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Greenland . . . Our New Manifest Destiny (concluded)

One of those in the Trump-is-brilliant camp is Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. He recently published an op-ed piece in the New York Times. (Why is that when conservatives want to be taken as deep thinkers they so often publish in the “failing” Times? Mitch McConnell also placed an op-ed article with the “enemy of the people” the previous week. His piece was one about the importance of filibusters for our constitutional government and glossed over how he had removed those all-important filibusters for Supreme Court nominees.) Cotton contended that the Greenlanders should welcome coming under American sovereignty. Denmark now subsidizes Greenland to the tune of at least $650 million dollars annually. America has more money than does the Danish government, so we can do even better for the Greenlanders, Cotton maintained. The Senator surprised me. He wants to commit to a new and expensive welfare program. He opposes entitlement programs for American citizens, but he wants to open up the floodgates for those who are now foreigners. Is this the new conservatism? What do Cotton and the others feel about increased federal support for Puerto Rico? Or have I underestimated Trump? Were his remarks merely an opening salvo, and his real goal is to swap Puerto Rico for Greenland? The Art of the Deal may be more subtle than I ever thought.

I wonder, if in stating that America can increase governmental moneys in Greenland, whether Cotton has examined where the Danish subsidies go. Health care in Greenland is paid for by the government, and Danish subsidies support that. Cotton, who adamantly opposes the Affordable Care Act, expects America to expand single-payer medical services in the new possession. And here I thought that Trump supporters believed in America first!

Does Cotton realize that part of the healthcare in Greenland is for abortion on demand. Greenland now has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. In fact, abortions have exceeded live births in recent years. (Remember those long nights.) He supports the laws that prevent the federal government from paying anything for abortions in the United States no matter how poor the woman or how the pregnancy—think rape and incest–occurred, but Cotton wants to increase funding for this medical procedure in Greenland. (I am told that when residents of Greenland’s capital Nuuk do want a baby, they say, “Let’s have a little Nuukie.”) And perhaps Cotton should also examine how education is funded in Greenland.

Cotton is a hardliner about our immigration system, concerned that Mexicans and Central Americans are lured here by all the goodies they can get out of our government. Shouldn’t he and other conservatives then be concerned that when we increase the freebies to Greenlanders, illegal immigration will uncontrollably increase there as refugees see Greenland as a new land of welfare opportunity? Perhaps Cotton, who supports Trump’s border wall, is already planning to build a wall around Greenland to stop the illegal immigration that he must think will inevitably occur. Perhaps Cotton ought to give at least an estimate as to how much federal money he thinks we will spend over there.

I also wonder if Cotton and the other Trump-is-marvelous crowd have thought about the status of those who would fall under American sovereignty. If we own Greenland, will we provide a path to American citizenship for those who live there, or will they automatically be citizens? Will they have an unfettered right to permanent residence in the United States? If so, how long does one have to be a Greenlander for that right? Puerto Ricans are American citizens and can come and go to the United States whenever they wish. Guam, which we own, is similar. Those born on Guam are American citizens who can move to the rest of America. (For reasons I don’t understand while Guamanians have birthright citizenship, those born in American Samoa do not.) If Greenland is to be treated like Guam, aren’t conservatives concerned that refugees will flock to Greenland and have ice-floe babies who will be American citizens who can freely emigrate to America? I am guessing that before conservatives will grapple with such questions, they will have to ascertain whether Greenlanders lean Democratic or Republican. And perhaps even more important: Will there be a path to statehood for Greenland? Just because they have fewer than 60,000 people doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have two Senators and three electoral votes, just as long as they vote Republican.

We have acquired much territory through purchase in our history. As far as I know, we never sought to find out whether the people who already lived on those lands desired a new sovereign. In essence, they were treated like Russian serfs. You buy the land, you buy the people on the land. Should we who proclaim democracy and government of “we the people” continue such a feudal practice? Will there be some sort of plebiscite; will the leaders of Greenland be consulted? (I have no idea who the chief griot of Greenland is, but I am confident neither does our president. However, there is a good chance that Melania knows that person well.)

