Saturday, October 08, 2005

Slang rules!

P.J. O’Rourke doesn’t much like leslie Savan’s Slam Dunks and No-Brainers. I won’t be reading it. But I sure did enjoy the review:

A little information makes any book about language a pleasure. Very little information is found in “Slam Dunks.” Much effort is expended citing the use of catchphrases. Not much effort is expended discovering their sources or tracing their disseminations. Savan quotes from Charles Mackay’s brief chapter on slang in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” but she doesn’t seem to have read it. Certainly she didn’t absorb Mackay’s sense of how “the favorite slang phrase . . . throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour.” Savan is apparently ignorant of Eric Partridge’s “Dictionary of Catch Phrases.” Here she would have found that a Macaulay Culkin “Home Alone” squelch she particularly deplores has a 100-year-old fun and frolicsomeness antecedent. And Savan writes that “exactly when cool jelled into the word we know today is difficult to say.” It is not difficult to say upon looking into The Oxford English Dictionary. “Assured and unabashed in demeanor . . . calmly and deliberately audacious or impudent” dates to the 1820’s. But the O.E.D. is not in Savan’s bibliography, which contains “Jones, Gerard. ‘Honey, I’m Home!: Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream’ “ and “Moore, Michael. ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?’ “

Rush’s Georgia “mistress”

She’s apparenlty CNN’s Daryn Kagan:

LIMBAUGH: In fact, I got a note from my mistress in Georgia this morning, who was watching the speech. She said, “This is great. This sounds like you wrote this speech. This sounds like you giving this speech.

[Also] Via Amanda: “Nothing says ‘down home man of the people’ like having a ‘mistress’. That’s pretty much how we common folk in the red states do it.”

Amanda’s right. He’s part of the conservative elite no matter where he stands on Miers.

Abby makes sense

Yesterday:

DEAR ABBY: From time to time, you tell young women who think they might be pregnant and are afraid to tell their parents, to do so. I usually do not write letters like this, but I need to express my personal experience. I am a minister. Several years ago, I worked for Planned Parenthood and we had a young girl—around 13 years of age—test positive for pregnancy. We urged her to tell her parents, but she kept refusing, insisting, “Dad will kill me!”
Of course, we knew better, and finally convinced her that the best thing was to tell her parents, have the baby, and get on with her life.

Her father beat her so badly that she was in the hospital for more than a month. She lost the baby because of the beating and ended up in foster care.

I will never again tell a young person that her parents will not go crazy, and I don’t think you should do that either. Thanks, Abby. I enjoy your column.—REGRETFUL IN FLORIDA

DEAR REGRETFUL: Thank you for the warning. Even though we wish all teenagers could disclose to their parents, as your letter illustrates, it is a sad reality that some of them cannot. And we, who care about young people, have to first be concerned with their safety. Although most young girls do involve their families, there will always be some who are unable to do so.

For that reason, I do not believe that parental notification should be mandated by law. And because sex education is no longer taught in as many states as it had been before, I strongly urge parents to begin talking to their children early about the facts of life and their personal value systems, in order to create a safe and comfortable environment should a crisis occur.

Via Amanda at Pandagon:

The paradox of parental notification laws is that the argument is that girls should tell their parents because their parents are their protecters, but girls who actually believe this don’t need to be forced by law to tell their parents.