A recent blogspot discovered by fortunate accident has sounded the rams-horn again to address the Problems With English Other Than the Fact That Not Enough People in America Are Speaking It. Which is, Too Many People Who Think They Are Speaking English Need to Try Harder. The discussion boards on the site include many non-US English speakers and the issue here is not to take them to task. Their Englishes have their own rules and their countries have their own problems, so let them have at it. But, as before we noted here problems with word usage and with pronunciation are not improving between our oceans! So, with the conviction that the often pushed idea that English is “chaotic” and has no rules is blithering blather and that people are simply too lazy and impudent to learn the rules of pronunciation that would head off the most atrocious and nauseous manglings, and that there is by the way nothing wrong with long and multiple subject sentences, here we go.
-ILE: In American English, the suffix –ile is unstressed. It is pronounced ‘L. It is not stressed and not pronounced –ILE, like the word aisle or the contraction I’ll. So think of the word missile. Americans always pronounce this, correctly, as MISS’L. We don’t say MISS-ILE, like “miss I’ll”. The British do, and we know that, but it doesn’t throw us. But for some reason only known to sociolinguapsychologists—and I’m not sure there is any such thing—after the missile test Americans just fall apart. So here is an inanely repetitive list that is probably futile (see below)
Agile: Say AJ’L DON’T Say AJ-ILE
Futile: Say FYOOT’L (like feudal, but with a T) DON’T Say FYOO—TILE
Fragile: Say FRAJ’L DON’T Say FRAJ-ILE
Hostile: Say HOST’L (like hostel) DON’T Say HOS-TILE
Juvenile: Say JOOVEN’L DON’T Say JOOVEN-ILE
Mercantile: Say MERKENT’L DON’T Say MERKEN-TILE (that’s an upHILE battle)
Textile: Say TEKST’L DON”T Say TEKS-TILE (that will be upHILE and FYOOT’L)
CIA, CIE, CEA, TIO, TIA: when a C or a T is followed by a multiple vowel combination, an SH sound is usually produced. Now, to make it harder, there is disagreement over whether the SH sound is made by the C or T, or made by combination of the C or T with the subsequent vowel. So, keeping it local, everyone knows the train is at the station that is a STAY-SH’N. The question decocts to, Does the second T in station make an SH sound, and the I is silent? Or does the TI in station make an SH sound? In many to most cases it doesn’t matter, and in most cases people seem to naturally get this. They say official UH-FI-SH’L they say special SPE-SH’L, they say ocean OH-SH’N, they say martial MAR-SH’L (though they probably think it’s spelled that way, too). they say facial FAYSH’L, they say most all –tions SHUNS. The word they fall down on more often than not is species, which suddenly and for no apparent reason has started being SPEE-SEEZ rhymes with feces, most of the time, and SPEE-SHEEZ little of the time. It should be, and used to be SPEE-SHEEZ, as the rule dictates, all of the time. Then somewhere someone decided it was a SPES-EE-AL case and it’s been far more contagious than bird flu ever since. If you’ve been saying this, stop it. It is not an EKS-EPS-E-AN to the rule.
This same over-prissiness comes across from media talking heads who suddenly NE-GOH-SEE-ATE things that are CON-TRA-VER-SEE-AL.—in the latter case even adding an extra unwanted and unwarranted fifth syllable.
Now there is murkiness here. The preference is for a judiciary to be JOO-DISH-EE-AIR-EE, with five syllabic flags flying, and not a JOO-DISH-ER-EE with only four. But its issues are JOO-DI-SH’L, not JOO-DISH-EE-AL (or, god forbid, JOO-DIS-EE-AL). So what gives? Does the C make an SH sound all by itself leaving the following “I” to make an EE sound for the judiciary, but then need the “I” to go SH for judicial? The alternative is that CI makes the SH sound in which case there is an “I” missing in the accepted spelling of judiciiary [sic].
-TAIN: In words that end with this combination the syllable is unstressed. A captain is a CAPT’N, not a CAP-TAYN, a mountain is not a MOUN-TAYN and of these we are all certainly SERT’N. So, the starchy vegetable, exotic though it may seem, is a PLANT’N, not a PLANT-AYN. The exception to this is verbs: maintain, ascertain,etc,.which typically are not stressed on the first syllable
AE: Actually, there are two different issues here. In modern English the old diphthong (DIF-THONG) this represented is gone. In American English, it makes a long E (EE) sound. This is also true of Latin wordsl where the singular ending in A is pluralized by adding an E (as in antenna, antennae). So an aegis is an EEJIS, Aesop’s fables are EESOP’s. So far, relatively good. But the Latin endings trip people up. They just can’t leave an A alone. So, we get one vertebra and more VERT-A-BRAY, even from back doctors who should know better. Two or more are VERT-A-BREE. Likewise supernovae (SOOP-ER-NOH-VEE) and arrays of radio AN-TEN-EE. Of course this could be remedied most easily by recognizing the separate but even more useful rule that words that have been adopted into English can be anglicized. You probably can’t get away with vertabras, but antennas, supernovas and mathematical formulas are fine.
LM : This one will rile people all the time, though why is a mystery. It rarely goes unrealized or unsaid that Ls before Fs and Ks in many cases, are not pronounced but simply modify the vowel in front of them. Folks usually know they are FOHKS, not FOHLKS. And eggs have YOHKS that sound just like yokes, and all this has to do with how people TAWK, not TAWLK (that kind chokes you), A walk is a WAWK, a half is a HAF, a calf is a KAF, etc. Generally, the rule with LK is that after an E or an I, the L is pronounced, (ELK, MILK) after an A or an O it is not (WALK, FOLK). With an LF combo, after anything but an A it is pronounced (ELF, GOLF, GULF, but HAF).
The problem comes with LM. Generally, after an A, the L in an LM combination is not supposed to be pronounced. The L just modifies the A sound, like it does between an A and a K in walk, talk, stalk and balk (yes, BAWK—no L). So, you put a BOM, made from O-MOND oil on your POM to KOM yourself down. It might act as a SAV, although that is by extension due to the relationship of F’s and V’s, not to the LM-ents at hand here.
OV: This one comes from early spelling and printing conventions that conspired to muck-up what would have otherwise been fine. It seems that early on, some handwriters had a predilection for over-rounding and over-closing their U’s, making them look like O’s, particularly when writing a U followed by V. This is because the early distinction between U and V as separate letters was late in coming and UV looked like VV or even W, if some distinction were not attempted. This caused Julius Caesar’s brother, Ivlivs Caesar, to get all kinds of undeserved credit. The unfortunate result was that many printers—who were surprisingly illiterate—used O’s for the intended U’s so that many words that were spelled kind of like they were pronounced—luve, abuve, uven,-- got printed as love, above, and oven. The legacy of this that generally speaking, to this day, in most words with an OV combination, the O is pronounced like the short U in under. This is so true, most don’t even notice: oven, above, love, shove, coven, dove (the bird), shovel, glove, So, just like one would SHUV’L with a shovel, one would GRUV’L by their HUV’L and not HUV-ER needlessly over a shoulder. Cases where the O is actually pronounced like an O of some kind, like grove, clove, move over; are actually the exception to the rule.

