Thanks, Donny T.

5 December 2025 Leave a comment

Schools that I attended many years ago were effectively segregated, as were neighborhoods, businesses, and the like. Yet, all the people of color I encountered as a child were caring, even loving, and it seemed to me, indispensable to our daily lives. I was left one morning with our Black “cleaning lady.” I played with her daughters, and later, I petitioned to return to play again, as we had had fun. I was told mildly, “No, you don’t play with them.” This came from the same voice that had left me in the care of Thelma and her daughters, while he undertook some other activity. I asked why, but was stonewalled with, “Well, you don’t.”

That’s when I learned — at 6 or 7 — that there was a rule of discrimination, which like most rules and laws were given me no reason. I was restrained by command and ignorance. It wasn’t a conscious turning point in my world view, but it did pull back the curtain to reveal the dark wizardry of the world. Kept ignorant and constrained, I would be compliant. What my father overlooked in his young son was that I was not of a compliant character. I was independent and frankly irreverent. And I am thankful for that. I was never the poor creature trapped in authority and blinded by ignorance.

In the years since, I have made a point of seeking out places and people who are different from me. I discovered that cultural differences are fascinating and enlightening. Every difference is another color of life, making a rich and vibrant world. Yet in my retirement years, I seem to have relaxed my efforts to encounter differences and have somewhat lost the joy of learning. I know this makes my life more bland, and not learning is not living. However, Donald Trump and his gang of culture thugs have come to my rescue.

By going after Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the Trump Gang has reawakened my interest and energies for these very things. The voice of the authoritarian commanding ignorance has once more pulled back the curtain. Knowing that Donald Trump is just wrong, reassures me in my belief that diversity, equity and inclusion are essential, not just in the institutions, workplaces and marketplaces. These values are the pathways for all of us to a rich and thriving country, and ultimately, to such a world.

A daunting prospect, I agree, but dreams of reaching beyond our grasp are essential to extending that grasp to richer ends. Thanks, Donny T. You seem to have backed your ass into the fan again.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Can Humanity Be Digitized?

10 November 2025 Leave a comment

In the years before AI, when search engines simply scanned the Web, I told my tenth grade lit students that I’d give A’s to students whose analytical essays on a piece revealed something we hadn’t discussed in class and for which they had produced clear textual evidence. My principal suggested I was giving out too few A’s. I pointed out that I didn’t give grades, they were earned. I showed students ways to approach literature and assess the strength of the conclusions at which they arrived. My students earned plenty of A’s, mostly, I think, because they felt really good about what they were writing and how ‘smart’ they felt.

I wonder how an AI system would handle a request for an, as yet, unearth thesis in – say – the Ramayana. Of course, the AI’s ‘class discussion’ must have been very extensive, but under these or any other circumstances, could the bot postulate and support a novel conclusion?

Classical reportage covers who, what, where, when and, to some extent how. The why of things may only be taken from the heard words of someone other than the reporter. The good reporter would not have speculated. Incorporating events external to the reported incident and used as an analysis would also have been opinion, as in this writing.

If AI systems are collecting, and when appropriate, citing existing data, then they’re simply doing research. Citing sources would be good. Citing would provide some basis for authenticating the factual quality of the information. What about the intangibles? On what rubrics can AI systems evaluate the strength or weakness on ranges in the nonphysical realm? How can they scale loosely defined abstractions, such as liberty, respect or love?

My students had the words in the book, the strategies I had shared with them and 16 years or so of gathering data and experiencing feelings. They put it together. Their real intelligence allowed them outstanding insights – insights and the skill at arriving at them that I hope they have carried into life.

Asimov’s writing from half a century ago mocks the self-accolades of AI engineering. STEM was once a theme in the humanities. Now it is trying to generate its own humanity. Will it supplant us along the way? Are we the primitives in this evolutionary leap into Artificial Humanities? And what does that even mean? Can humanity be digitized?

—————————————————————————————————————————

This article suggests that far from supporting creative discovery in its own function, it stifles such thinking in its users’ generative cognition. “How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot,’” New York Times, Nov. 10, 2025 [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/ai-social-media-brain-rot.html]

Filed under Critical thinking, Education Policy, Literary Criticism, Social Commentary Tagged with , , , ,

Want to Be a Millionaire?

8 November 2025 Leave a comment

If there were a quadrillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000,000) in the economy and it were split evenly across 400 million citizens, each would hold two and a half million dollars. (I don’t hold even half that amount.) If, however, just one thousand of the people each held a billion dollars, the rest of us would now only have $249,750.06 – about one tenth of what we would have had. Since I hold more than that quarter million amount, as do many others, there isn’t much left for the poorest half of us.

Simplistic? Oh, yes, but clearly demonstrates how big figure incomes could suck the life out of the people. Much of the money goes back into circulation, of course, but much of it just gets passed around among the rich as investments and acquisitions. Billionaires are not shopping at the little store on the corner of your block or buying rounds for the workers at the local bar or putting books in your kids’ school.

Of course, this is only reëstablishing the distribution of wealth and power inherited down from tribal chieftains who enlisted a few lieutenants to coerce the women, children and weaker men – the human resource – to grow the foods, find the materials, make the goods and provide the services that the warrior-class masters demanded. We call that “primitive.” It sounds pretty contemporary to me.

Sure, there have been some popular uprisings – peasant revolts. Even among those churning convolutions, we find the big pieces rising to the top in the cesspool for revolution. Those primitive urges aren’t going to be extinguished by any humane rationalism. The question isn’t, “Nature or nurture?” The question is, “Visceral or cerebral?” Aristotle got it. Donald Trump gets it.

Filed under Economic issues, Politics, Social Commentary

Literacy for the Information Age

21 September 2025 Leave a comment

The radio has informed me that Minneapolis Schools will be putting, more perhaps, emphasis on the teaching of literacy. In our inundation of marketed information, bromides such as “literacy for the information age” present a puzzle for the close reader or listener. What does it all mean? It sounds good.

First is the matter of the flooded environment. There are so many impressive words, catchy phrases and glib statements – market-speak – around that both the audience of such noise and its producers simply take it as the norm. This is how it should sound, because it is how it sounds. A fairly circular understanding of reality. I like to think of it as ‘surround sound.’ Our verbal reality is that by which we are surrounded in all directions, as if floating inside a beach ball of sound, the walls made of clever but vapid words, phrases and statements. The language of these walls defines our new grammar – the syntax and lexicon of a new spoken and printed reality. And the new language only superficially resembles the old. For example, a word such as “iconic” is now used much like the word “very.” It is simply a hollow intensifier with misty connotations of the classical, classiness and – thanks to Apple Computer’s accurate use of the root word, “icon” – digital1. Do we remember the original meaning of the word “icon?” What does that say about an iconic new idea?

So here we are inside this planet sized ball of clever, if vapid, verbiage. We look out at it, and if we are thinking people, we ask of any one statement, “What does that actually mean?” The reasoning is typically open-ended or circular. Statements from the same source are often just highly polished contradictions. And many statements seem inconsistent with our experienced reality.

We return to the promotion of a new emphasis on teaching literacy, “literacy for the information age.” How can literacy be considered more important now than it has been for the last hundred years, as the speaker for Minneapolis Schools suggests? The phrase sounds good. Is education policy to be based on a skewed, empty catchphrase?

Perhaps electronic text documents actually use a different dialect of English that uses a different syntax and a different lexicon. I have to admit, it often seems as if they do. I had thought it was a case of the producers’ use of social media-speak and thumb-writing; they were just semi-literate. Perhaps, this is the very form of English in which we need to be fluent in order to function well in this “information age.” It is not however; it is simply a corruption of the language.

Literacy is as important as ever in this “disinformation age.” The literate demanding of clarity and precision helps us see through the glittering spin of cleaver words and phrases. Literacy should be, as it always has been, the ability to see what the words, alone and in complex combinations represent, not just how they sound.2 The utterance, “Literacy for the information age,” is a misrepresentation of an essential understanding of any education.

The saddest thing about the idea that reading literacy is especially important in the current environs is that we do so little of it. So many more of the words that are directed at us are spoken, mostly recorded. Spoken language seldom exceeds a middle school level of literacy, even among highly educated people. Reading varied and challenging text is, on the other hand, how we develop not just a broader lexicon. It also increases cognitive strength; it helps build dendrites. When we read broadly, we become smarter.

1      Have you thought about the source of the word digital? Perhaps we should use the term “the binary age” in reference to computing code. Is it because we use our ten digits on a keyboard. We use two thumbs to “text” something.

2      I hasten to make the allowance the sound of language in poetry and even prose. Here is the place for the subtle to be enlightened and enshrined in therich sound of the spoken words, where the words tap emotions as well as deepening lucidity.