The Fox News writer points out, however, that we have bought lands before—including the Louisiana purchase, the Gadsden Purchase, Florida, and Alaska, and he concludes that Trump could simply buy Greenland. Hold on–it has never been that simple. We do have a Constitution and the consent of Congress or the Senate has been necessary for those purchases. We may say that President Jefferson and Secretary of State Monroe made the Louisiana Purchase, but in fact Congress ratified and authorized the funds for it. The Gadsden Purchase and the acquisitions of Florida, Alaska, and other lands came via treaties together with the authorization of the funds from Congress. A treaty, of course, requires not just the consent of the Senate, but consent by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. Do you really think that is going to happen? Or does Trump have another trick up his sleeve that he will maintain justifying him in his mind to take unilateral action and do another end run around our Constitution—that document that conservatives proclaim to love so dearly?

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Greenland . . . Our New Manifest Destiny?

President Trump wants to buy Greenland. My first reaction: I was surprised that he would want to buy white people. But then I did some reading, and I learned that Greenland’s population is 88% Greenlandic Inuit, with 12% Danes and other Europeans. Maybe that eight-to-one ratio explains the acquisition mania.

On the other hand, I never thought that Trump would think desirable a place that does not have forests to decimate and is not dependent on coal or other fossil fuels. In what seems ironic, Greenland is one of the greenest places on the planet. According to one source, seventy percent of its power comes from renewable sources, mostly from hydropower. But perhaps this is an attraction for Trump. He can fulfill his promise to bring back jobs to the West Virginia coal fields by “ordering” the Greenlanders under some national security rationale to use coal. I can see the slogan as Trump supporters wear tee shirts proclaiming, “Make Greenland Sooty (Again).”

I wondered how Greenlanders have reacted to the proposed purchase by a world leader who does not believe in climate change. Greenland is ground zero for global warming. An ice sheet covers four-fifths of the island; it weighs so much that it has depressed the central part of island making it almost a thousand feet below sea level. The glaciers have been experiencing increased run off contributing to the rise of sea levels. Does a lessened ice mass also mean that the land will rise?

Perhaps, however, the Greenlanders favor global warming. It would not be surprising. Greenland’s capital and largest city, with a population of more than 17,000, (Quick! What is it?) Nuuk averages high temperatures below freezing for more than half the year. I assume, however, that the tourist agencies point out that the high in July is a relatively balmy fifty degrees Fahrenheit. A few degrees warmer and perhaps the residents will be able to break out bikinis and speedos. During the summer, the sun rises at 3:00 A.M. and sets at midnight, so there is a lot of daylight for any unrestrained outdoor frivolity. Of course, during the winters, the sun is above the horizon for only four hours, but those long nights perhaps call out for other appropriate activities.  

If Trump does buy Greenland, you would think he ought to make at least one visit, even though that it is unlikely since he does not own a hotel there and won’t be able to bill the American taxpayers for his stay to increase his family revenues. But perhaps those long nights appeal to him for all the dark hour tweets he can unleash. And maybe he is already watching Greenlandic porn movies to find a star for another extramarital bedding during a long night. But with Michael Cohen unavailable, who is preparing the nondisclosure agreements and assembling the hush money payments? I may not have anticipated that Trump would float the purchase idea, but surely no one should have been startled that he showed the usual pique when the nasty Danish threw ice water on the idea. Canceling a scheduled trip to Denmark seems par for his course, but, of course, he does not own a golf course in Denmark and does not apparently have a way to bill us taxpayers and increase his revenues by a Copenhagen visit.

It was expected that conservative pundits would weigh in and maintain that Trump was again showing his genius. Too often the difference between these commentators and a rubber stamp is that the latter leaves an impression, but I was surprised that Trump-is-always-right sycophants have cited climate change—yes, climate change!–as a reason why the U.S. should purchase Greenland. An article on the Fox News website states, “But what makes Greenland particularly valuable to the United States is global warming. The unavoidable receding of Arctic sea ice will open a new sea route in the Arctic that can be used for both commercial and military vessels.” What especially struck me about this contention was the use of the term unavoidable. Global warming is happening, the writer to my surprise wrote, but his position is that it is inevitable. Increasing temperatures can’t be helped, apparently. I guess the writer believes that it is God’s will, so we should just go with it and seize the opportunities. If we can keep the warming going and the ice diminishes and the seas rise, new sea routes will open allowing ships to go where they have not gone before. So, stop being so negative about climate change (which Trump says is not happening) and revel in new sea lanes.