AND ON THIS HAPPY NOTE…SOME THINGS TO REALLY WORRY ABOUT

In imitation of the recent trend toward Top 10 lists (or Top 5, or Top 7, etc.) that enumerate arguments in slightly glorified bullet-point format, I offer the following. Consistent with tweeting, texting, e-mailing and PowerPointing, listing enables us to convey a lot (quantitatively) without worrying too much about niceties like paragraphs, thought flow, story-arcs, or literacy. So here come The Top Several Real Threats to America (the term America is used here as synonymous with the United States as a political entity, created by the Constitution of 1787. Not as a term for the stretch of geography between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with a pretend southern border and a big Blue State to the north. The threats that America faces would include asteroids, supervolcanoes, and the coming ice age.

1.Browning. Read an article regarding the modern Balkan nation of Macedonia and you will likely encounter soon within it an admonition along the lines of: “This is not to be confused with the ancient kingdom of the same name, in the same location, that was home to Alexander the Great”. In other words, an entirely different and unconnected people and culture occupied the same lot a long time ago and the current residents have inherited their name. No other similarity exists.
So what will "America" mean in 20 years? What does it mean now? The term “browning” has been used, by no means always pejoratively, to describe the changing demographics of America. While the specifics of “browning” have changed some since its original coinage, it still refers to the fact that White People of European ancestry are not, or soon will-be not, the majority ethnic group here.

Specifically, “Latinos”, a term for people who are, oddly enough, not European, like the Latins were, are now the largest minority— having surpassed “African-Americans” (another puzzling misnomer) in numbers a few years ago. And, of course, they keep coming by legions (as Latins would, one supposes) to mow, prune, pick, and commit crime. To be sure they are not the only immigrants. The Middle East, Asia, and West Africa— both the part actually in Africa and the part in the Caribbean-- are great sources of urban population replacement, too.

What browning really means, though, is not simply an expression of aesthetic racism. When considering the threat level, substitute the term Non-White People with People Not Products of Western Civilization. There is a chasm of a difference. The former just means your forfathers didn’t come from Europe. That latter means you are not plugged into the American Idea. America, after all, is founded upon a cultural ideal, the product of an idea. Those principles are not identical to, but also not separable from what used to be called Western Civilization, particularly (to really ruffle some feathers) the Protestant take on that civilization. Unless the immigrants coming here now assimilate, and do it quickly, America the idea is dead. The walls of Rome will just move north, temporarily. Latin America will not develop or be improved a bit, and Latin Americans in America will not benefit for long. The US will become, de facto, a Latin American country, replete with all the corruption, poverty, and other dysfunctionalism that culture has so amply demonstrated in the last half millennium. Writing everything in espanol, as well as English, does not help solve the assimilation problem, obviously It is dangerously simpleminded to say this is a non-issue and compare it to waves of Eastern and Mediterranean Europeans that flooded through Ellis Island. They came to adopt, adapt, and acculturate. Current immigrants, many of whom are illegally here to begin with, don’t. The plan is to milk the US’s first-world economy, while maintaining a Third World culture. It just doesn’t work that way. This has happened before. As rounded dates, AD 476 and AD 2008 may have a lot in common. When the barbarians overran Rome, the result wasn’t a bunch more new Romans, who just happened to have red hair and freckles, and pushed Latin As A Second Language programs and bilingual schools. It was the Dark Ages. They weren’t called Vandals for nothing.

2. China. It’s really hard to make sense of why we continue to do everything in our power to hasten the end of our reign as the Sole Superpower and elevate one of the world’s least democratic, least humane, and most –non-Western countries—let alone the world’s biggest country-- to be our effective and unbeatable archnemisis. It’s like Frodo and Company can’t deliver the Ring to Sauron fast enough. Heaven forfend that we do anything to even slow the rise of Mordor. We really just hope they’ll keep lending us money.

This also why Iran going nuclear is a secondary problem, and doesn’t make the Top Several catastrophes list. We already won’t do much about Iran because we don’t have the will and we’re kind of afraid of China. If it wasn’t for China, we’d only have Russia to worry about. And, while we don’t seem anxious to clip their wings either, the Russians have a lot of their own problems to occupy them (like a hell of lot of non-Russians in their country, see above.) In a few years, we won’t be able to do anything about the next Iran because we can’t and China could actually, militarily, stop us. Unless that alien technology we’re reverse engineering at Area 51 is practically magical we are going to have our position in WorldCo severely downgraded. It will be the most dramatic demotion of a country since Great Britain became Britain. And we die intestate, unlike the Brits who had us, to pick up the mantle of civilization and all that that means. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the Communist Chinese character that makes them appealing as a major force in the world. The whole planet will become bad neighborhoods or prisons. And we seem to be fine with that.

