Malapropism of the Day--"Alterior Motive"

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alterior motive

Merges alternative (other) with ulterior (hidden) to mean other motive. Recent example: “I don't have an alterior motive and I am not paid to do this.” http://amyshahmd.com retrieved 9 apr 2014

Malapropism of the Day—"Alcatraz Around (My) Neck"

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Alcatraz around (my) neck

Confuses the bad reputation of a famous prison with that of the speaker in Coleridge’s famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who brings misfortune on the ship by killing an albatross, and whose fellow sailors force him to wear it around his neck in penance. Boston’s mayor from 1993–2014, Thomas Menino, was famous for malapropisms—including this goof. Recent example: “I always found a job to be like an Alcatraz around my neck.” http://www.npaper-wehaa.com retrieved 3 may 2014

Malapropism of the Day: "Cutting Age"

 age, cutting

Mixes cutting edge, a metaphor for technological newness, with modern age, a characterization of recent history connoting up-to-date technology and attitudes. Recent example: “In businesses I bring cutting age innovation, to assist leadership and their teams transform themselves and their business.” http://www.eventbrite.com retrieved 20 may 2014

Malapropism of the Day -- ADIEU

MALAPROPISM OF THE DAY

As some of you may know, I'm compiling a book of malapropisms for a NY publisher. Some are funny, some just curious. I'll be writing and illustrating it. At present, I'm still in the collecting/drafting stage, but I thought it might be fun to post a malpropism of the day. Since I'll have about 600 of them in the book, it should take me about two years to post them all, from A to Z. If you are inspired to submit to me some malapropisms you've run across, I'll welcome them!

Today's entry:

adieu, without further

Variant: much adieu. Conflation of adieu (good-bye) with ado (complicated doings, ceremony) to mean “without saying anything more.” Recent example: “Without further adieu . . . the next remix album is . . . *drum roll* Animal Crossing!” shinshuinbloom.tumblr.com—retrieved 14 Mar 2014.

The NRA in Red and Blue

It's been much commented on that there are few, if any, "Conservative Democrats" around any more. That's certainly true here in North Carolina. Given the choice between a conservative Democrat and a conservative Republican, conservative voters here mostly voted Red. Old ties of party loyalty proved themselves too weak to resist the tendency toward ideological purity in the modern Conservative movement.

That wasn't so as recently as the Clinton administration, but the 1994 congressional election that swept Newt Gingrich into power for the first time was also marked by a historic electoral carnage among conservative and moderate Democrats—particularly in the South. And it was that election, more than any other, that put the fear of the National Rifle Association into the hearts of conservative Democrats.

Ever since, Democrats in conservative areas have generally been too afraid of the NRA to back any kind of gun control measure, no matter how weak. And nationally, the Democratic Party has been so afraid of losing its few remaining conservative and moderate members that there has not been a strong push back against the NRA.

But the conservative triumph in the South could mean less influence for the NRA.

Consider this: North Carolina was a swing state in the latest Presidential election, but farther down the ticket, Republicans solidified their hold on electoral power here. The US Congressional delegation, and the state Senate and House, are now solidly red. Congressional districts have been so successfully gerrymandered that Democrats are crowded into a few "ghettos" of large urban areas, or weirdly shaped metro corridors, and their actual proportional strength among voters has been effectively hidden.

What this means is that here in North Carolina there are very few conservative or moderate Democrats in Congress left to fear the NRA. The remaining Democrats are in safely Blue metro/suburban districts.

The effect of this, oddly enough, may be to free up Democrats nationally. In part because of demographic changes elsewhere in the country, the party has managed to stay competitive nationally even though it has mostly lost the South. It has won two Presidential contests, and held on to a majority in the U.S. Senate. Florida and northern Virgina excepted, the swing states are now in the Rust Belt and the West, not the South.

I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the fact that the South is out of play means that the Blue side has less to fear on the issue of gun control. As its constituents in the West, Midwest, and Northeast are increasingly not as interested in pro-gun policies as the old conservative Southern Democrats were, the party can now more safely begin to flout the NRA.

With the recent shock of the killings in Connecticut, Democrats nationally may wake up and find they don't have as much to fear from the NRA as they once did. Maybe they'll stop pulling their punches on gun control for the first time since 1994.