What the writer did not make clear, however, is why the new ship routes, if they occur, mean that it is essential that we own Greenland. Aren’t there many sea lanes around the world important to us where we do not own the adjacent land? Why is this different?

This writer also said, as did others who find a way to support Trump after he makes a pronouncement no matter what it is, that Greenland has valuable minerals that should not fall into China’s hands. Why, then, don’t we try to buy the mineral rights? Indeed, those of us who believe in free enterprise and fair trade should expect American corporations to see the opportunity and seek to get all this valuable stuff. These Trump-is-amazing writers don’t give an explanation for this apparent failure of American capitalism. Where is their faith in free enterprise without government intervention? Isn’t that the point of cutting governmental regulations, which they support?

(concluded September 6)

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Put Labor Back into Labor Day (concluded)

          Ofttimes unions have been a scapegoat for various economic woes. At the time that Japanese car companies were first making major inroads into the American market and American automobile makers started to decline, I was at a party where I met Tina who worked for a major investment house. She railed against the auto unions and blamed them for the problems of General Motors and their brethren. I found this strange. The Japanese car companies were then known to take much better care of their workers than their American counterparts. That didn’t seem to indicate that the unions were the real cause of the problems. On the other hand, Japan car companies had devised a superior just-in-time system of assembly line production that the Americans did not have. The Japanese were simply more efficient. The foreign companies were simply better managed, but for Tina, and many others, it was easier to blame unions than to criticize the American corporate structure.

          It is not just narratives like Tina’s that has made the American corporate war on unions successful. It has been aided by laws passed by conservative states and legal decisions by conservative courts. It has also been furthered by our immigration laws and enforcement. Periodically, as happened recently, ICE raids a plant and arrests hundreds of undocumented aliens working there. Gee, how does it happen that those large numbers were at the same workplace? Did management not know they were there? Perhaps such a raid seems to harm the companies because they lose a workforce, but instead they aid the owners. The workers are soon replaced, and a message is sent out to them and to others in different companies: Don’t draw attention to yourselves by unionizing or complaining about wages or unsafe and other working conditions. Such attention can lead to your deportation. Until such raids have serious consequences for the companies and management, the raids just nurture low wages and dangerous work environments.

The number of unionized private sector jobs is about one-fifth of what it once was, well under ten percent. The consequences for the country have been immense. A study concluded that a major cause of our rising income inequality has been the decline of unions.  See https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/labors-decline-and-wage-inequality/. It is not just that the wages in what were unionized jobs have not kept pace, but also that when unions were strong, companies often increased wages to stave off unionization efforts.

          There has also been a political fallout. Who you hang out with affects your views. Politicians no longer seek out union support as they once did. They hang out with corporate and other business leaders. That is where the money is, and money increasingly controls our political process. In the 2016 election cycle, business outspent labor by sixteen to one, with businesses spending $3 billion on lobbying and unions spending $48 million.

          Unions in the past worked for laws that helped all working people, but now they have little effect. This is part of the reason that, unlike in other developed countries, we do not have guaranteed paid parental leave, paid vacations or sick days, and the minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage is lower than in other developed countries. Instead, we have seen the rise of unpaid interns in the work force and workers forced into arbitration systems that favor corporations. We have also seen a major shift to temporary and contract workers. Google, for example, has more temporary and contract workers than full-time employees.

            This is not to suggest that everything unions might advocate for is necessarily a good thing, but as the union voice is increasingly drowned out by the big money coming from a relative handful of rich people something important has been lost in our country. (If you want to be depressed, read Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.)Unions may still be in the dining room, but they are at the kids table and seldom heard.

On Labor Day we can have picnics and hit the back-to-school sales, but the day was meant to be a commemoration of organized labor. We have politicians who proclaim a concern for blue collar workers, but our present political system is rigged so that labor can be largely ignored, and corporations can be served.  Without a strong labor movement, the country is not as well off as it ought to be. Let’s put Labor back into Labor Day.

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Put Labor Back into Labor Day (continued)

          Labor Day was meant to honor the American labor movement, but do we do that on the holiday or at any other time? Aren’t we much more likely to denigrate the laboring class or organized labor? How often do you praise unions? When you pass a highway road crew, do you spot workers seemingly idling and think, “Working hard or hardly working?”

