Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 48

Journalism is Dead—Long Live the Media!

Today, I am running a column that I posted a while back about the sorry state of American journalism. Historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote it in 2019, but much of its content is still quite current. You will find Hanson’s complete bio at the end of the post.

For the past few years, I have struggled to understand, if not accept, what has happened to the practice of journalism in America. It has degenerated into something that I no longer recognize.

When I began my professional journalism career at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970s, the concepts of fairness, balance, and objectivity were required components in the newsroom. If I inserted my opinion in a story or was perceived as biased, I heard it from many Tribune editors. “Yates, you can’t say this,” they would bark.” Where’s the attribution? I don’t care what YOU think; report the damn story.”

Sadly, that kind of editorial oversight seems to be missing from newsrooms today. Like CNN’s Jim Acosta or April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks, reporters prefer to create news with their antics at press conferences rather than report it. Neither would have lasted a day in the old Chicago Tribune newsroom.

Hanson examines the decline of journalism and offers some thoughts on why it is happening. Here is Hanson’s column. Please give it a read. It contains a lot of wisdom.

Journalism is Dead—Long Live the Media!

By Victor Davis Hanson

There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on.

Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice, identity politics, “equality,” and diversity. The degree a news account is expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the effort to fundamentally transform the country into something, unlike its founding.

At the recent third president-less White House Correspondents’ Dinner, passive-aggressive journalists whined that they were victims, standing on the barricades against the all-powerful, all-evil—and all absent—Donald Trump. If the attempt was to return professionalism to the evening and eschew the pathological celebrity obsessions of the past, the result was only more confirmation of the self-referential and narcissistic culture of the Washington press corps.

Why should we believe reporters suddenly worried about ethics, free inquiry, and speech?

No journalist who pontificates now about the supposedly First Amendment-violating Trump ever mentions that Barack Obama had Fox News’s James Rosen (and his relatives) monitored, that he surveilled the communications records of Associated Press reporters, or that he spoke with the press far less often than did Trump, and often fixated on Fox News.

Journalists themselves had no problem with colleagues colluding with the Clinton campaign, as evidenced in the Wikileaks Podesta trove. There was never much introspection about why the elite press and media corps—loudly progressive and feminist—was decimated by #MeToo Movement allegations of long-standing sexual harassment and assault.

Were there serious worries voiced over journalistic ethics when CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked primary debate questions to the 2016 Clinton campaign? Did journalists speak out when journalist Candy Crowley abandoned her moderator role and turned into an Obama partisan in the 2012 second presidential debate? Were reporters at all worried when the Shorenstein Center cited 90 percent negative media coverage of the Trump campaign and presidency? Did they object much when Twitter and Facebook exiled conservative voices that they found inconvenient?

Are journalists concerned when campuses shout down visiting lecturers or pass speech codes to restrict free expression? Was the strange Obama-era state surveillance of fellow journalist Sharyl Attkisson of any importance to the journalistic brotherhood? Did they fret that the Obama-era FBI likely inserted informants into a political campaign or deliberately deceived a FISA court to spy on an American citizen?

Have journalists signed any of their accustomed collective outrage letters over the New York Times’ Nazi-like anti-Semitic cartoons and its pathetic sort of, sort of not initial apologies?

Concerning the three great psychodramas of the last two years—the Kavanaugh hearings, the Covington kids fiasco, and the Jussie Smollett fantasy—the media for too long trafficked in the lies of the discredited and predicated their coverage on ideology: feminists, Native Americans, and African-Americans as noble victims; their white male oppressors not so much, regardless of the facts of the case.

During the Duke lacrosse team mess, the University of Virginia fraternity hoax, and the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin drama, the public first began to sense the old implicit media bias had become something new—an outright distortion of evidence to serve a higher cause. We are now at the point that the news consumer has little expectation that journalists will report the facts but assumes that they will massage, distort, and misrepresent narratives for purposes of supposed social utility.

The media does not just mislead in what it reports; it also chooses not to report the news it finds antithetical to its social justice mission. Voters never learned about what Barack Obama actually had said at a dinner honoring Rashid Khalidi because journalists suppressed his speech. In the same fashion, the public never knew that then-Senator Obama had posed for a photo-op with Louis Farrakhan. A picture was also never released until after Obama had left office. In a new condemnatory account of media misbehavior, Unfreedom of the Press, Mark Levin inter alia devotes a discussion to what we might call the “un-news,” the long history of deliberate suppression of important stories that do not advance the media’s ideological objectives that transcend simply reporting the facts of important daily events.

We might call their modus operandi “critical journalistic theory” that postulates few disinterested facts, only interpretations constructed by white male elites. So, to get at a different “truth,” journalists must deconstruct the story by changing or omitting bothersome facts to transmit the “true” essence of an event.

Recently, the media was faced with an existential decision over whether to own up to its peddling myths about Russian collusion or to double down on them. So they perpetuated the farce by bragging on their own contributions to it, and by extension, sought to ensure their tarnished reputations by further tarnishing them.

There was never any evidence to support the collusion hoax. Despite denials, the yarn arose mostly from Hillary Clinton’s (illegal) hiring of British subject Christopher Steele (albeit through the intermediaries of the DNC, Perkins-Coie, and Fusion GPS) to smear her election opponent. After all, presidential candidates are not supposed to hire foreign nationals to work with other foreign nationals to conduct espionage to undermine an opponent’s campaign—and then illegally hide the nature of such a “campaign expense” through three firewalls.