3. The Debt. As cliché as it is to say it, it is true. The national debt is so out of control that it arguably makes everything else irrelevant. And it is not just theoretical or ethereal anymore. It is really, concretely affecting our everyday lives, dragging the economy farther and farther into an abyss, destroying the value of money and leaving more and more people with no jobs and all the other nothing that comes with that. No institutions are going to be able to continue as they are, all infrastructure— not just physical bridges and damns, but everything-- is deteriorating and there is simply is no money to do anything about it. The current “leading” generation has already seen its standard of living decline significantly relative to the previous one. Education is no longer any guarantee of success, or even employment. And this is all without inflation. When that hits, and it inevitably will, then all bets are off. For a variety of reasons, we may be looking at something far worse than 1932, and without the ability to even give an illusion of recovery. At least this might solve the illegal immigration problem. This is certainly hastening the Dark Ages' arrival, with or without a change in complexion.

4. Fuel. Yes, the enviro-nazis are right that we must end our dependence on oil. The fact that we’ve become accustomed to $3 a gallon gasoline as simply a fact of commerce that we must accept demonstrates steep decline in our national pride and spirit of self-preservation. They are wrong, however, to think this can be done in the foreseeable future. There simply is nothing else except coal, which they also don’t like, and nuclear, which they double don’t like. No amount of windmills, solar panels, or people on bicycles is going to change that. So the best we can do is to end our dependence on foreign oil. That would solve all kinds of problem, including having to give a rat’s arse what happens in the Middle East, and transferring what little wealth we really have to places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. This means we must drill, drill, and drill some more. Including off-shore and in Alaska where caribous might have to eat around the oil rigs. And it means coal. Lots of it. And nuclear. And, importantly and obviously, we cannot cripple ourselves with some suicidal carbon-credits scheme that will not benefit the “planet” at all, and will help move problem Number 2 much farther into the alarm zone. The fact that that even needs to be said is a horrifying comment on where exactly we are in the country’s timeline of decent.

5.The Government. Ronald Reagan was being even more profound than smart people realized at the time when he noted that government is the problem, not the solution, to our must fundamental troubles. There is permeating every elite, especially the political and the media, a denial that rises to the level of psychopathology as to the degree to which government policies have created the dystopic state of affairs we are in. Crisis after crisis, be it health care, the debt, immigration, what have you; has been created and/or worsened by the very regulatory meddling that the political Left, at least, consistently turns to for salvation. At some point you'd think that “anyone” would realize that more water in the gas tank is not the remedy for knocking in the engine. But so far, it is not happening. If anything, the election of the Obi One and the Congress from Cambridge has been a huge leap backward. To an era where Big Government is arisen and even more irrational, irresponsible, megalomaniacal and kleptomaniacal than ever. Unless we revamp our entire notion of what politics is supposed to be, we can’t address any of the other issues and WE ARE DONE. Do I hear the bells of secessionism ringing again? Dang, that keeps happening.

"MY FRIENDS ARE AMONG GERMANS"-- Pierre Lavall

Don’t really want to belabor the point…ok, I kind of do, but the week’s events continue to pile on evidence of the regime’s disdain for democracy, or what is left of it. Gay marriage-ballot defeats, and health care piracy just aren’t enough. Now we have the gut-punch to American sensibilities of Immigration Reform [sic]. Think of health care reform in reverse—instead of government taking over, imposing byzantine rules and creating stagnation; the feds want to take over so they can abolish the rules and let chaos reign. Over-enforcement of rules that are dysfunctional to begin with, or non-enforcement of rules that are common-sensical. Those are the poles of Obamunist social policy. The center is bare. The center that the useful idiots of the last two elections convinced themselves that Mugab-- I mean Obama—and his minions would steer from. To be specific:

Around two-thirds of the Amerian people, more of Arizonans, are either in favor of the Grand Canyon State’s new, tough immigration stance, or don’t think it goes far enough. Obama, of course, is against it.

