Eat that metaphor salad and name it on the way back up, you bad druggie

Game theory

1

In the middle of Loren Eiseley's essay "How Flowers Changed the World," the freshman comp class snapped awake for a moment when a girl hit a startling assertion and uttered a pretty little scream.

"Flowers are sex organs?" she cried.

"What did you think they are?" I Socratically responded.

Pause.

And then the girl ventured: "For decoration?"

2

The woman's denim pants from South Korea are purses for an invisible currency. Their decorated pockets hold nothing but an object of imaginative speculation. Playfully, they deploy optical illusion to shape an idea of the body they coyly hide.

Click to enlarge.

Playfully, too, they are labeled with nonsense words and an anachronistic image from a symbol system which still retains prestige in its provincial borderlands.

H. M. Regiment of Royal Korean Cowgirls.

3

The beggar is holding a sign which we can't read at that angle.

“Beggar’s dog – Hoboken,” ca. 1910-1915

Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.10090

But we can be sure what it must say. Advancing on our sympathy behind the shield of his sign, the beggar is notionally selling pencils and shoelaces: things everybody needs, things with a value in any economic system. But in the trade zone behind the sign, what is transacted is only an exchange of money from one pocket to another. Except for that transfer, everything in this image is decoration. The beggar's pencils are no more for writing with than a hedge funder's bling watch is for telling time.

Making it playful, the beggar has alienated his tin cup from the transaction by hanging it around his dog's neck. Accustomed to seeing pictures by the rules of narrative convention, we think of the dog as smiling. The dog is also wrapped in something gauzy. It may be something like a woman's shawl; it may be a completely threadbare blanket. Presumably it is worn against the cold, but we are going to read it too as part of the game. Coming closer and closer to the outline of the dog's body, it playfully beckons the decorative twists of the iron bars behind it into what might look like the final shape of a life.

That gauze, those iron helices, that dozing bald man, have become part of a pattern they can no longer outlive.

Adjective neutral, noun bad

 

At minute 4 of this video about a small lake in New Hampshire called Jew Pond, the director of the New Hampshire Jewish Federation makes the point that the noun "Jew" is pejorative when it's used as an adjective. His examples are "Jew politician" and "Jew lawyer," and he might also have mentioned T. S. Eliot's scornful phrase about one of his benefactors, "Jew publisher." "If the name had been 'Jewish Pond,'" the director tells the interviewer, "we would not be having this conversation."

And that's why Republicans say "Democrat Party."

—

Addendum: Gary Ostrower writes to recommend the Wikipedia article “Democrat Party (phrase)," and adds,

“The difference between using ‘Democrat’ as an adjective and ‘Jew’ as an adjective is that the latter has nearly 2000 years of negative connotation behind it. Not so ‘Democrat.’ Most — maybe all — of my own students would not recognize ‘Democrat’ as slur; not so with ‘Jew.’”

And that’s true enough. Just two days ago one of my own rhythm-challenged students sent me a friendly e-mail beginning, “High Professor Morse.” No, he didn’t mean “Herr Oberprofessor,” and no he couldn’t hear the pause where the comma should go. For that matter, when I took my physical exam for the draft in 1966 the sergeant in charge of the paperwork instructed us to fill in the Race blank “Neg” if we were, as he carefully put it, Negroic.

---

Further note, March 14, 2012: Jew Pond will now be renamed. Story here:

http://forward.com/articles/152987/nh-town-votes-to-rename-jew-pond

Coed

Note: Belatedly I've realized that Windows Live Writer, in which I've been writing my WordPress blog, will let me copy posts to my Blogger blog as well. I've been using the Blogger blog only as an archive of my pre-WordPress posts, but the machine seems to have been with me all along.

So:

In the course of the Republican primary campaign of 2012, the conservative policy intellectual Rush Limbaugh weighed in on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student who had addressed some Democratic members of the House in favor of birth control coverage under government-mandated health insurance. According to David Crary's article for the Associated Press (Honolulu Star-Advertiser 3 March 2012: A3), Mr. Limbaugh told his radio audience on February 29:

What does it say about the college coed . . . who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

About that, three language notes.

1. A septuagenarian myself, I remember the term "coed" from the 1950s. I don't think I've heard it since then.

2. The OED traces the term back to 1893. From 1903, it offers an anti-Limbauvian quotation: "Any college where the girls are commonly called ‘co-eds’ is not a truly co-educational institution."

3. For conservatives who understand that conservatism of thought entails conservatism of language, Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" offers this reassuring statement of faith.

I almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred amongst us participates in the "triumph" of the Revolution Society. If the king and queen of France and their children were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities, (I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility,) they would be treated with another sort of triumphal entry into London. We formerly have had a king of France in that situation: you have read how he was treated by the victor in the field, and in what manner he was afterwards received in England. Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality,— nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity.