No capisce?

Over the last couple of decades I have been pushed further into Grumpy Old Editor territory by the claims of political correctness, as it was once known. From the time I heard that African American would no longer be hyphenated but Irish-American would, I knew something was going on that was not dictated by logic or reason but by emotion and power. And indeed, from those humble beginnings have come no end of mischief. (I refer to the reader to my discussion of AFABs and AMABs in April, for example.)

One preference that irritates me for very practical purposes is this: that foreign words are no longer supposed to be set in italics when appearing in English text. You surely have seen passages like this in books in the past:

"Pardon me, Passepartout, have you seen the ticket office for the next stage of our journey?" 

"Alas, M. Fogg, la billetterie is shuttered for the day." 

In this pretend passage from the Verne work, we can gather what Phileas's helpful companion is saying and we have possibly learned some French vocabulary as well. But the insidious thing I have done with italicization is othered the French by making their language look like some weird -- well, foreign thing. And boy, won't the French be mad! I'm sure they never do anything like that to non-French words in their own text!

My point is, the italicization of a foreign word was never intended to make any non-English speakers feel like they didn't belong; it was intended to alert the reader that the word is in another tongue and help the clarity of the text. 

There are a number of foreign (I'm sticking to foreign over non-English) words that look the same as English words but are not -- and that's where clarity is threatened. Try this passage:

Mr. Van der Plotz ran up to me in quite a state of distress. "You shall not believe this!" he said. "I was minding a beer near the stream when suddenly an angel pulled at my shirt! I was slim enough to realize it was a roof! Fortunately, the man was aloud, and I was able to leap into the stream, escaping with no more than a bad, although my boots are coated in blubber. It quite upset my rooster!"   

From our example, it seems Mr. Van der Plotz has lost his senses. But let's identify which words were actually in his native Dutch by the use of italics.

Mr. Van der Plotz ran up to me in quite a state of distress. "You shall not believe this!" he said. "I was minding a beer near the stream when suddenly an angel pulled at my shirt! I was slim enough to realize it was a roof! Fortunately, the man was aloud, and I was able to leap into the stream, escaping with no more than a bad, although my boots are coated in blubber. It quite upset my rooster!"

"Oh!" I said. "You were watching a bear when a fishing rod snagged you? But you were smart and saw that it was an attempt at robbery! The man was elderly, so you were able to escape into the stream, suffering only an unexpected bath and muddy boots. And now your schedule is all upset."

"That's what I said!" he huffed. 

Yes, this is a silly example, but I hope it makes the point -- we treat foreign words as foreign in text because they are. We'd all like to be able to read any language, but that's not how life works. In most nations on Earth you will find only one or two common languages, and having limited language in a populace is useful for -- what's that word again? Yes, clarity. In a book, a reader needs a helpful indicator that a word has arrived from a language different from that in which the bulk of the text is written.

The war on precision and clarity in the supposed service of removing offense is itself offensive. This nonsense is brought to us from our universities, of course, paid for by tax dollars, outrageous tuitions, and rich people who should know better. If the intent was mainly to sow confusion, what more could the academicians do? The ivory tower has become a Tower of Babel.

But it was delicious.

While many people remember the tragic Great Molasses Flood that struck Boston in 1919, few now recall the Tremendous Canned Jellied Cranberry Roll that nearly flattened the city center in 1913. 

Gearing up the gratitude.

With Thanksgiving nearly upon us in the United States, it behooves us to remember things for which we should have gratitude. Gratitude is the best cure for many social and emotional illnesses, which is one reason it is so despised by people who hate America. 

So first, I'm grateful that socialism was pushed further away from the body politic by the results of our last election.  

Closer to home, I'm grateful that the early snowstorm we had last week is a melted memory now. As it turned out, on our block we missed having long-term issues by a matter of inches. 

The local utility company is pretty good about getting out there when the sun is warm, taking down branches that will fall on power lines when the weather turns cold. But when the problem is a tree more than a dozen feet into someone's property, I don't think they have the authority to go tree-cutting. When our early storm hit, some trees still had leaves, weighing down the limbs, which subsequently fell off. And in one case, an elderly tree was entirely weighed down. 

Timber!!!

As you can see, it landed a ways over the curb, into the street. The homeowner has yet to chop it up; he may be pricing the job out. Fortunately it did not go far out enough into the street to be a danger to traffic.

Even more fortunately, it literally missed the power lines by inches. 

It looks like the tiny upper branches probably brushed the lines as the whole thing came down. If it had been just a little taller, lights out. 

We came close to having a bunch of houses without energy as Thanksgiving approached, with a problem that couldn't be resolved until the downed tree was completely removed. 