After her defeat, “collusion” morphed into a progressive and media-generated mechanism at first to account for the inexplicable Clinton defeat, then to abort the unpalatable Trump transition and presidency, and finally as a desperate preemptive effort to thwart an investigation of high crimes of Obama-era officials. And the collusion myth caused the nation a great deal of harm until even the onetime progressive heartthrob Robert Mueller’s “dream team” found no evidence for it whatsoever.

In response, did the media, in an introspective fashion, reexamine why they had peddled collusion through leaks, groupthink, and self-righteous sermons about their own wounded fawn egos? Hardly. No sooner had Mueller found no collusion and no case for prosecuting “obstruction” of such a non-crime than the media first declared itself correct and righteous for peddling the Russian conspiracy theory and, second, moved immediately to “tax returns,” in essence learning nothing and forgetting nothing.

Lately, a tiny few progressive journalists have tried to warn their colleagues that the collusion farce and other frauds have all but ruined what was left of the reputation of American journalism. The leftist anti-Trump Nation has just published Aaron Maté’s exhaustive account of the falsities, smears, and sheer ridiculousness of the media obsession with collusion.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, another progressive anti-Trumper, had earlier done the same. And a few journalists, despite being deeply embedded within the Democratic-media nexus, have voiced warnings on other fronts.

CNN’s Jake Tapper finally had to remind his television audience that, contra the Joe Biden rollout campaign video and the progressive gospel, Donald Trump did not excuse white nationalists and Klansmen during the 2017 Charlottesville violence.

Covington kids slandered and libeled by groupthink Media

Recent polls of likely voters, of all Americans, and even the Washington press corps itself, show an overwhelming consensus that the media is both biased in general and in particular against the Trump presidency.

“Fake news” is not just a Trump talking point or obsession. It is a factual account of what journalism has become—so often an arm of the progressive movement and an incestuous and inbred group of New York and Washington coastal elite mediocrities, or what former Obama official Ben Rhodes cynically wrote off as an “echo chamber” of greenhorn know-nothings.

CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta can delude himself into thinking the media got it right on collusion fantasies, but his own act as a disruptive and shallow performance artist has discredited him as a serious journalist.  His own network has all but ruined its reputation and lost much of its former audience by reporting outright falsities and employing entertainment and news hosts in a wide variety of shows who descended into gross buffoonery—from Kathy Griffin’s decapitation video to Anderson Cooper’s on-air Trump defecation metaphor to Reza Aslan’s “piece of s—t” commentary to the late Anthony Bourdain’s quip about poisoning Trump.

Do we still remember the CNN news team in December 2014 doing an on-air “hands-up” charade in honor of the Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown? Note that even Eric Holder’s Justice Department found that Michael Brown never attempted to surrender to police. CNN never apologized for its news team trafficking in false news that only inflamed passions at a time of increased national tensions.

CNN reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, and Lex Harris all have peddled false rumors, and gossip passed off as fact.

CNN “analyst” James Clapper, himself an admitted liar who has deliberately misled Congress while under oath, claimed that Trump was a virtual Putin asset for months. He never recanted. Finally, he and others have ended up attacking the idea that members of the Obama intelligence team “spied” on the Trump campaign, in effect defending himself on air by ridiculing charges against people like himself.  None of these journalists wondered why they seemed to have repeated the same errors in the same fashion with the same denials of culpability.

What destroyed the present generation of journalism was not just that they live in coastal corridors of progressive groupthink. It was not just because they almost all graduated from liberal journalism programs that still regurgitate ossified Watergate psychodramas of investigative reporters as comic book heroes. Nor is the cause of their decline, even their own hair-trigger and social media snark, or the pushback from Donald J. Trump.

Instead, over the last 20 years, marquee journalists saw themselves as wannabe celebrities who were to make news, not to report it, to massage stories in such a fashion to serve their social justice agendas, and to virtue signal their superior morality, as many revolved in and out of government.

What have they become instead? People with enormous self-regard but with little experience with the public whom they were supposed to serve.

They espouse opinions on nearly everything while knowing almost nothing. They believe Washington and New York are the centers of the universe, while the universe is making both more irrelevant. As their ethics dissipated, their vocabularies shrank. Their poor communication skills grew ever poorer, and they displayed little knowledge of the history and culture of the people they reported on. Most could give an in-depth lecture on Botox but are ignorant about the U.S. Constitution or basic American history facts.

The people are finally tired of their bias, incompetence, and arrogance—and are finally beginning to ignore most of what they say and write.

Content created for the Center for American Greatness, Inc.

Photo Credit:  Getty Images

About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won  (Basic Books).

A Little Fun With Words

A “Lexophile” is a lover of words–one who derives pleasure from the various use of words, who appreciates the nuances surrounding different words, and who is alert to synonyms, antonyms, homophones, anagrams, palindromes, and homonyms, often using them for effect, sometimes in humor. The New York Times even holds an annual competition to see who can create the best original example of a lexophile.

Actually, lexophile is not even a word–at least it is not found in any of my dictionaries, including my Merriam-Webster. That’s why you can use it as a noun to describe a person who is a lover of words as well as the sentences that a lexophile creates.

Here, for your Christmas season enjoyment, is a list of recent entries in the Times lexophile contest.

Enjoy!

No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.

If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.

To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can’t put it down.

I didn’t like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.

Did you hear about the crossed-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn’t control her pupils?

When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.

When chemists die, they barium.

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went, and then it dawned on me.

I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic.  It’s syncing now.

England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.

This girl today said she recognized me from the Vegetarians Club, but I’d swear I’ve never met herbivore.

I know a guy who’s addicted to drinking brake fluid, but he says he can stop any time.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles U.C.L.A.

I got some batteries that were given out free of charge. 

A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead giveaway.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the fellow whose entire left side was cut off?  He’s all right now.

A bicycle can’t stand alone; it’s just two tired.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine last week is now fully recovered.

He had a photographic memory but it was never fully developed.

When she saw her first strands of gray hair she thought she’d dye.

Acupuncture is a jab well done.  That’s the point of it.

Those who get too big for their pants will be totally exposed in the end.

 

 

 

 

The Rules of Writing: There Are None!

For writers and those who are struggling to be writers, there is no shortage of rules, guidelines, tenets, and imperatives all calculated to turn you into a bestselling author.

They are often daunting and overwhelming and in some cases a bit terrifying.

But mostly, they are unnecessary.

Yes, I said it. Rules of writing are gratuitous, redundant, and pointless.

“What is he saying?” You might be asking yourself. “Has he gone off his mental reservation? Did somebody steal his rudder? Is he weak north of his ears?”

I have been writing, in one form or another, for most of my life. I learned the techniques and skills of writing by toiling for almost 30 years in the relentless and stressful world of journalism.

I was in some pretty good company. Ernest Hemingway began his writing career as a journalist—in fact, we both began our journalistic careers at the Kansas City Star.

Other successful authors who started as newspaper hacks include Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack London, Annie Proulx, Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck, James Agee, Lillian Ross, and Mark Twain.

For 13 years I taught journalism and writing at the University of Illinois after leaving the world of professional journalism. During that time, I managed to condense my thoughts on writing into a structure suitable for the classroom.

So allow me to share my views on what writing is. What I am about to say here are not stringent rules or rigorous imperatives.

Don’t forget. There are no rules. Look at my comments as suggestions or musings, but not as edicts or diktats. Writing is both an art and a craft. To be a good writer, you must first master the tools of the craft. What are those? They are vocabulary, grammar, research, style, plot, pacing, and story.

Words are your essential tools. They are your implements in the same way hammers, saws, bubble levels, squares, screwdrivers, and tape measures are the tools a carpenter must possess.

Then comes grammar. Just as carpenters must learn to respect and skillfully master their tools, so too must writers learn to skillfully manipulate words and respect the language.

If you don’t respect the language, you will never succeed as a writer.

You must also give yourself time to learn the art and craft of writing. You don’t learn how to be a writer by sitting alone in a room and squeezing your brain for inspiration the way you wring water from a sponge.

One of the first steps to becoming a good writer is by reading. Read, read, and read. As I used to tell my students, “If you want to write well, read well.”

Learn from the best; imitate (and I don’t mean to plagiarize). Listen to the words! Words speak to us from the written page, IF we let them IF we allow our eyes to open our inner ears.

Gifted writing can’t be taught. It must be learned.

And we learn from doing it; from experience. That’s how we gain confidence.

Let me repeat that because it is SO VERY IMPORTANT. To be a good writer, you must be confident in your ability to use the tools of the craft: vocabulary, grammar, research, style, plot, pacing, and story.

A confident writer is typically a good writer. We gain confidence by being successful in our work–no matter what work we do. We also learn from failure. Why was a book rejected 40 times? Why isn’t it selling on Amazon or Goodreads or Barnes and Noble? There must be a reason. Find out what it is and learn from it. Then go back to work and make the book better.

Once you master the Craft of Writing, the fundamentals, the mechanics, the “donkey” work, then you are ready to move on to the Art of Writing.

I don’t know if those who do not write for a living understand just how difficult writing is. Many believe that writers work from inspiration and that the words simply leap onto the blank page (or into the motherboard and central processing unit of a computer).

Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Ernest Hemingway

What’s a typewriter? You might ask. That’s a topic for another post when I discuss ancient writing implements.

But I digress. In fact, while inspiration is a beautiful thing, it is not what makes a good writer or book. Writing requires significant research, whether fiction or non-fiction. It requires a facility for organization and a keen sense of plot, pacing, and story.

I don’t believe writers are “born.”

They evolve over time as a result of significant experience in the craft.

Not all writers are brooding, intractable alcoholics or unbearable misanthropes who feel their creations contain irrevocable and definitive truths that most of humanity is too obtuse to comprehend.

In fact, most successful writers are excellent storytellers, and they like nothing more than to have their stories read by as many people as possible–even if those stories don’t always possess immutable truths.

And storytelling is not limited to fiction. Storytelling in non-fiction or journalism is just as important.

When I was young, I used to write lots of short stories. Were they any good? No. But for a person who wants to be a writer they were my way of practicing. Sort of like practicing the piano or the flute or some other instrument. The more you practice, the better and more accomplished you become.

Somerset Maugham, the author of such classics as The Razor’s Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, and Of Human Bondage, had this to say about writing:

“If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.”

And that leads me to Ann Rice’s Non-Advice to Writers. Ann Rice is a best-selling American author of gothic fiction, including books such as The Vampire Chronicles, Feast of All Saints, Servant of the Bones, Exit to Eden, and Belinda.

    Ann Rice

Here is what she says about giving advice to writers:

“On giving writers advice, offering “rules.” I’m asked a lot about this, and people bring great lists of rules for writers to the page all the time. What do I think? I can’t say it loud enough. There are NO RULES for all writers! And never let anyone tell you that there are. Writers are individuals; we each do it in our own way.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you’re not a “real” writer because you don’t follow their rules! I can’t tell you how much harm was done to me early in life by others judging me in that way. I was told in college I wasn’t a “real” writer because I composed on a typewriter; I was condemned later on in damn near apocalyptic terms for “not writing every day.”

“Real writers” are those who become “real writers.” That’s all there is to it. And again, we each do it in our own way. For me, stubbornness has been as important as any talent I might possess. I ultimately ignored the people who condemned me, ridiculed me and sought to discourage me. I laughed or cried over it in secret; and went right on writing what I wanted to write, the way I wanted to write it.