Shun the Gun

Guns are legal, and their ownership protected by the U.S. Constitution, but after the Connecticut school shootings last week, President Obama is right: something has to change. So, if guns are legal and protected, what can one person do?

Here's a suggestion: Shun the gun.

I don't actually oppose gun ownership. As a hiker and outdoors lover, I'm grateful for the wild country set aside as hunting game lands. I know people who honestly love hunting, and whose love of it is truly what I would call "sporting." But even so, it seems to me that gun culture in the country has gotten completely out of control. That's something that can change, and that we should change. And we can do it without passing any new laws.

From a culture that tolerates guns, our country, particularly here in the American South, has changed to one that actively celebrates and glorifies them. Your local Wal-mart probably has a prominent gun section. Outdoors superstores like Bass Sport Shop, Gander Mountain, and Cabelas are all about guns, and no one finds it unusual as they drive by on the nearby superhighway. First-person shooter games dominate the market. Small towns, like mine, have multiple gun shops, with brightly blinking signs advertising their wares. No one thinks twice.

More to the point, few people think twice about neighbors with extensive collections of firearms—people who proudly boast of their guns, who sport aggressive bumper-sticker slogans on their cars ("This home protected by Smith & Wesson"; "My President is Charlton Heston": you've seen them). The mother of the Connecticut shooting suspect was, apparently, among these—a woman who boasted of her guns, and took her children out shooting with her, if one is to believe the press reports.
Years ago, such a "gun nut" would have been looked at askance by "respectable" members of the community.

Maybe it's time more of us started looking askance.

Public gun culture celebrates public threats of armed defiance, glories in aggressive militaristic bluster, romanticizes uncritically elements of popular culture, such as Clint Eastwood movies, that a careful examination shows are usually much more equivocal or ironic about violence than their fans imagine. Popular movies, television shows, and books often imagine dystopias in which guns are the only answer to a society gone mad. The implication is that ours is just such a society, and that the only thing a sane person can do is own a gun for self-protection.

It's crazy, and it has to stop.

Your dentist ought to be ashamed of himself for having gun magazines on his waiting-room table. Your church-going neighbor with gun slogans on the car ought to find him- or herself suddenly alone at church during the coffee hour. The drunk at the party bragging about how he'll go out in a blaze of glory before the President takes his guns away ought to suddenly find he has no audience. The child demanding the first-person shooter game for Christmas ought to find coal in his stocking.

It's time to shun the gun. It's time to make gun ownership private again—something chosen out of necessity or sporting requirements, not a public statement of political defiance. It's time for being law-abiding and "respectable" to be respectable again. Good people shouldn't go around boasting about their arsenals and expect not to be shunned. People who are proud to be "gun nuts" shouldn't be accepted in polite company.

Statistics show that guns in the home increase the likelihood of accident or suicide, but if you feel that you must have a gun to defend your family, that's your right. Still, it's not something you should feel comfortable boasting about. If guns were something to feel self-conscious about, owning them might be less attractive. Such a change in attitudes is something that we can encourage without passing new laws or changing our Constitution.

It would be a good start.

Another September 11

I thought I was over September 11, but this article in Friday’s Washington Post brought it all back.

In it, an Air Force pilot recalls how she and her flight commander scrambled to intercept United Airlines Flight 93, which had been hijacked by al-Qaeda fanatics intent on crashing it into the Capitol Building. Neither of the Air Force jets was armed. The fliers intended to knock down the airliner by turning their own planes into guided missiles aimed at Flight 93: A suicide mission. To save our country.

The passengers on Flight 93 made the sacrifice instead, bringing the airliner down in a Pennsylvania field rather than let the hijackers have their way. And as I read about it, I found myself all teary again, the way I was on September 11 when I heard the story of how the Republican activist Barbara Olson, wife of the U.S. Solicitor General, had been among those killed when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Her husband reported that she’d called him while the plane was in the air, and asked what she should do, and then the phone went dead.