Filed under Critical thinking, Education Policy, Literary Criticism, Social Commentary Tagged with , , , , ,

Let’s Play the Game-of-Life

4 July 2025 Leave a comment

Giving $15 or $20 to a hundred candidates by hundreds of thousands of people, while probably necessary, isn’t what will break the oligarchic locomotive. It hasn’t been the winning element in many races; it has simply been pay-to-play for candidates. The DNC needs to understand that the party and its cash-pile aren’t what wins and loses elections. It’s voters – living beings.

That money has always been so important is pretty well-established. We are so deeply immersed in our nearly universal belief the money is how we measure ourselves and others, that when we ask, “What are worth?” we don’t mean, “How much do you contribute to your various communities?” We don’t mean “How are you doing with the condition of your soul?” We mean, “How much have you got in the bank?” I once saw a church that had opened in an old bank building. How poignant!
We aren’t all this way. Some individuals are or have been in the past. Perhaps when they die, they should have their remains buried in a safe-deposit box. Oh, wait! They do. They call that bank a mausoleum. Maybe that should be “mau$oleum.” However, for much of the world and a lot of the U.S., this is how it is – some living humans and some walking ATM’s. The point is, more money isn’t going to be the critical straw that breaks the oligarchs’ back. What is going to be required is that all the people who understand that we are not worth any amount of money.

Money isn’t worth anything. Money is paper. Money is numbers recorded is electrons. Money is the set of pieces in a Game-of-Life. Money is not really real.

The greedy have for millennia gathered up all they could of the necessities of our corporeal lives—food, clothing and shelter – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—fenced it in, guarded it with a chosen few—knights, armies, oligarchs—and dispensed something like Monopoly money. If one gave much or all of what one had or produced, one could be given a few such money tokens to buy back some of the products of their own labor. The masters in the castles—the rich, rationalized by the notion that “Greed is good.” (Calvinism)—need only figure out how to keep the masses sufficiently oblivious to the real rules of the game. “Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.” (B. Franklin – maybe) The cleverest part is that, even today we, who produce the wealth, are all allowed to deceive ourselves—believe ourselves empowered by using our tokens among one another, just like the big boys.

When did this start? Somewhere between the cave and the Bible – give or take. And what do we do about it now? We give tokens received from the masters, for our production of their goods and services, to campaign funds that we hope will get people elected who will change that distribution of wealth. Why would one think that? Money is not leadership, but it is power, if we allow it to be. The exchange of money is the game of the rich. Exchanging a little money to change the rules for the real exchange of money is probably doomed to failure.

How likely is it that one who is elected going to change any part of the system he thinks got him elected? After all, how often have people in positions of power been successful in altering the exchange of money as they said they would – or even, would have liked to have done, after being elected? How likely are we to know the real feeling of someone running for office in any case? Might they not be just as blind as anyone else to seeing the contrast of worth and wealth? Soul and credit score? How many politicians have simply lied to us outright about what they planned to do for us and how it would benefit us? How many have simply lied repeatedly?
Marx actually did have something right. Take money out of the system altogether and let government coordinate the production and welfare of it all. All players win. Nice idea; works in the commune, but Lenin demonstrated that it breaks down at scale. Communism is almost a conspiracy theory now. Did what they said ever really happen? It may have happened in name, but there was never any real economic breakthrough. It was just a novel venture in tyranny.

“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” —
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

The vulnerability in this system is ignorance then. Tyranny of any kind depends on ignorance. The master will always attack the enlightened and when trying to gain control will go after the informed. Killing off the educated might be a little awkward, however. Some of those educated might be the ones carrying out such a task. Oops. A better approach is to pull back resources to schools, control the media, make college only for the already rich. This is one way to help secure one’s dictatorship.

To change the situation will take time. To change the situation will take thinking. To change the situation will take patience. To change the situation will take a whole lot of committed people. People need to be talking to people – talking one-on-one, in small groups, on zoom conversations. People need to be talked with, not at, not to. People need not be told what to do, unless they ask. Being told what to do erodes trust. People need to be helped to understand what might or will happen, why that might happen, when, where and to whom. The press can’t do anything like the job of achieving this when no person, neighbor or friend is talking with them about it. People can certainly disagree about expectations or opinions, but facts are facts. Facts can be denied, as they often are, even when they’re biting one on the nose. And people should be encouraged to ask candidates about issues they have with what they hear. Mostly people should be encouraged to demand of candidates and representative when they are not there answering questions, “Why not?” Even if all one can do is to help people understand how the Game-of-Life economy works in broad strokes and how it has been in play though out history, one has moved the dial. So, yes, it will take more than one. People need to understand the basic rules of the game, because, like it or not, we are all players in the game. It is not a strategy to change votes; it is a strategy to level the playing field. It is a strategy to help restore any semblance of real democracy. Information – the truth makes players stronger.