I knew of no other way to become the writer of my dreams. If you want to be a writer, go for it. Critics are a dime a dozen, and people who would love to see you fail are everywhere. Just keep on going; keep doing what works for you. Keep believing in yourself.” 

Ann Rice has said it well. You must believe in yourself and your work because if you don’t, who will?

EAST MEETS WEST–AND FINDS ‘DECADENCE’

Occasionally I reprint stories I wrote while working as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Here is one I wrote from Bangkok, Thailand in 1985. It examines the attitudes some Asian countries have toward Western (read “American”) culture—specifically, its music, its films, and what some consider its promiscuous lifestyle. Not much has changed since I filed this story thirty-six years ago.

BANGKOK, Thailand–Two months ago, at the peak of its popularity, the hit song “One Night in Bangkok” (see link at end of story) was banned by the government here. The reason: It was seen as a Western perversion of Thai culture.

Last week in an impassioned speech, Singapore’s deputy prime minister deplored the influx of “Western decadence” and warned his nation’s parliament that Asia was being “engulfed and overwhelmed by dangerous waves of undesirable Western influences.”

Even in Japan, which more than any other Asian nation has embraced and emulated Western culture, Japanese politicians and sociologists have lamented the erosion of traditional Japanese values under a “mushroom cloud of American music, movies, and adolescent mayhem.”

Other Asian nations–from South Korea, which has in the past banned American rock music, to Taiwan, which has refused to allow controversial American and European films and books to be circulated–have begun looking more critically at imported Western ideas, culture, and even fashion as their traditional societies are altered by high technology and cross-cultural communication.

Everything from declining family and human relations to rising divorce and crime rates is being blamed on unhealthy Western “permissiveness” in an increasingly shrill denunciation of the West.

Ironically, this is happening at a time when economic and cultural contact between Asia and the rest of the world has never been greater.

Critics of American and European influences are calling for a return to something they call “Asian values”–a catchall term that seems to encompass everything from Confucian ethics to an Asian version of the Boy Scout oath.

“Asian values,” explained Ong Teng Cheong, Singapore’s deputy prime minister, “are the ethical and moral concepts of Asians, the spirit of thriftiness and diligence.

“Moral and ethical values and proper human relations are the pillars of society,” Ong said. “Asian values emphasize the personal moral character and a person’s responsibility to society and the nation.”

Not everyone in Asia seems ready to accept that definition, however. Nor do they agree with governments that seem overly concerned about Western influences.

“Confucianism and other so-called Asian values essentially work against the trend toward democracy,” said Singapore parliamentarian Chiam See Tong. “People are taught not to speak up and to obey the orders of their superiors.

“One suspects that, by ‘Asian values,’ what is really meant is old conservative Chinese ideas of obedience to authority and not headlong opposition with the government, like in the West,” he added.

According to Vichai Prasertporn, a professor of political science at a Bangkok university, “What these governments that are crying for the return to Asian values are really saying is, ‘Sit down, shut up and follow orders.’

“Blaming the West for internal problems is nothing new in Asia,” he continued. “And certainly by banning a song about Bangkok’s nightlife, the government of Thailand is not going to ensure cultural purity. Just the opposite. ‘One Night in Bangkok’ is more popular than ever now.”

The chorus of complaints about the infusion of Western decadence and social permissiveness seems destined to achieve unprecedented decibel levels in the halls of Asian Parliaments. Everything from heavy metal and rap music to uninhibited displays of sexual activity in Hollywood films are under fire.

“Why is it that in almost every American film there must be the following elements: multiple and graphic sex scenes that verge on pornography, incessant and explicit homosexuality and lesbianism, graphic and extreme violence, and persistent drug use?” Prasertporn asked.

Some of the more xenophobic critics are even unhappy about the continued spread of American fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Shakey’s Pizza.

“We are witnessing a current of ill wind of faddish trends pervading Western countries where the youth like to put on an unkempt and outlandish dress and romp and dance in the streets,” observed Singapore parliamentarian, Tang Guan Seng.

“They (Western teenagers) even take to drugs and unbridled carnal excesses,” Tang scolded. “In their minds, there is only individual freedom but not social or national interest.

“Furthermore,” Tang said, “we in Asia simply can’t accept the Western practice of addressing parents by their first names or the pitiful banishment of elderly parents in homes for the aged.”

In Japan, where Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone has recently called for a revamping of the country’s educational system to emphasize more “Japanese values,” similar complaints about American influence are often heard.

Yet, say those who disagree with the denunciations of Western influence, countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore are undergoing dramatic changes because of their emergence as Asian superstates.

“The world is shrinking faster than ever before, and these countries are responsible for it with their manufacture and dissemination of technological gadgetry,” said Shintaro Ohu, a Tokyo businessman. “They are getting fat off this technology, yet at the same time are complaining about the changes this technology is bound to cause.”

Others agree and insist that Asian nations whose traditions are eroding in the high-speed computer age should accept the changes.

“The values and things worth saving will always be there,” said Prasertporn. “Big Macs will never replace spicy Thai shrimp soup, and I am sure Japanese teenagers who wear Boy George costumes will eventually come to see the classical beauty of a Japanese yukata (robe).”

Click on the link below to hear the song and see why it was banned in Bangkok.

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=ymyy-t-999&p=one+night+in+bangkok#id=1&vid=7b7f2072f783ccf3cdc3cfe5338f88bd&action=click

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people

Robert Frost once said, “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”

He was right. All of us need a little humor now and then in a world where levity often seems in short supply. The other day, I received an email that contained the following “Signs of the Times.”