Barbara Olson had been one of my least favorite people. She was a smart, pugnacious and (I felt) mean-spirited advocate for conservative politics—one of those people you loved to hate, if you were on the other side politically. She’d been all over the television during the 2000 election cycle, and was a frequent guest on Bill Maher’s TV show, “Politically Incorrect,” snarking about Al Gore and liberalism. But all of a sudden she was dead, along with the nearly three thousand others who departed this world in the wreckage of the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon, and in the Pennsylvania field.

At that moment, what had come before didn’t matter, and I could see my bitterness and irritation at her for what it was—something essentially false, and trivial, and unworthy. We were all Americans, and we were all standing together against a great evil. At a service in a small Episcopal church the next night, I found myself crying and praying for Barbara Olson, repenting of my sins, ready to do my part—whatever that was—in the fight that was to come.

For the next few months, that amazing feeling of solidarity of purpose with other shocked Americans remained strongly with me:

—As I played volleyball with friends a day later, not far from Dulles Airport, under a deep blue sky surreally empty of air traffic, trying to act normally.

—As I waited stuck in traffic on the Washington Beltway, where the drivers were suddenly calm and courteous, and no one cut anyone else off.

—When I watched the congressmen from both political parties singing together on the Capitol steps.

—When I watched President Bush take a megaphone and climb on the smoking ruins of Lower Manhattan to defy Al Qaeda.

That feeling was still with me months later when I visited New York for a convention, and made the pilgrimage down to Ground Zero, where the wreckage had been mostly cleared away but  still smelled of smoke and ruin. And I felt it too the following spring, on a hiking trip in England, when the sympathy and kindness of the English people I met helped me see that we were not alone, that much of the world shared our shock and sympathized with our grief.

That was ten years ago.

Today, in some ways, it is as if it never happened. It is as if our nation, which woke up for a few months there in 2001 and 2002 with a shared sense of purpose and connection, has slipped back into the same old dream we were dreaming before the planes hit. The political battles are more vicious than ever, hypocrisy and cynicism exacerbated by a severe economic downturn in which those who have been backed up to the edge of a cliff kick at those who are already falling off of it.

It turns out that there were few clear-cut enemies to mobilize against. Instead, we mobilized against ourselves. 

The so-called War on Terror mostly set us against one another. Those who argued against new restrictions on civil liberties or against ill-conceived military action in Iraq the following year were branded “unpatriotic” and vilified. Who were the true patriots? Who were the true Americans? Our  readiness to share in sacrifice for our country was manipulated and twisted and used for political gain. Those of us who had opened ourselves up to it felt like we’d been played for suckers, victims, like the heroic Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, of friendly fire.

As this tenth anniversary of the September 11 attack nears, the retrospectives on TV and radio refer knowingly to that day as a day when “everything changed.” Several of them have asked viewers and listeners, “how did it change you?”

I don’t feel that the attacks changed me. If anything, they brought out something in me that was already there: my best self, willing to believe, sacrifice, and act selflessly. They brought out the most hopeful, patriotic, naively optimistic parts of me that I’d previously walled off from a world where suckers get taken advantage of, and no good deed goes unpunished. 

But what came after September 11, with its internecine culture wars—red America against blue America, Tea Party against New Deal, ideology against pragmatism—was far worse than al-Qaeda’s attacks. What came after September 11 changed me.

Today I feel beaten down emotionally, and pessimistic about the direction in which the country is moving. I see fear, and greed, and revenge, and mistrust ruling our lives. I see people shutting down and lashing out. Even though I no longer commute on the Washington Beltway, road rage is worse than ever. The political divisions seem even more intractable. A President whose campaign asked us to hope and work together is increasingly trammeled into a neat political box.The class anxieties feel even more pronounced.

Reading about the pilots brought it all back. Everything, including the tears. For a moment—just for a moment—I again recognized the part of me that truly believes in America and the principles that it was founded on. It is still there, if buried deeply by all the rubble of the decade since September 11, 2001.

I read in the Post story that the pilots eventually returned to base on that day. They were not required to make a dramatic sacrifice for their country. Later, they would go on to fly and fight in Iraq, armed this time with all the high-tech weaponry that could be packed onto their planes. It was a fight that was less clear, and a cause that was harder to define, but they were ready to do their duty.

I feel the same way. If only I knew what my duty was.