          That was often my reaction at least until I got a job in a cemetery in the summer after I graduated from high school. My first assignment was to rake a grassy plot that had been recently cut. I thought that this would be easy, even pleasurable. I was young and fit, and I loved the smell of freshly mown grass. But after quarter hour my arms were sore. I took a few minutes break. After another fifteen minutes, my shoulders started to burn. I took another break. After a total of ninety minutes, every part of my body seemed jelly-like. How could all those people do something like this for eight hours day after day? Luckily, a regularly scheduled coffee break at nine interceded, and I was given a new assignment at its conclusion.

          During that summer, I worked alongside the full-time employees, and I saw how hard they worked and how often they took pride in what they accomplished. I had a new-found respect for those who labored. This education continued in the summers of my college years when I worked in a factory. I learned how hard it was to do repetitive tasks on my feet for a workday, but again I learned that the workers cared about the product. If I did not assemble something correctly or made some other mistake, I was quickly informed on how to do the task properly. These were boom times, and we worked nine-and-a-half hour days during the week and a half-day on Saturdays. The full-time workers did not complain but were happy for the extra money that they could make. I bitched a lot, got regularly drunk in what was left of the evening after scarfing down a meal, and then dragged myself out of bed at 5:45 A.M. for the start of another nine-and-a-half hours.

          My grandfather was the member of a union. So were my fellow factory workers. (As a summer worker, I was not asked to join.) Since I barely spoke with my grandfather, I never heard from him what he thought of his union, but that he joined the strike and stayed out for its duration, does indicate something. Mostly I heard about the union from my grandfather’s son, and this talk was not so much about the union and wages, but about the union and working conditions. My father told me stories about how management would order workers to do unnecessarily dangerous things that the union would prevent and that the union forced the company to reduce the risks of silicosis, measures that would not have occurred without union bargaining and pressures.

          I did hear the union workers at the factory talk about their union. This came up frequently at the lunch break and before and after work (I carpooled with workers to get to the factory a few miles out of town) because bargaining was going on with a strike date looming in the middle of summer. (The potential strike presented an existential dilemma for me. My family supported union causes, and I did know Solidarity Forever. On the other hand, I was dating one of the management’s daughters. I was saved from resolving the conflict between principles and sex when at the last minute the company and the union signed a new contract. Years later, I was represented by a union when I was an attorney for the New York City Legal Aid Society, and strikes again posed dilemmas for me, but that is a story for another time.)

          The factory workers were not dissatisfied with their working conditions, but they saw the union as essential for getting fair wages. Without the collective action of a union, they knew that they would get paid less and simply have no alternative but to accept whatever the company offered to pay them. They knew that if the company were to make the choice of more money for the owners and higher wages for the worker, the result would not be more money in their paychecks.

          Those days, however, are now distant. Unions have much less authority than they did back then and in other countries now. Unions have been denigrated since the beginning of the organized labor movement, but that denigration took especial hold over the last forty or fifty years. How often have you heard something positive about unions? On the other hand, you probably did hear about featherbedding and union corruption. Of course, many unions have had a corruption problem, but if you pay the least little attention, you know that many corporations have had and continue to have corruption issues and the equivalent of management featherbedding in the form of lavish pay and perks. Corporate corruption, however, does not mean we think that all corporations are bad for the country. In contrast, a corrupt union bleeds over to other unions. A corrupt union tends to make us think that unionization is generally a bad thing.

(concluded on Labor Day)

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Put Labor Back into Labor Day

Labor Day is not a lonely and forgotten holiday. It is celebrated as the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The schoolyear begins as does the football season. But how often do we commemorate the supposed purpose of the holiday, the labor movement? At least on most Labor Days, however, I think about a laboring man, my grandfather.

 I was raised in a working-class family. My parents, sister, brother, and I lived on the ground floor of a two-story house. My father’s parents lived upstairs. While I talked with my grandmother some, I spent almost no time with my grandfather, who just seemed silent with us most of the time. I have no idea how he ended up in Wisconsin. He was born in Pennsylvania to an immigrant family, most of whom migrated back to Germany. I felt like I knew only two things about him: He played skat, a card game, at a local tavern on some weekends and evenings, and he worked at the Kohler Company, the firm that makes toilets and sinks and bathtubs. Other than that he was some sort of laborer in the factory, I didn’t know what he did.