Read ‘em and enjoy! And as a bonus, check out the Henny Youngman one-liners and a couple of quips from two other folks at the tail end of this post.

A SIGN IN A SHOE REPAIR STORE IN VANCOUVER: We will heel you. We will save your sole. We will even dye for you.

A SIGN ON A BLINDS AND CURTAIN TRUCK: “Blind man driving.”

Sign over a Gynecologist’s Office: “Dr. Williams, at your cervix.”

In a Podiatrist’s office: “Time wounds all heels.”

Sign in the Army Recruiting Office: Marry a veteran, girls. He can cook, make beds, sew, and is already used to taking orders.

On a Septic Tank Truck: Yesterday’s Meals on Wheels”

At an Optometrist’s Office: “If you don’t see what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.”

On a Plumber’s truck: “We repair what your husband fixed.”

On another Plumber’s truck: “Don’t sleep with a drip. Call your plumber.”

At a Tire Shop in Milwaukee: “Invite us to your next blowout.”

On an Electrician’s truck: “Let us remove your shorts.”

In a Non-smoking Area: “If we see smoke, we will assume you are on fire and will take appropriate action.”

On a Maternity Room door: “Push. Push. Push.”

At a Car Dealership: “The best way to get back on your feet – miss a car payment.”

Outside a Muffler Shop: “No appointment necessary. We hear you coming.”

In a Veterinarian’s waiting room: “Be back in 5 minutes. Sit! Stay!”

At the Electric Company: “We would be delighted if you send in your payment on time. However, if you don’t, YOU will be de-lighted.”

In a Restaurant window: “Don’t stand there and be hungry; come on in and get fed up.”

In the front yard of a Funeral Home: “Drive carefully. We’ll wait.”

At a Propane Filling Station: “Thank Heaven for little grills.”

In a Chicago Radiator Shop: “Best place in town to take a leak.”

  And the best one for last.

Sign on t back of another Septic Tank Truck: “Caution – This Truck is full of Political promises.”

Henny Youngman

How many of you remember Henny Youngman? He was known as the king of one-liners that often were punctuated by the sound of the lone drum.

Here are several of his best:

My neighbor knocked on my door at 2:30 am this morning, can you believe that….. 2:30 am?!  Luckily for him, I was still up playing my Bagpipes.

I saw a poor old lady fall over today on the ice!!  At least I presume she was poor – she only had $1.20 in her purse.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

A guy complains of a headache. Another guy says “Do what I do. I put my head on my wife’s bosom, and the headache goes away.” The next day, the man says, “Did you do what I told you to?” “Yes, I sure did. By the way, you have a nice house!”

My girlfriend thinks that I’m a stalker. Well, she’s not exactly my girlfriend yet.

A man goes to a psychiatrist. The doctor says, “You’re crazy.” The man says, “I want a second opinion!” The doctor says, “Okay, you’re ugly too!”

I was so ugly when I was born; the doctor slapped my mother.

My wife said: ‘I want an explanation and I want the truth.’ I said: ‘Make up your mind.’

A car hit a Jewish man. The paramedic says, “Are you comfortable?” The man says, “I make a good living.”

Went for my routine checkup today and everything seemed to be going fine until he stuck his index finger up my rear! Do you think I should change dentists?

I was behind a rather large woman at the checkout. She had on a pair of jeans that said, ‘Guess.’

I said, “I don’t know……..maybe 350 pounds.”

And finally here are a couple of extras:

 

“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know

I’m not dumb…and I also know I’m not blonde.” – Dolly Parton

 

“When I was a boy, the Dead Sea was just sick.”

-George Burns

 

I will close with a bit of Chinese wisdom:

There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it. – Chinese Proverb.

Is The American Empire Finished? How Nations Slip from Greatness to Oblivion

A decade ago, when I was a professor and college dean at the University of Illinois, I picked up a book in the campus bookstore entitled: “Are We Rome?”

Its message was compelling. In 262 pages, it suggested, with the persuasive and rational use of historical facts, that the United States is on a similar track as ancient Rome was when its powerful empire was destroyed in 476 A.D.—not by a more powerful enemy from without—but by a multitude of forces and influences from within.

The parallels between the Roman Republic and the American Republic are as undeniable as they are stunning.

In both empires, we can see the steady erosion of morality and a decadent society’s indifference to the sanctity of life. We see the insular culture of our capitals (Rome and Washington D.C.), the inability or unwillingness to safeguard and defend borders, the crumbling of a once-great infrastructure of roads and bridges, the escalating corruption of central government, and the smug ignorance of the world beyond our borders.

We see two empires being constantly split and fragmented into competing tribes of people, each concerned not with the whole but with their narrow, minority perspectives and opinions. We see the replacement of a once patriotic populace with one devoid of national loyalty and allegiance.

In short, we see decadence, decay, and two powerful empires—one doomed that lasted more than 500 years, and another that so far has survived 245 years.

We know that the glory that was Rome disappeared more than 1,500 years ago, consigned to the province of ancient history along with Latin, its similarly deceased language.

How much longer will the American Republic exist? What are America’s prospects? Whither our empire? Are we too doomed to insignificance and oblivion?

Today, I am posting a recent commentary by fellow journalist Don Feder, former editorial writer and columnist with the Boston Herald. Feder’s piece takes a look at some of the questions I raised and offers some compelling answers. Please read on. You will be happy you did.

How Nations Fail. Is America on a Path of Permanent Decline?

By Don Feder

Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever?

In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality.

Nations, too, have seasons. Imagine a Roman of the 2nd. Century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.

Forever was about 500 years, give or take.