Blaming and shaming and collecting campaign contributions will accomplish little to change things. Democracy depends on an informed electorate. Give up on monetized isolation voting. Build community. Some will not come, not listen, not anything. Well, they won’t. The ones that do show up and do listen and do think will therefore gain right away. Inform people. Empower them. They will make the right choices, and they will look for and deserve the right results.

Filed under Reflections

Is the ship sinking?

4 May 2025 Leave a comment

There is an article from The Guardian (“Trump’s Truth Social posts make no sense – what do they say about his mentality?”) that looks at Chairman Trump’s mental state through his social media. One of those “funny if it were not so frightening” things. I’ve long harbored pity for what it must feel like to be him, but it appears he might not have the mental clarity to see his own suffering. After all, his agony may be his driving force; it seems it’s all he knows. So, it must feel normal, even correct.

While I would never willingly kill anyone, I have actually wished Trump were dead. I think now that it would be better if he somehow just faded away. Maybe he could have a stroke or be found wandering the grounds of the White house naked and then be quietly institutionalized. Whoever took over couldn’t be any worse, but they could be worse at “it,” I guess. The hope would be that the chaos Trump’s shattered mind has sown would then infect the regime itself, disrupting if not paralyzing it.

I don’t fear Trump will be the next Putin or Xi, as he is clearly not as astute nor as coherent as either of them. Trump doesn’t see that he is trying to make a new government while governing from the crumbling remains of the old government. A government recycler. A one-man revolution. The task is way beyond any apparent capacity of the man, and it seems very unlikely that he has any grasp of the scope of such a thing. Trump and his band of sycophants are attempting to recycle the ship of state from the damaged pieces of the old craft while sailing the high seas, full steam ahead. Yet as can be seen from his Truth posts, his thinking is so disjointed and delusional, not to mention superficial, that we’re heading for a serious shipwreck.

I’m not without hope, but I’m expecting irreversible change. The damage has been done to the hull, however, and the ship of state is taking on water. Unless all efforts are made to save our ship, we’re going to go down. “All efforts” are not, I believe, any longer likely in the Divided State of America. There is not an “All” in our country anymore.

 

All things are mortal. Even the mountain crumble back toward the seas. Who are we to think that anything we make or do or are will last forever. Everything is subject to the laws of physics. The tension between order and entropy is everything: the overarching universal driving force. Change is constant; stasis is nonexistent. All of us — you, me, Trump, Jesus – are in constant change in every way from everyone and everything else. Who or what we are at any moment is defined but those changing relationships to everything else. We are all as motes in a massive dust storm.

In the kitchen sink, a molecule of detergent can reach out and grasp a molecule of water with one hand and a molecule of pork fat with another, and they can flow away together down to the drain to grey-water afterlife. If this linking doesn’t happen, the water molecule may evaporate, leaving the fat and detergent unbound to fend for themselves. These two, bound to one another, may just be left behind on the empty sink bottom – in housekeeping purgatory. No one goes to the Grey Haven that day. The bonding is order; the failure to bond or have a bond be broken is the effect of chaos. Yet time and change will go on for each of these molecules, other bonds will form and be broken, over and over, until the end of all things.

We worry mightily over one washing up. We experience those few “seconds” that could be any time in the sink, in the world in a migration, in our minds in an agreement called a country. We can’t choose the coming in nor usually our going out. Over time we have some opportunities to reach out our hand and bond with other people, things, places, activities. We have some control over these bonds, but that is still very little control in the greater scheme of things. Yes, there are those who can cast shockwaves that break bonds and also form others, and other nonhuman forces create shockwaves, but shock waves are not bonds. Shockwaves threaten bonds; so, if we value our bonds, we must hold tightly. Individuals who send out chaotic shockwaves may be, and I believe often are, lightly bonded, even unbonded — isolated in their own universe and frequently, if unknowingly, very lonely.