So I'm grateful for electricity and the genius of those who learned how to harness it for the benefit of humanity and civilization. And I'm grateful that the weather did not result in a local cut of electricity. And I'm grateful too that Communism has not taken over our country, because in many ways that means all the lights go out.

Crushalogs IV: The Revenge.

As a continuing social project, I am examining the volume and weight of catalogs I receive in the mail as the Christmas shopping season gins up into high gear. This is the fourth time I have done this. It's not as scientific an examination as I would hope; I have done these on different dates in November, and I have not spaced the years out evenly. 

In a nutshell, or perhaps a mailbox, I have been curious as to whether online advertising is killing the mail catalog business, so I have been looking at whether the sheer weight of catalogs has been decreasing as time goes on. Are they still considered an effective way to reach potential customers? If so, the overall catalog weight should be increasing or staying about the same. If not, it should be dwindling like the number of non-"commemorative edition" publications on the supermarket checkout magazine racks. 

Here are the results from the three previous entries:

Crushalogs I: November 4, 2016 -- Several weeks earlier in November than this year, and I estimated more than 10 pounds to that time; the catalogs seemed to be thicker eight years ago, but I may have exaggerated the total weight. Bad science, me! 

Crushalogs II: November 8, 2019 -- I also did not make either a count or a weight of the catalogs in 2019. I do note that in 2019, as in 2016, there was a giant dump at the beginning of November. This year it seems to have been parsed out over the month. I wonder if that is because Thanksgiving is so late in 2024?

Crushalogs III: November 19, 2022 -- Two years ago I did weigh the catalogs, and got a total of two pounds. Well, I think I can beat that weight this year! 

So let me load the catalogs into a plastic shopping bag, and then use the old luggage scale... And: 

Almost four pounds! So it looks like catalog mailings are up this year, double by weight from '22. It seems like in a lot of areas, smart businesses are pulling back from the new technological approaches and going back to what works. Maybe catalogs really are the way to reach holiday shoppers. After all, TV viewership is down, landline phones are way down, but if you live somewhere, you have a mailbox. It's a lot easier to focus on a few quality selections in a catalog than deal with the firehose of dubious miscellanea from online stores (hello, Amazon). If a company doesn't just chuck a lot of cheap Chinese crap at its clients, its catalog will likely be of higher interest. 

MAI Fulfillment says one of the advantages of mail catalogs is that they offer measurable results for businesses, justifying the large expenses of design, printing, and mailing. It depends on what kind of customers are being targeted, I supposed. 

What will 2025 bring to the catalog business? Oh, who knows. I have no idea what's coming down the road. I'm grumpy enough now. Maybe next year I'll go full Grinch and steal all the catalogs from all the mailboxes in Whoville and use them to build a giant bonfire to scare off the Whos. Not likely, but who can say what the future holds?

You’d better watch out!

We had a very dry and pleasant and even warm autumn to this point, so now we're getting it in the shorts. First there were wildfires, which I have never seen in the lower tier of New York State. They followed on the heels of drought warnings as day follows the night. Containing those bastard fires was extremely tough for our local firemen, and a big salute goes out to them. 

When it rained all day yesterday, it was a big relief. People always say "We needed the rain," but we really needed it this year. It usually rains here a lot, especially in November, which is normally a big gray wet smear of a month. And this is why we almost never have to deal with wildfires. 

Prior to the rain, a lot of the locals started to get their Christmas decorations out. I just can't do it before Thanksgiving, but I didn't fault them for taking advantage of the clement weather. I too have hung ribbons and lights in cold so miserable I could barely feel the fingers that were doing the work. But I just couldn't focus on doing the job this soon.  

Note that for some folks, the beginning of
Yuletide does not mean the end of 
Gloattide. 

I know when I drag the decorations out of the cellar, I will get that powerful feeling that I had just put them away. It happens annually, and the feeling is stronger each year, because of the ol' toilet paper situation, that life -- like a roll of TP -- goes faster the further along you are. 

And alas! I probably should have put my porch lights up already as well, because as I write this at 3:30 in the morning on Friday, it is snowing like (to use the technical, meteorological term) bejeezus out there. The dog sensed that this would be a bad time to have to go out to pee in the yard, so he woke up at three and started whining. And here we are. 

Compounding this, it's garbage day! Which means I don't know if I should take the can up to the street or not, as the trashmen will have to avoid the plows. The plow might even nail my Rubbermaid, which sounds vaguely pornographic. So now I don't even know what I'm doing. 

Jupiter pluvius, I guess, but sometimes his schedule is very inconvenient for me. 

Scrape the scum!