I do know that he started at Kohler in 1917. I am confident of this fact because I now have my grandfather’s Hamilton pocket watch, which was awarded him by his employer on his twenty-fifth anniversary of working for the company. His initials are inscribed on the back. A cover opens revealing his name and further inscriptions: “1917 SERVICE 1942” and “KOHLER OF KOHLER”.  A goldish chain is attached to the watch and to a medallion, which is inscribed on the back with my grandfather’s name and the obverse has a relief of a factory worker, “Kohler” boldly written across the medallion, with a slogan on one side: “He Who Toils Here Hath Set His Mark.” (When I used to wear three-piece suits to court, I would carry this watch and medallion in my vest pockets. The watch still works beautifully.)

My grandfather continued working at Kohler for another dozen years, but then a strike came. Kohler was by far the largest employer in the area, and the walkout, with my grandfather joining the strikers, had a huge effect on the town. As the strike went on and union benefits lessened, families faced tough times. Some strikers sought other work, but there was not much to be had. A few decided to return to work. Loyalties were tested. In a town with a tavern culture, some regulars found they were no longer welcome at their favorite bar. Sporadic acts of violence occurred. I was only eight or nine when it began, and the kids seldom mentioned it. Child friendships did not follow the fault lines fissuring from the strike, but at home I learned the epithet “Scab” and the words to Solidarity Forever.

And I saw the effect on my grandfather. He was now home at times I had never seen before. And he looked lost, bewildered. Part of his life, his identity, had been stripped. I have no idea what kind of economic strain was weighing on my grandparents, and from the sanctuary of childhood, I never thought about it, or I never thought about it until a few years after the strike started. I was with some friends, and we wandered into a park behind our school’s playground. And there was my grandfather raking leaves. Until then, I was not aware that he worked for the city’s Parks Department. He saw me; I saw him. We made no signs of recognition. He looked embarrassed. Raking leaves was the kind of demeaning make-work projects of the Depression. It was akin to a handout. It was not the real work of making something as was done at the Kohler Company. Or perhaps, my grandfather was fine, and only I was embarrassed for what he now had to do. I know that I did not want my friends to know that the lonely-looking figure under the trees was my grandfather. Perhaps my grandfather was truly embarrassed or perhaps he recognized that I was or perhaps both, but we exchanged no greetings.

The strike lasted six years, then, and I still think today, the longest strike in the country’s history. The National Labor Relations Board eventually found that Kohler had not bargained with the union in good faith, and that set off another round of contentiousness about what back pay was owed the strikers. The year the strike ended my grandfather died.

My sister recently told me something I did not know–that my grandfather waited by his upstairs window watching for me to come home from school. He knew that I was studying German, a language that he considered his native tongue (he also spoke English, of course, and Lithuanian), and he was proud of my German studies. Although I would try to exchange a few words of German with my grandmother, I never said a word of German to him. I am sorry for that, and I am sorry that I did not go up to him in that park. We did not hug much in my family, but I wish that I had given him one. He may no longer have had the job that had been part of his identity for forty years, but work was still important to him, and the many others like him. I try to remember that, especially on Labor Day.

(continued August 30)

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Snippets

Who knew that Tarzan lived in Wisconsin?

Parking increasingly requires us to go to one of those machines and buy a slip with a time printed on it to put on the car’s dashboard to show how long the car can be parked in that spot. With a parking meter, there was always a chance that time remained on the meter, and we might need fewer coins than we thought or, perhaps, none. It was not a huge joy when that happened, but it always made me feel at least a little bit lucky. But that happy moment is now gone. Or does anyone, when leaving a parking place, give the slip with time remaining on it to someone pulling into a spot on that block?

Will a new generation know what “Rita the Meter Maid” is about?

I had a heart incident a decade ago. In the days right before I landed in the emergency room, the strain of ordinary exertion must have shown, because, for the first time ever and to my dismay, a young woman offered me her seat on the subway. Luckily, she was not that good looking.

At this time of year, I remember the country song lyrics—“There are two things money can’t buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes.”

Why do we say something is “affordable”?  Isn’t anything bought, leased, rented, or bartered “affordable” for the one who got it?  And isn’t almost anything, no matter how “affordable,” not affordable for many?

 I recently met a couple.  He was six feet ten.  She was just shy of five feet.  What questions would you have liked to ask?