How many times do this administration, and Congress, get to demonstrate their disconnection from American citizens, sensibilities, and norms before the message gets through. It’s as if every sentence on the nightly newscasts ends with three dots, instead of concluding with the obvious point made.

“When asked whether his administration might try to mitigate the Arizona law in some way, Obama said: ‘We're examining it now.’ His attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr. called the law ‘unfortunate’ and said he was considering a court challenge. Over 60% of Americans and 70% those in Arizona support the law”…

…there are the dots….an "oh, and by the way" afterthought. You wait for the news reporter to wrap up this presentation, but no. To recap: The people want it, the president [sic] is looking for ways to stop it, and the attorney general thinks it is unfortunate and will ask the courts to stop it. And his chances of the last are good, since getting the courts to enforce the Constitution at this point is akin to getting a tornado to assemble a trailer park in its path. The fact that this administration is, at least of late, routinely on the opposite side of public opinion doesn’t even rate completion of the a thought. The fact that the preferred method of bridging this gap has been for the administration to simply use its coercive power to force its will is treated as simply unremarkable. Maybe interesting, but nothing worth examining with valuable air time or print columns. So, just for laughs and to preserve the record, we have to ask again: what happened to “the people have spoken?”, “of the people, by the people, and for the people”? Both are popular refrains from the Obamunists. How about this gem:

“But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad," said Obama, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree. [whose laws is not specified by the article ed.]"When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us."

Really, Obi? Only if “us” is the one-third of the population who wanted to federalize health care and not the 50+% who did not and do not.

Only if "us" is the 6% of the population-- including, of course, Obama-- who think English should not be the sole official language of the country, and the "others are the 87%-- read that again, 87%-- who disagree with the "leader" and think English-only is only obvious.

And, only if “us” is the 30% of people who agree with the Chairman and Politburo that the Arizona immigration law is anything but late in arriving and maybe too flaccid, and “them” is the 70% who are concerned about defending the country from invasion and criminality.

Maybe if the government stopped acting like a menacing, threatening, foreign entity, that ignores the will of the people it is supposed to be serving, and being inherently bad, the Obi One would not be so troubled by hearing people say things he does not like. Either that, or he will crack down harder on those who disagree with him. The second is more in-line with his increasingly delusional, Chavezistic attitude toward the masses and Himself. Anyone who sees the world without the sycophantic lenses of a collaborationist is racist, or crazy and hate-filled, or both. Ordinary Americans, upset to the point of tea-partying, are perfect villains to this crowd. While illegal immigrants and their enablers are ignored or indulged for destructive mayhem worthy of French car-burners and Gaza gangsters. More is in the barrel— climate “legislation”, alien amnesty, tax hikes, union fixes— and all with the big common denominator of having no public mandate. This administration will use all the capital it has to enact an agenda dear to a small cell of vile vampires who have hated America and its ways, and sworn to see them both undone for generations.

The same agenda would disgust and horrify most Americans if they could only recognize it; could only come to terms with the fact that some people in power really wish harm to them and theirs and are acting on it through destruction of the country. The wishes of the public are being muted, ignored, and flaunted. If office-holders really are no longer accountable to serve the public, if public opinion really doesn’t matter, if politics fails….then we may have no choice but to turn to other methods of conflict resolution. This is no game, and cultural survival can make mean demands. Trouble may be coming—and, sadly, it probably should.