Holding out hope may be donning a robe of futility. Engaging in the orderly holding tightly to what we have will resist change, but change will still happen. Otherwise, the only way to resist change is with active resistance – sending out one’s own shockwaves. That, of course, may precipitate retaliatory shockwaves aimed at breaking your hold on what and whom you hold on to. Aligning with many others to create a more shocking impact may be strategic. Yet, this may get an enlarged blowback and a greater challenge to many more close bonds. For every thinking individual, there must be a reckoning of what is at stake and what there is to gain. There will be change and it may be challenging. Bonds may well be broken. Of course, in time, all things will be wiped away. In the meantime, how to respond is always based in speculation. “Time will heal all wounds.” “When good people do nothing, bad things happen.” “It can’t happen here.” “People only change when it hurts.”

Is the ship sinking? Have you counted the lifeboats?

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with

The ‘Most Pro-Crypto President’ in History

14 December 2024 Leave a comment

Eric Trump Promises the ‘Most Pro-Crypto President’ in History

This headline from the December 14th New York Times speaks reams about the mist of words and ideas that have drifted across our country. The president in this headline is Donald Trump, of course. According to US News, “Cryptocurrencies began to gain traction in the United States around 2009 with the launch of Bitcoin…” What does that tell us about this statement?

Well, let’s look back. The current President, Biden, is ending his term this year. The president before that was – Oh, well, Donald Trump, of course, and he can’t really be more famous than himself. The president before that was Barack Obama, whose first term began in 2009, the year of the Bitcoin launch. All three of these presidents expressed caution, at least, about issues such as privacy, anonymity, and accountability. Even Donald Trump, with a record of financial wrong doing, was skeptical during his time in office.

So, what does this headline really say? Does a quarter of a century really represent a significant period of history? We can hardly imagine what another moneyed president, such as George Washington, thought about the matter. Was skepticism not reasonable for these “historic” presidents? Well, let’s see – billions of dollars worth of something like credit assigned to electronically stored digital numbers which fluctuated in value according to their appeal for or disregard of an anonymous body-financial? Ponzi? How many individuals – even those in financial sectors of the government or your living room – actually understand the prestidigital miracle of the fluid value of swirling electrons? Skepticism seems prudent.

The sad thing about the headline is what is suggests about the audience to whom it is directed. Those who are adherents of the idea of crypto-finance must be joyous at what sounds like free rein. Those who admire their incoming president but are not financial tycoons could feel more confident about exchanging much of their electronic bank dollars into cryptocurrencies, which after all is not much different than putting one’s savings into high-risk/high-gain stocks. Everyone will get rich – except the skeptics, of course.

Filed under Reflections Tagged with , ,

Autumn in the Marsh

28 October 2024 Leave a comment

One red leaf among the once green,
before a threatening, clouded sky.

One leaf among all this dying
and brown and fading foliage.

One calm thing among the noise
of the highway, the gun shots,
the jet engines, the dry winds.

One red leaf among the once green,
above the fetid and receding marsh.

One leaf among all this drying
of the broken branches and grass.

One bright thing among the browns
of the caked mud, the bare ground,
the empty nest, the flying dust.

One red leaf fluttering in the breeze.

Why does this one red leaf
so proudly beam its rapture,
when it knows
it too will soon fail and fall?

Filed under Poetry, Reflections, Social Commentary

Is it just Zenglish?

19 June 2024 Leave a comment

Over the past decade or two, there has emerged into the popular parlance a slough of word variations which are cute, unnecessary, obscure and often simply wrong. Some of these are amusing; some quite inane. Most appear to arise from a cute twist, escaping a jumbled grasp of the English lexicon, to a fatuous flirtation with the sound of a word, unrelated to its actual meaning.

A word most notable in this regard is probably iconic, the adjective form of the noun icon. The word descends from classical Greek through Latin basically unchanged into English. An icon is an image, either visual or imagined, that represent a person, spirit, or even just an actionable abstraction which when appealed to is inhabited by that person, spirit or concept. The icon itself becomes a proxy of that which it represents and allows the viewer to commune with that which is being viewed. Think of it as something like the image of a face on a video link, not the actual person, but an in-person proxy image. Apple got it right when it introduced icons to their Macintosh computer screen. Touch it with your proxy-finger – clicking the mouse cursor – and it connects you to an interactive program. The word is ‘classy’ as it comes from ancient languages and sounds erudite, and it’s trendy as it emerges from Apple’s magical appeal. So, how can one “experience an iconic river journey”? American news has certainly taken the bait.