The only time I have been in one was in Baltimore while on a tour of baseball stadiums as a guest of a minister friend. He insisted he wanted to go to his first “Hooters.”

All those TV sports shows ought to interview college athletes about their favorite professors and then produce clips of those teachers in the classrooms and interacting with the athletes outside of classes.

I was on a park bench. Off to my left a man was ranting. Police were around the apparently mentally ill person dealing with him patiently. On the next park bench to my right were people who begged in the park and seemed to know the ranter. One of the them looked at the police, saw a blonde woman, and said, “Look at her. She doesn’t look like a cop. Why did she become a cop? She should have been, uh, uh, uh, a chemist, or something.”

I hope it was for a law firm, but it did not say so. The billboard read: “Medical malpractice is all we do.”

It was a remarkable sight, the man wearing sweatpants held up by suspenders.

“No one on earth—none that I had ever seen—is more polite than a person at a gun show: more eager to smile, more accommodating, less likely to step on your toe.” Paul Theroux, Deep South.

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A Con Man

I was walking in Manhattan miles from my home. A man approached me and in the friendliest fashion said hello. I nodded, thought “panhandler” even though he was not shabbily dressed, and continued on. He turned to walk with me and said with companionable incredulity, “You don’t remember me?” I perhaps took my first real look at him, pondered, and said no. “We met at your place.” I studied him again and hesitated. “My sister works for you, and we met when I came over to see her one day.” He almost sounded hurt. Perhaps I should have walked away at this point. I knew it was a con. A woman did work for us, but her siblings were sisters. I, however, was not hurrying anywhere and was intrigued. “Oh,” I said.

          He then continued, “We met when you were coming home from work, I think.” I don’t remember my precise replies, but anything specific I said he would weave into his patter–not immediately, but after a sentence or two. If I had said that I usually got to Brooklyn about six, he would find a way to mention Brooklyn as my home as if he had always known that, and so on. Only when the talk lasted long enough to seem as if we were reunited long-lost buddies did the pitch come. This was the familiar one about car trouble. Something was wrong with his vehicle, and he needed a few a bucks to put it right so he could pick up his mother at the doctor’s office. Only rarely do I give money to panhandlers, but I did give him something. I often stop to watch street performers and drop a bill or two into their cap when I especially like them, and I thought this guy was a very good street performer of a sort. (I don’t remember the name he ascribed to himself, but he told me something as he sought mine trying to build a bond.)

          Few street performers I have seen play on race, but a troop I have seen several times on the Central Park Mall does. They are six or so young black men who do tumbling and acrobatic passes to the background of music with a heavy beat coming from boom boxes. They ask a few of the audience members where they are from. The majority seem to be tourists, and what could be a better New York experience than to be in Central Park watching this group perform?  You don’t see that back home. They have a patter that is as honed as a vaudeville act, and it plays up race and subtly plays on racial fears. As one starts his run for a tumbling pass, another says, “That is as fast as you will see a black man run not being chased by a cop.” “If we weren’t here getting donations from you, we would be breaking into your homes.”

          My guy who approached me on the street, however, used race in a more subtle way. His incredulity at not being recognized was a great play on white guilt. Don’t many of us secretly worry that we fall into that group that think so many black men do look sort of alike? And not wanting to be rude to a black man then tends to make us stop and at least briefly hear what he has to say.

          I wondered how often he had to approach men like me for his sister line to succeed. Does one of every five, ten, or twenty white men walking in a Manhattan neighborhood have a black woman working for him at home? Surely in five or ten minutes he could encounter some such person. And, of course, the odds would be good that this person would have a brother. In any event, probably few of the white men know much about the lives of the women that work in their home. (I was different from many because I worked at home for about half the time and chatted with people who cleaned or helped take care of the nonbinary progeny.)

          The guy, however, was good beyond getting me to stop and listen a bit. Besides the line about his sister, he said nothing that could seem wrong and send up flags. Instead he was skillful in trying to get me to say things that he could use to make it seem as if he already knew me. He was good at his craft.

          After I gave him some money, I wanted to stop him and tell him I knew it was a con and ask him how he had developed his line, how often it worked, and how much he made. But, just like insisting on finding out how a magician does his tricks, it would have destroyed the moment.