France was the thing in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim community.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British Empire. Now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.

In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low, and its population is aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.

I was born in 1946, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century.  America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the Greatest Generation, we won a World War fought over most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed.

It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world.

We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and COVID.  We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA, the blueprint of life.

But where is the glory that once was Rome?

America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well nowhere in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year.

Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.

The pathetic demented creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, Dr. Jill had to lead him like a child.

In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.

We can’t defend our borders, history (including monuments to past greatness), or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds.

We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.

The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago.

Crime rates soar, and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets.

Our culture is certifiably insane. We have men who marry men. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism seek to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.”

We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom while our birth rate dips lower year by year.

Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality.

Our “entertainment” is sadistic, nihilistic, and enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is nothing but noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.

Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified.

A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress.

We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation in which our leaders no longer believe.

How meekly most submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks and hand sanitizers) shows the death of the American spirit.

How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?

Fighting endless wars, they can’t or won’t win.Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repayRefusing to guard their borders, allowing alien hordes to inundate their nation.Surrendering control of their cities to mob ruleAllowing indoctrination of the youngMoving from a republican form of government to an oligarchyLosing national identityIndulging indolenceAbandoning faith and family – the bulwarks of social order.

In America, every one of these symptoms is unmistakable, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.

Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had?

I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on—the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.

This nation took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely.

During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk, and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, “Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.”

The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, what will posterity say of us if we lose without a fight?

While the prognosis is far from good, only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.

 

Letter from Oxford: Revising History to Appease the “Woke” Left is Stupid

With “cancel culture” running amok in the United States and statues still under attack by those who insist on ascribing 21st-century values and standards to 18th and 19th-century historical figures, it was gratifying to see that Oxford’s Oriel College in the U.K., has resisted the mob’s demand to erase history by taking down a statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes.

A while back I received a non-official satirical response to those who demand that Rhodes’s likeness be scrapped. It was written presumably by white students to black students attending Oxford’s Oriel College. Before I share the letter, here is a little critical background about the Rhodes controversy. 

 The “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign was successful at the University of South Africa. That school removed Rhodes’ statue in April 2015, a month after the protest there began. Students and anti-colonialism activists then began similar protests to remove statues at other universities, including Oxford, where Rhodes (who was born in England) remains a significant figure. Oxford University still offers the elite Rhodes Scholarship, and a statue in his likeness presides over the university’s Oriel College campus.

Statue of Cecil Rhodes being removed in Cape Town, South Africa

In January 2016, Oxford students voted to remove the statue.  Later that month, the school opted to keep the statue after receiving threats from alumni to withdraw millions in donations if it was removed.  The college’s decision sparked more marches and ongoing protests, maintaining the issue in the news. Eventually, it agreed to remove the statue, but in May of this year, it backtracked on that decision and decided to keep the effigy of Rhodes where it remains on the facade of Oriel College.

Oxford University’s chancellor, Chris Patten argued against the removal of the Rhodes statue during an appearance on the Today program on BBC Radio 4. However, his language was far tamer than the rhetoric employed in the following letter. Patten styled the objections to Rhodes as along the lines of the “safe spaces” policies adopted on many university campuses in Britain and the US, which critics have said are used to suppress debate on a range of issues.

“That focus on Rhodes is unfortunate, but it’s an example of what’s happening on American campuses and British colleges,” Patten said. “One of the points of a university – which is not to tolerate intolerance, to engage in free inquiry and debate – is being denied. People have to face up to facts in history that they don’t like and talk about them and debate them. Education is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice.”

He added: “Can you imagine a university where there is no platform? I mean a bland diet of bran to feed people, it’s an absolutely terrible idea. If you want universities like that you go to China where they are not allowed to talk about western values, which I regard as global values. No, it’s not the way a university should operate.”

With that as background, here is the unabridged letter ostensibly sent to black students who are demanding that Oxford University pull down the Cecil Rhodes statue and other likenesses of him on campus. It also appeared as an op-ed on America’s Breitbart News. (Note: I have left the British spelling of certain words intact).

Dear Scrotty Students,

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed significantly to the comfort and well-being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter, and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. “Autres temps, autres moeures.”*  If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”

              Cecil Rhodes

Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second-oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th-century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond.

Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks.

We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.

And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short-lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been damn near zilch.

You’ll probably say that’s “racist.” But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.”  Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities.

We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the‪ #‎blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American mind.”

At Oxford, however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics, and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university.

Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships)

Oxford students demanding that Rhodes statue be removed from Oriel College

We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case – postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it – but we are colour blind.

We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth, and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate by sex, race, colour, or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.

That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!”

No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic – otherwise, your idea is worthless.

This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College because it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which we dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop?

As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful – Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”

We’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic, and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and Al-Qaeda have been doing to artifacts in places like Mali and Syria.  You are murdering history.

And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your ‪#‎rhodesmustfall campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed.”

One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a wealthy politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!

Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism, and a collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention-grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.

Yours,

Free Thinking Students of Oriel College, Oxford

*Autres temps, autres moeurs – Other times, other customs: in other eras people behaved differently.

 

 

Biden Exec. Order Mandates Divisive ‘Race Training’ at Every Level of Federal Government

I have posted frequently about the fraudulent Marxist scheme called Critical Race Theory and how it is being used to indoctrinate K-12 school children to view themselves and others, not on the basis of their character (as Martin Luther King once said) but by the color of their skin. Most recently, I posted about how CRT is being used to indoctrinate our military.