CLOUDS GATHER, THE THUNDER HAS ALREADY SOUNDED

“This presidency is an unmitigated disaster”. So says a famous commentator and undoubtedly he is right. You just don’t see it put so succinctly very often. The “health care”…thing…which was just passed is an unprecedented, and unmitigated disaster, but it is only the latest and possibly the worst of assaults on basic American dignity by this cohort of Third World-caliber political gangsters. To just say, “This presidency..,” etc. covers things more thoroughly and is probably more parsimonious except that it lets “this Congress” too far off the hook. But this Congress has not exactly led these societaly suicidal charges; it has more been dragged and pushed and bribed toward Gomorrah. And there is the problem. Since when did Congress stop being a branch of government, and start being a cowed arm of the White House? Well, it started before the Obamanation, but its shameful, pathetic demise has been put on fast forward thenceforth. Nowhere has this been more underlined than with the health care ukase. Here, a very important line was crossed: the house of the people and the august Senate lionized with unintended campiness by the likes of Robert Byrd, ignored the clearly and loudly expressed will of the people—violated it, in fact, with contemptuous disregard—and did the “president’s” bidding. When has this happened before? When has a supposedly democratically-responsible American government ever acted so autocratically, with such disdain for the public in an immense area of domestic policy? Even wars—not usually amenable to politics-by-polling once commenced—have had to answer ultimately to the will—or lack thereof—of the people. Thus the elitist imposition of Obamedicine is a monumental event.

The perfidious and odious nature of this regime and the true face of its jug-eared head have been surprising and dismaying only to a breed of politically naïve, and in some cases stupid, voters and public commentators. For some reason best left to the musings of cognitive psychologists, these people were convinced, or at least “hopeful” that the current Chairman of the Politburo was a moderate, who would govern from the center. It is thanks to this few million nitwits that we are in this predicament. So for those who look at the clown make-up, green wig, and big floppy shoes and don’t see a clown, consider this from Reuters—a foreign arm of the Obamedia who are by no means flag-waving Reaganites:

“Democrats in Congress who passed historic legislation… to revamp the U.S. healthcare system face a new challenge over the next seven months: convincing voters it's a good deal.”

So here is Obamacracy in action. Your “representatives” do whatever the hell they want to—including what you have loudly and specifically told them not to do—and then they go out and try to convince you that what they did was what you really wanted. Or should have wanted, anyway. But wait, there’s more:

“If Democrat lawmakers fail to counter public opposition, it could cost them their jobs in mid-term elections”.

Not if Democrats counter Republicans, mind you, but if they can counter the public opposition. It is Democrats vs. the Public. That should not be seen as anything short of a shocking portrayal of on-the-ground reality in a supposed democracy. It takes foreigners to see what is obviously going on here? Problem is, of course, that the said job losses probably won’t transpire in most cases. Even though pointing out that elected officials who give the finger to the public may not get reelected seems like a non-cerebral statement of the obvious, it is not. Remember that in the last round, all the public required is something shiny and distracting—like a minority candidate a vacuous slogans—to get the above-metioned well-intentioned numbskulls to vote for them. And the gravitational pull of a black hole has nothing on deep-blue political territory for sucking light into permanent oblivion. Sheep will become astrophysicists before the District of Columbia votes Republican.

So, if public opinion no longer matters for the setting of policy, how, precisely, are grievances to be addressed. This is dangerous territory. The lack of accountability to the people is usually a harbinger of change of a more dramatic and even violent type. The plain fact is no one—Obamanicks, others of the even more distant Left, or “moderates” of whatever polka-dot pattern—can expect to keep assaulting and violating the basic cultural values of a big portion of the population without expecting significant blowback. Just as the Obamedia should realize that legitimizing Obama’s ideas means legitimizing the more aggressive strains of the “militia” movement as well; it has to be seen that simply ignoring his most blatant transgressions in service of that bleak agenda is not assuaging them. Culture still exists. And the American culture does not follow the lead of effete weasels, quota-pushers, and quislings. Americanism is not dormant outside the Beltway and Upper Manhattan. Accommodation seems less and less likely. Clouds are gathering.