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Sneaked or Snuck

The TV newsreader said that the burglars snuck into the building after midnight. I thought how my grade school teacher Miss Dahlberg hated snuck. It was not as high on her antipathy list as ain’t, but it was close. Snuck, she preached, was slang.  All who used it betrayed their lack of education. It was uncouth; inelegant. “Sneaked, sneaked, sneaked,” she exhorted.

But in all circles that I encounter today, spoken and written, it is largely snuck. A dictionary’s note says that snuck is now used by people of all educational levels, and while snuck may once have been regarded as “nonstandard, . . . it can no longer be regarded so.”

Language changes. Even so, I try, perhaps in deference to that teacher to say sneaked.  But why? I actually find it mildly difficult to enunciate. My tongue has to do a dance between the “k” and “d” that I think makes my pronunciation odd. Snuck is easier to say, and since both the meaning of snuck and sneaked is clear, how can the use of either be sneered at?

Why stick to the traditional grammatical rules if the meaning is clear? Does it really matter if we say: “He is different from a pedant” or “He is different than a pedant”?

Language, however, does not always change to remove artificial distinctions. It adds newly needed words and definitions. Many of the common words we use when discussing computers, for example, did not exist a century ago. Of course, these are necessary words, and the lexicon should increase. But the definitions for existing words also change even when there is no apparent need for the change, and oft times the new meanings do not bring greater clarity. Sometimes they only create redundancies or even contradictions.

So, for example, precipitate means to bring about suddenly. (I think of those high school chemistry experiments where the beaker was filled with a liquid holding something in suspension. A chemical was added and almost instantly solid particles floated to the bottom.  The precipitate appeared precipitately.)  Precipitous referred to a precipice and meant something extremely steep, but over time precipitous got confused with precipitate, and now precipitous not only refers to steepness, it also means precipitate. This new definition for precipitous added nothing useful to the language, but nothing seems lost from the language by it. And my guess is that the context almost always makes clear which definition of precipitous is meant.

Sometimes, however, a definition is added to a word that is inconsistent with an existing definition. Presently once meant only “in the near future, soon.” Presently now, however, means “now.” These definitions are inconsistent. What is soon is not now, but the two usages are hard to confuse because the tenses that accompany the word make clear presently’s meaning. “He will be here presently” can’t mean now. “He is presently here” can’t mean soon. (Although presently can and should be dropped from that second sentence because the sentence’s meaning stays the same without it.)

But sometimes a new meaning gets added to a word that can cause confusion. Verbal once only meant “consisting of words.” Verbal now also means spoken and not written. A written statement is thus simultaneously not verbal and verbal. Most often the intended meaning is no doubt gleaned from the context, but verbal meaning oral adds nothing to the language and sometimes does cause confusion. Not every added definition is an advance or harmless. A valuable linguistic distinction has been lost now that verbal also means oral.

Do you have new definitions of old words that you would like to see disappear?

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I am pleased to see that Anthony Scaramucci is back in the news but not because I care about his views of President Trump. Instead, as during his eleven days as White House communications director, I hope that his prominence will  bring cult showings of the movie “Scaramouche” starring Stewart Granger, and this will bring a revival of the author Rafael Sabatini, who, of course, wrote the marvelous book Scaramouche as well as the equally delightful Captain Blood, and this will lead to cult double features of Granger’s “Scaramouche” and Errol Flynn’s “Captain Blood,” and all this would lead to a revival of Baroness Orczy and her novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, and this would lead to cult showings of “The Scarlet Pimpernel” starring Leslie Howard. Right now, we seem to need some swashbuckling heroes.

In the old days, including during my career in criminal defense, when a person informed the police about (i.e., ratted on) another, it was said that the informant had “dropped a dime” on the other one. No one calls a cop on a pay phone with a dime any more. So today, what is the informant doing?

The blonde server told us she was from Siberia. She elaborated. From western Siberia, from Siberia near Kazakhstan. She said, “From the nice part of Siberia.” Who knew?

As I walked to the subway, I heard a street person in a doorway say to no one in particular, “Did you see that old couple who just walked by?  They did it.”

My friend worked for Nokia. She liked the work except for the trips to the headquarters in Finland, even though it amused her that Helsinki was the only place where she saw women with blonde roots.