The Lakers great Jerry West is dead at 86. He was a literal icon of pro basketball: His silhouette is on the N.B.A. logo.

New York Times, Wednesday, June 12, 2024

The poor man has been reduced to a wooden triptych or perhaps a moss-covered statue? Well, he did play for the Lakers, a team name recognizing Los Angeles, the city of Lakes. Wait – what lakes? Words can deceive.

Language is a living thing. It has grown, merged, shed its tired and ignored parts altogether, and it has added words from without and within. Such contortions of the language, such as the one above, typically arise from generational slang, the secret, rebellious language of youth. In the forties and fifties, we played adolescent games with spelling. Quick became kwik, in a time of expansion and relative wealth when time was precious, speed was valued, and shorthand was the common. Also, this must have seemed cute and clever. In the sixties and seventies, we capture phrases from film, television, and cultural vernaculars, often echoed in the film and television. The culture sets, civil rights, racial poverty, drug use and the Viet Nam War, emerged into public attention, and youth reacted to these social issues, as youth typically do, in their opinions and in their language. The eighties and nineties were the decades of rising consumerism and for youth with expectations for college or facing sidelining to grunt-work. Americans became more deeply class determined based on levels of education and income goals. We began to speak two languages and used them to solidify our identities.

Non-Standard English was left to vibrant “under classes,” and the privileged “educated” rallied around the Standard. Crossing over, the “standards” toyed with the patois of the “non-standards,” somewhat daringly playing with fire. Conversely, the “non-standards” saw the use of Standard English as uncool, even disloyal, as attempts at “passing.” This muddying of social dialects and 19th century standards, as is apparent in this paragraph, is certainly characteristic of the vitality and growing pains of the language, and as English has evolved over the last millennium, our predecessors must have experienced this vitality and these growing pains as well. Words and phrases have been shifted or integrated into our usage well enough, but not always. Some have, thankfully, been expelled. Far out, man!

Here is an example of a slightly famous shift:

         Normality => Normalcy

Normality has, for several centuries, meant a state of normal or typical conditions. President Harding campaigned on the phrase “Return to normalcy.” Normalcy is a term from 19th century mathematics, as in right angles being “right.” Harding intended the word to refer to returning the country to its “normal” situation. A norm being a mathematical average, “normalcy” was perhaps intentional, in a governmental and social if not mathematical sense.

Well, Harding was a teacher briefly. Perhaps he chose the mathematical “normalcy” to seem more academic, or maybe his rather average educational experience left him unclear about the alternatives, and he went for the one that made him sound more electable. This writer has observed that the PBS New Hour has used “normalcy,” while DW News (Deutsche Welle news in English) routinely uses “normality.” Harding’s contribution then has been to American English, among his other contributions. Indeed, dictionaries in the U.K. and U.S.A. attribute normality to the Standard with normalcy to the American alternative. It’s all part of the story of our language.

Here is a challenge for readers: guess for yourselves which of the candidates below will survive the whimsy of the English language speaker. You may need to do a bit of research, but learning from research is many times more lasting than a read over.

  1. How is a scion a reasonable name for an automobile?
  2. What’s the meaningful difference between like and such as?
  3. Where does plus come from, and why should it not be substituted for and or also? (Est-ce plus clair?)
  4. Why would we say, “She was gifted a ring,” and not say, “She was given a ring?” (As a former teacher of nominally “gifted” students, it’s hard not to see this as one of their jokes on the world.)
  5. Why would we say, “The representatives expensed large sums to statute restoration,” and not say, “The representatives allocated large sums to statute restoration?” Or, why would be say, “The businessman expensed grant funds on workers’ safety,” and not say, “The businessman spent grant funds on workers’ safety?” (This is Latinization for the sake of obfuscation, i.e., big words for bullshit.)

One thing can be said for all this: English can be no end of fun

 

Filed under Critical thinking, Foolery, Social Commentary Tagged with ,

Galaxy

17 January 2024 Leave a comment

All I wanted was to give, to give to make people better than they were, feel better, be better, be more inclined to laughter.

Yes, my giving was on my terms and somewhat selfish, but it has been the right thing to do and it has made me happy.

Now, I find no one interested in getting anything I have to give, to be taken for granted, to be thought of as old, and I am not happy.

Getting doesn’t help. Anything I get just seems to sink quietly into a black hole at my core.

Now, I am only getting older, and I wonder what being gone will be like, and who will notice.

January 2024

Filed under Poetry, Reflections Tagged with ,

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