According to Schott’s 2008 Desk Almanac:
Retronyms are terms that has been created to clarify an exiting word rendered ambiguous by evolutions in technology or social practice.
I’m currently reading Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which is a beautifully written and thoroughly researched lament about our evolution (or degeneration) from eaters of food to consumers of “food-like products.”
With that book in the forefront of my consciousness, the following retronyms, listed in the Feb. 1 entry of my Schott’s page-a-day calendar, took on a timely significance:
- Organic food
- Conventional oven
- Free-range eggs
- Fruit in season
These terms came into being with the advent of the industrial food supply. Before chemical fertizers and factory farms and free trade agreements and cheap oil, all food was organic, free range and/or seasonal.
And it was cooked in a conventional oven.
Now we must specify.
[UPDATE]
In the near future, we may have to add a modifier to ‘cheeseburger.’ As in, “This conventional cheeseburger is much better than the canned cheeseburger I had yesterday.”
Published on January 31, 2008
in politics.
From Democracy in America:
It’s as if he spent the past seven years hibernating in an underwater grotto, rolled over, stretched, yawned, made some sandals from ropes of seaweed, ate a few barnacles and paddled up to shore.
Answer after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Guess who’s back!’
Published on January 30, 2008
in politics.
From a post I wrote in November:
Still, there are aspects of [John McCain's] personality that I like, namely his surly, unscripted side. I’m not talking about the highly cultivated “maverick” shtick, but rather the side that’s not afraid to call a college kid a “little jerk” for asking him if he’s too old to be president. I find his notorious temper oddly appealing. (If he were elected, it would concern me more, but at this point his chances seem pretty slim.)
Having won the Florida primary, John McCain is now considered likely (if not quite guaranteed) to win the GOP nomination. A lot can change in a few months! While he’s still far from taking the oath of office, he’s doing much better than I (and everyone else) predicted.
I wonder how much McCain’s appeal comes from being seen, however erroneously, as the anti-establishment candidate. If he’s the frontrunner, won’t he lose his outsider appeal? And surely the press will start to give him long overdue scrutiny.
Published on January 22, 2008
in politics.
No, I will not respect your Confederate heritage, you treasonous bigot:
So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than “offensive” to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—[Mike Huckabee and] the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.
–Christopher Hitchens, “Why are the media ignoring Mike Huckabee’s remarks about the Confederate flag?”
I’d also like to second Hitchens’ characterization of Ron Paul as “absurd and sinister.” More absurd than sinister, but still.
Sarah Vowell, writing for the Times:
Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”
Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”
…
In this age of a slower, grubbier mutually assured destruction, when no one’s typed the word “nonviolence” since the typewriter, it’s worth reading Dr. King’s quarrel with the cold war’s MAD ploy. In the “loving your enemies” text he tells a pretty little parable about how one night his brother A. D. drove him to Tennessee. Infuriated by all the other cars’ brights, A. D. vowed to crank his lights and blind the next driver passing by. Dr. King told him not to, that it would just get everybody killed. “Somebody got to have some sense on this highway,” he said.
Published on January 20, 2008
in Uncategorized.
Don’t let the pseudo flap between Barack and Hillary distract you from what you’re supposed to be doing today: Thinking about how incredibly awesome Martin Luther King Jr. was. Here’s a link to a transcript and video of his “I Have a Dream” speech. Amazing.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
Published on January 17, 2008
in Uncategorized.
What do New Jersey and Russia, Colorado and Finland, and Texas and Canada have in common?
Click below to find the answer.
Continue reading ‘Quiz’