I got to the escalator at a local Target. A man carrying more stuff than I offered to let me go first, but I insisted that he proceed. When I got to the escalator with him in front, I realized that the escalator was not working. I said to him, “But I expected you to get it to work.” He immediately replied, “That’s just what my wife says.”

As I passed a group of toddlers after some rain, I heard the teacher calmly state, “It is your choice whether you walk in any puddles.  But first think about whether that is a good choice.”

If the Gospels are divinely inspired, why did He inspire four different people who wrote four different accounts inconsistent with each other? Wouldn’t it have been better to have one comprehensive narrative so that those without faith would have less to pick at?

A Sunday School teacher once said to me, “There are three main religions in this country: Christians, Jews, and Catholics.”

“I believe in children praying—well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant.” Joseph Conrad, Victory.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Transylvania/Mormon Question

The university/museum boat trip down the Danube from Vienna to the Black Sea was not as satisfying as I had hoped. The lectures were not very informative and the stops in various cities were too brief to feel that I had even begun to see a place. Even so, I did get the sense that, although these countries may be neighbors and share much, they differ in essential ways. In one, for example, there was a strong security presence—armed men with automatic weapons outside the museums and in formation in the squares—while in another only one or two cops were spotted. In one country, mule-drawn carts were prevalent, while in others I saw only motorized vehicles.

I did learn yet again of deficiencies in my knowledge. Some were rather trivial. I failed the Budapest guide’s question, “What is the second largest Hungarian city in the world?” His answer: Cleveland, Ohio. (Perhaps there was a time that Cleveland held that distinction, but I doubt it does now.)

Some other knowledge gaps were less trivial. I knew that World War I was vital to understanding today’s world, but I did not fully grasp how much that war’s aftermath continues to affect Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, especially the Middle East). This was driven home when I learned that the same days were simultaneously a period of mourning in Hungary while a period of celebration in Romania. This stems from the Treaty of Trianon. Okay, maybe you know more than I do, but I had never heard of the Treaty of Trianon, which helped to end World War I. I thought that the Treaty of Versailles had done that, but the Versailles Treaty did not stand alone. The Treaty of Trianon (it is some consolation to my bruised ego that this treaty was signed in Versailles at the Grand Trianon Palace) was negotiated in 1920 between the Allies and the Kingdom of Hungary. Austria-Hungary had fought with Germany and was dissolved into separate states after World War I. The Treaty of Trianon demarcated Hungary’s borders, which are nearly the same today.

The treaty proclaimed that all of Transylvania, including the part that had been in Austria-Hungary, was now Romanian, even though about a third of Transylvania’s population was ethnic Hungarian. Thus, the anniversary of that treaty is met with mourning in Hungary and celebration in Romania. It may be nearly a century later, but the memories are still firmly in place.

While I did not know enough to get all the history, sociology, or demography I might have out of the trip, I did pick up a useful social tip: Make an effort, if the opportunity exists, to befriend any Mormons on your trip. Talk with them; hang out with them; eat with them. This is partly because all the Mormons I have met have been bright, charming, engaging, entertaining folk, but also for another reason: They don’t drink. On trips like this Danube cruise, many meals are included in the tour price, and sometimes wine comes with the dinner. If so, a bottle or carafe or two may be placed on the tables. (I am not the kind of traveler whose tours have been so exclusive that the group is small enough that all can be placed at one dinner table; instead, there have been a number of tables with the travelers free to go to any place setting.) Stay with your new Mormon friends. We did, and there was more wine and vodka some of the time for us.

Now you might think you don’t have to find a Mormon; you can find any teetotalers. I warn you, however, avoid the teetotaling non-Mormon Christian groups. (If you want to see an interesting reaction, ask Mormons whether they are Christian.) In my experience, the teetotaling Baptists, for example, are quite different from the teetotaling Mormons. (I was raised in such a Baptist church. Take the Bible literally, I heard preached. I also heard that when the Bible said “wine,” it really meant “Concord grape juice.” I had some trouble with the inconsistency.) Those Baptists don’t just abstain, they think all should shun alcohol, the devil’s brew. (Thus, prohibition.) This view does not make for a good dinner companion when you are reaching for your third glass of pinot. The Mormons, however, seem to hold the attitude that while they will not drink alcohol (or coffee), they will not pass judgment on those who do. Thus, they are good dining partners, especially when you get their share of the wine.