truth denial and propaganda to block efforts to expose the hazards of smoking.  Deny, deny, deny.  Find (and pay) scientists to testify that smoking is not a health hazard.  e.g. "Cigarettes may cause lung cancer, heart disease and other health problems, but the evidence is not conclusive."  Over time big tobacco gradually confessed there might be a case for smoking causing cancer but new “low tar” products and then vaping, mitigate the hazards.  It’s a pattern that other industries have copied over and over, depending on the power of a repeated lie until it becomes truth in peoples' minds. 

And so, from climate change deniers we get, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role.”

The old style gas lighters wanted to establish a level of doubt in your mind. But the new-form gaslighting wants you to believe fantastical conspiracies - and demonizes anyone who dares call them out as false. So anti-vaxers - politicians and radio talk hosts in particular - claim that the pandemic is fake, or Bill Gates is putting nanobots in each dose, or that the jab is the Biblical “mark of the beast”.  And this malarkey get accepted by millions of people. It beggars belief.

Social media makes these disinformation efforts even easier and more troubling, as we the people propagate false statements, intentionally or ignorantly, through our comments, likes and shares. A recent 60 Minutes segment interviewed a Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen, who revealed internal documents showing that Facebook's algorithms encouraged hateful and angry interchanges.  Hate attracts more engagement and hence more ad revenue than the professed defense of family values stance. Facebook's motto is "Move fast and break things".  Comforting business model, eh?

In response to the whistleblower claims, Zuckerberg in his best Spock impersonation stated:“the argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical.” Except that it's not. If the goal is to maximize Facebook's profit, accomplished by increased engagement by more people, making people angry is deeply logical.  Hate is stronger than love as Steve Bannon famously advised. Hate and anger equals more posts, more outrageous comments, more likes, more shares, more ad money.

Americans used to hold to the "common good". But these days, the common good is pretty uncommon, relegated to the dusty confines of philosophy classes.  A good read on the subject - the Constitution - has a great outline for achieving the common good.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Importantly, the first 3 words of our Constitution’s Preamble are "We the People". Not we the government, not we the states, not we the political parties, not we the Facebook. We the people. We are responsible for assuring the rights of all are respected, regardless of race, color or creed, and that truth wins out. Our nation needs to remember how it felt to work toward a common - meaning for everyone - good.  We need to stop shouting, start thinking and look for common ground, common good.

We could start by adopting a commitment to truth and a touch of civility.

Copyright ©  2021  Dave Hoplin