Last week, things got worse. Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring every level of the U.S. government to engage in “race-conscious hiring” and conduct diversity training based on deceitful and racist CRT dogma. It’s just another step in Biden’s plan to divide our nation along racial lines–exactly what MLK spoke so vehemently against. It also is the institutionalization of a neo-affirmative action policy that many states have banned.

 

Just as Democrats see the unprecedented flow of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens into the U.S. each month, not as a crisis, but as a procession of new and obedient Democrat voters, Biden and his race-hustling cronies in the White House are attempting to keep the country riven into warring tribes. It’s an ancient “divide and conquer” strategy that despots the world over have used again and again to maintain their power and control.

Now, it is being rammed down our throats by our nation’s first fully socialist administration and everything that this perverted and twisted regime is doing is absolutely antithetical and hostile to traditional American values, not to mention the Constitution.

Today, I am reprinting a story by Michael Ginsburg that appeared Saturday in the Daily Caller. It looks at Biden’s executive order, which is going to have far-reaching and negative consequences on our country.

But, hey, as mumbling, bumbling Biden would say: “Here’s the deal. We need to maintain our power over you white supremacist terrorist Trump supporters, Republicans, and conservatives.”

Please read on:

  Biden Executive Order Mandates Divisive, Unscientific Race ‘Training’ At Every Level of Federal Government

By Michael Ginsberg 

Daily Caller

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Friday that ensures that every part of the federal government will conduct race-conscious diversity training and engage in race-conscious hiring.

The executive order “establishes an ambitious, whole-of-government initiative that will take a systematic approach to embedding DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] in Federal hiring and employment practices,” according to a White House fact sheet.

In practice, it will ensure that federal agencies employ tenets associated with Marxist-inspired Critical Race Theory (CRT) within their hiring practices and day-to-day activities.

CRT holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth, and the adoption of race-based policies.

The executive order directs federal agencies to “develop strategic plans to eliminate any barriers to success faced by under-served employees.”

This will be felt through federal hiring, which will prioritize “communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including people of color, women, first-generation professionals and immigrants, individuals with disabilities, [and] LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Notably, the order requires diversity training like the one conducted by Sandia National Laboratories, a government contractor that helps manage nuclear weapons.

During a three-day “White Men’s Caucus,” male employees were required to recite “white privilege” and “male privilege” statements, according to leaked documents reported on by Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo. Trainers at the caucus told the participants that “white supremacists,” “KKK,” “Aryan Nation,” “MAGA hat,” “privileged” and “mass killings” were all associated with “white male culture.”

Sandia National Lab

 

Those trainings were later banned by a Trump administration executive order. That executive order was later challenged in court by the NAACP, and Biden revoked it on his first day in office.

The Biden administration claims that these trainings “promote respectful and inclusive workplaces and… increase understanding of implicit and unconscious bias.” However, numerous studies have found that the trainings not only fail to achieve their stated aims but actually make race relations worse.

Implicit bias trainings have not “been shown to result in permanent, long-term reductions of implicit bias scores or, more importantly, sustained and meaningful changes in behavior,” public health professor Tiffany Green and psychology professor Nao Hagiwara wrote in Scientific American.

The value of the Implicit Association Test, which purports to measure implicit biases, is hotly contested by psychologists. “There’s not a single study showing that above and below that cutoff [0.65 on a 2 point scale] people differ in any way based on that score,” Texas A&M University psychology professor Hart Blanton argues.

Even worse, diversity trainings like the one the employees of Sandia Labs were required to participate in can actually make race relations worse. Those trainings can generate “increased belief in race essentialism, or the notion that racial group differences are valid, biologically based, and immutable,” three researchers found in a 2018 study.

Diversity trainings make participants “more likely to believe that they themselves are being treated unfairly,” three psychologists wrote in 2016 in the Harvard Business Review.

 

 

 

 

Fascinating Facts For Word Lovers

As a someone whose primary tools are words, I am always interested in where these critical implements originated and how they continue to evolve.

The study of grammar, language, vocabulary–otherwise known as etymology–has always fascinated me. For those who enjoy writing and reading, what follows should be an entertaining romp through the worlds of philology, semantics, and dialectology.

Don’t let those terms throw you. We are not talking about theoretical mathematics or quantum physics. It is a look at where some of the words and phrases we use every day come from, some of the anomalies of words, language and usage, and how certain expressions evolved.

What follows is taken from a book entitled: 501 Things You Should Have Learned About Grammar. E njoy 

Did you know that “R” is the most commonly used consonant in the English language? Were you aware that the term “English” came before the name England?  Did you even realize that punctuation did not appear until the 15th century?

There is a treasure trove of fascinating facts in 501 Things You Should Have Learned About Grammar.  It’s a  book that linguists, lexicologists, book-lovers, grammarians, and those in book publishing should love.  The book is put out by Metro Books, an imprint of Sterling Publishing, the Barnes & Noble publishing company. It features sections on the history of English grammar, parts of speech, linguists, English around the world, and grammar through the ages.