We had company coming to stay for a couple of days. While we have had many dinner guests, it has been some time since we had a sleepover party. Whee! And that meant it was time for Molecular Level Cleaning. 

We love the family, and this also provided a motivation to get that pesky, er, spring cleaning done. Okay, so we were a little late. 

It was a bit of an adventure. The kind of thing where the curtains are getting washed, the beds are lifted to vacuum the carpet below, and at some point you just look around and say HOW DO WE LIVE LIKE THIS? 

By the time the discouragement sets in, though, you're in too deep. The only way out is through. And I like to think that we presented a very pleasant and low-dust (and even low-dog-hair) environment. 

It's getting to the point where it's time to scale down. Time to get a smaller place. Time to stop having to make a monthly mortgage payment, that's for doggone sure, and a smaller place ought to let us pay cash with the proceeds from our larger home.

What kind of smaller house? Well, I don't know. I have always felt that my grandmother had it good in her old age. She literally lived in a cottage, a winterized beach cottage of which there were many in the outer boroughs at the time. (Real estate speculators and Hurricane Sandy have put paid to a lot of those since.) It was a little place, three rooms, but manageable for her and all she needed; she would get up in the morning, have a bit of breakfast, do her chores, perhaps toddle to the market, and watch TV or enjoy the sunshine. She didn't have to put up with annoying people on the other side of the wall, or a stupid roommate, or anything like that. I thought she had it made. 

I have always sort of thought that she had a great retirement plan. And then I realized that this retirement plan was to be a woodland creature in a British children's book.

Mrs. Squirrel realized she was out of tea. "Oh, dear, best go round the shops." So she put on her scarf and a lovely hat and left her cottage in the woods. 

"Hello, Mrs. Squirrel!" said Mr. Trash Panda, popping up from his smelly dumpster. "Lovely day, is it not?"

"Quite so, Mr. Panda!" said Mrs. Squirrel, who did not feel close enough as a friend to call him Trash. "I'm just going to the shops. Do you need anything?"

"No, thank you kindly, as someone has thrown away half a pizza."

And so on and so forth. 

It's a pleasant thought, but I must bear in mind that my grandmother had my dad a few miles away to help her out as needed (she did not drive). Also, she herself was tough as nails. Whereas I and my wife will likely flee New York and not be near family, and I personally am about as tough as Bubble Yum. 

Plus, if the housing market craters, I may have to move in with Mr. T. Panda or perhaps in a hollow tree. Getting older is hard, even when you're not scrubbing the hallway. 

Self-manslaughter.

I was thinking of a family member who had an awful car accident a couple of decades back. Actually it could have been much worse; the car hit a low concrete barrier at speed and flipped. Physically she came through just fine. Mentally she was not well afterward. In fact, she was not at all well beforehand. 

The woman in question had lost her husband of many years, and was driving back home to their empty house after coming up to New York for the funeral. When I found out about this accident -- to a woman with a perfectly clean driving record -- my thought was then as it is now, that her intense grief led to an involuntary suicide attempt. Not self-murder, but self-manslaughter. 

Probably all but the most even keeled or self-possessed of us have had those times when we're so overwhelmed with anger or sorrow or some other form of emotional pain that for a brief period we would blow up the world (or our own world) just to stop the pain. For most it would not bring us to suicide, but it could certainly make us so out of control that we could cause some horrific harm to ourselves by accident. This is very like manslaughter -- there was no intention of killing someone, but a terrifying lapse of control has led to just that -- except the victim is us.  

According to the CDC's provisional data for 2023, heart diseases are still the top cause of death in America, followed by cancer. Accidental deaths are next by a considerable margin, not even a third of heart disease deaths. But they're all awful, because they each took the life of someone who could have lived another day. 

And now I wonder -- how many of them could technically have been caused by self-harm, which is eleventh on the list? I wouldn't be surprised if psychiatrists and statisticians have looked into this, but I doubt there's a way to know. Maybe a population sample that seeks out those who died accidentally to see how many were known to be suffering distress -- but who can say? A lot of men, and women too, try to hide these feelings for a variety of reasons. There's no way to know who was going along, outwardly in control, who suddenly had a moment in which he or she said I can't take one more second of this -- or felt that way without putting it into conscious words -- and made a small mistake with fatal consequences. 

If you're feeling that way as you read this, I ask that you not wait until it escalates but tell someone. The 988 crisis hotline has a good rep. And if you're in a stage of catastrophic distress but don't think it will rise to the level of danger, still try to find a positive way forward. The lady with the car accident I described lived almost four years longer and died of natural causes, but not for one day did she ever move forward out of her grief. She didn't deserve to suffer that way.