Here are 35 items from the book that should entertain, if not stimulate, you:

Shitfaced” meant “young-looking” in the Scottish dictionary.  Yes, before 1826, shitfaced, according to Scottish dictionary meant small-faced.  It referred to someone who had boyish or young looks.Queue” is the only word in the English language that doesn’t change in pronunciation if the last four letters are removed!One of the most interesting facts about words in the English language is that the female form of all words in English are longer than their corresponding male forms, except for in one case. The word “widow” is an exception to this. Its male form “widower” is longer.The oldest word in the Oxford English dictionary that is still in everyday use is “town.”Forty is the only number in which the letters that form the word appear in the order that they appear in the English alphabet.One is the only number in which the letters appear in the exact reverse order of their appearance in the English alphabet.“Four” is the only word whose numerical value is equal to the number of letters in it! Pangrams in English are sentences that contain all the letters in the English alphabet in a single sentence itself. Pangrams are used for testing typefaces, testing equipment, and for developing skills such as typing on keyboards, typewriting, handwriting, and calligraphy. Pangrams which are short and coherent are very difficult to come by, as English grammar has 26 different letters, and some of these, such as “q” and “x,” are not used very commonly. There is only one pangram in English which is short and universally accepted for keyboard testing. That pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”About 20,000 books ranging from poems, devotional pieces, grammar books, dictionaries and mythical stories were printed in the 150 years that followed the year 1476, which was when the printing press arrived in England.There are no masculine nouns for certain professions like maid or seamstress in English.The longest word in the English language that is commonly used and does not contain any letter that is repeated is “copyrightable.”“Queueing” is the only word in the English language with five consecutive vowels appearing in it.China has more English speaking people than the United States of America!In the early 18th century, a large number of English words were being derived from names of people and places. Many have stuck on until today! The word “sandwich” owes its existence to the Earl of Sandwich, who, on a particular occasion, put a slice of meat in between two pieces of bread.Over 80 different spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been documented, and it is interesting to note that he has used various spellings in all his six known signatures.The printing press was first invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439 in Germany. Each letter’s mirror image was carved in relief on a small block. Words were formed when blocks, which were quickly movable, were arranged to form different words.  The words were separated with the help of blank spaces, and this gave rise to a line of type, and some such lines of type gave rise to a page.With the help of some borrowed money, Gutenberg started the “Bible Revolution” in the year 1452, wherein 200 copies of the two-volume Gutenberg Bible were printed, out of which only a small number of them were printed on vellum.”By the year 1500, 13 million books were being circulated in Europe that was populated with 100 million people then.The Gutenberg Bibles were expensive and beautiful and were sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, where each one was equal to the amount an average clerk got his salary in three years. About 50 of these Bibles survive today.The written English used in the official documents at the Court of Chancery, a court of equity in England and Wales, was what set a standard in grammar and vocabulary, and that’s where the term “Chancery English” originated.Paradise Lost is amongst the most significant epics ever written in English. And what makes it even more special is the fact that the author John Milton (who had lost his eyesight by then) would mentally compose the verses at night and in the morning he would dictate them to his aides.The discovery that English and Sanskrit had much in common, in spite of having little contact, stunned theorists. Surprised by the linguistic similarities between different languages, scholars began to hypothesize the existence of an ancient language called the “proto-Indo-European” language that would later give rise to the various branches of the Indo-European group.Language historians now believe that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages spread to different parts of the world. Their language (spoken between 4,000-6,000 years ago) changed with their travels, leading the original Proto-language to die out, but leaving several distinct elements in the languages that evolved later.Words and sentences that are made by teaming up letters, numbers, or pictures are called Rebus. One example that we use in our day-to-day SMS lingo is “l8r,” which is short for “later.” Spoonerisms pop up when letters and sounds get misplaced. Missed becomes hissed, flags become hags, so on and so forth.Malapropism: This term is used to denote the replacement of a correct word with the incorrect word because they sound similar.“Puns are often called the lowest form of humor because of their reliance on manipulating the sound of words for effect. These are homophones, where the pun is created by replacing one word with another similar sounding one. For example “Old kings never die, they’re just throne away.”An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two or more contradictory phrases that, in sum, express an essential relation. Can you hear the deafening silence at that? If so, act natural.Many grammarians believe that the process of onomatopoeia – words formed in the imitation of sounds – was the basis of the evolution of words in the human language. Human beings coined words out of exclamations they made or heard animal and birds make, or came across in their environment. This theory has been pooh-poohed by others who cite the fact that there are very few words in most human languages that are onomatopoeic.Book and movie titles are also retrospectively used as metaphors – that’s a “Catch 22 situation,” “This is such a 1984ish nightmare” or “it’s a Cinderella story.Incidentally, the English word “alphabet” is made by combining “alpha” and “beta,” the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.Elizabethan English refers to the English and the laws of English grammar that existed during the period of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who was the Queen of England and Ireland from 1558 to 1603.The Elizabethan Alphabet had 24 letters, unlike the present day alphabet, which has 26 letters. “u” and “v,” “I” and “j” were the same letter.After the writers of the Bible, Shakespeare is the second most quoted writer in the English language.By 1400, English had replaced French as the most widely spoken language in England. In 1500, the English dialect that became the most common among all of them was Westminster English. Speaking this dialect was considered to be a matter of great prestige.A lot of Norman French words found their way into the English language. In today’s times, it is believed that over 30% of all English words are of French origin. Words like “joy,” “joyous,” “attaché,” and several others found their way into English courtesy Norman French.”

 

 

 

PUNS FOR THE EDUCATED

I hesitate to post this, but after reading through it a few times, I just can’t resist. We all know that the pun, or paronomasia, is often called the lowest form of humor. But as the American wit, Oscar Levant once said: “A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a pun this way: “The usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound.”

My introduction to the pun came from my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Gooch. One day in class she asked: “What is the difference between a conductor and a teacher? The conductor minds the train, and a teacher trains the mind.” 

With that, herewith I give you:

PUNS FOR THE EDUCATED

The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.

A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay; I’ll go on ahead.’

I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’

The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

A backward poet writes inverse.

In a democracy, it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism, it’s your count that votes.

When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.

A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’

Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says ‘Dam!’

Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.

Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.

The other says ‘Are you sure?’

The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’

Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

Then, there was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

Congratulations if you made it this far. Now I dare you NOT to repeat one or two of these to your friends or family.