FOR WHOM PROGRESS SOUNDS GOOD TOO

In the name of progress—real progress, not a synonym for social destruction as the term is used by the politically sinister—it is time to recognize the other side of stupid or lazy English. These are the “rules” of the language that serve no purpose other than ass-painedness. Some have been commonly complained of, some have been appealed previously, even for eons. Or at least a long time. Others are my own pet causes to which some will object. They are wrong. These things will also serve to demonstrate that conservatives are not simply blind protectors of convention and ancientness. Sometimes, change is good. But only when it is for a well-thought-out reason, not just when it seems childishly neat-o, and only when it is being replaced with something superior. Boy has that one been blown (Miss him yet? YES).

1. Question: Is it who or whom? Right answer— who. Always. There is absolutely no reason to maintain whom as a word as it adds absolutely nothing to communication. “To who are you referring?” is no less literate than any other construction to whomever it is conveyed. The awkward wording is a different and also assailable problem, as seen below.

2. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition--- it might make your meaning too clear. If “Who are you referring to?” is incomprehensible or unnatural sounding to you, then you are not a native English speaker and what does sound natural to you is probably something we uniculturalist Americans are not interested in. Anyone who knows anything about grammar has always been wise to this piece of pedagogical pedantics anyway. It is a rule from Latin that was arbitrarily stuck on English by prissy scholars who came from a part of the world where Latin speakers lived quietly in dusty old books, instead of sneaking into the country to undermine its native tongue. A tongue which ends just fine with prepositions and really does not need the tortured constructions forced by being determined not to do so. Note this does NOT give license to unnecessary or repetitive prepositions that aren’t objectionable because they are at the end of a sentence, but because they don’t belong anywhere at all. So, “I can give to whoever I want to” is still not correct, as, “I can give it to whoever I want”, is all that needs be said.

3. If an individual wants to speak properly without sounding like a moron they should assert their individual responsibility to do it. He or she should not assert his or her whatever, because that sounds bureaucrat-eseishly stupid, stilted and unnatural. The solution is, really, to use he, his, and him for the general as has been done since the beginning of English, but since the PC police frown on this, and some people for some reason want to please that group of goons, then they is the only alternative as there is no singular gender-neutral word in the language to substitute except “one” which requires other changes and is not as natural as they is.

4. Hopefully, people will change. Not just the way they speak, but entirely. But the point is that hopefully is used “wrongly” in this construction because there is no other word for what is meant. That right there is the perfect scenario for a new word or new usage. So, either make up the word hopably—which is needed but not allowed for no good reason—or accept hopefully in the way that it is used and give it some credit for filling in doing another word’s job due to its enforced absence.

5. I wish I were or I wish I was? It’s all subjunctive and there is no need for it. I wish it was true that was was what it is and were was not. Period. There is no need for the subjunctive in English, which never has been strong and which no less than Fowler (a big authority) said was on its way out back in 1926. God, how long must it linger. Would it were that were were not, but was was.

“WE THE PEOPLE…..HELLO?”

Of all the obvious criticisms that can be made of the Democratic Party, the worst one gets overlooked by the Obimedia almost thoroughly compared to others. Taking the DP as an institution consisting of its members in government (in an organic model, these would be analogous to tumors, or parasites, or mostly, parasitic tumors) and the enabling activist organizations that support them (the originating toxic agent that creates them, and the tumor’s blood-supply vessels) Yes, corruption and conflict of interest get an occasional whisper—always accompanied with a qualifier about how conservatives were somehow worse. Yes, broken promises and other euphemisms for lies and perfidy get an infrequent remark acknowledging, at least, that some political non-sophisticates and Republican extremists might call such spades spades. But no, we hear nothing about the DP’s, or at least its leadership’s, complete contempt for democracy. Contempt would be the correct term because it is not something they merely ignore— like the first two--, but a thing that they actively attack and abhor. If there is one thing that political “progressives” hate more than Western civilization, Christianity, or American values, its public opinion. The most glaring recent example, of course, is the Gay Rights Revolution that has decayed into the Gay-Agenda Persistent Nagging and Whining. Nothing has more enraged liberaldom than the passage of Proposition 8 where the peoples’ decision has created unparalleled bitterness and cattiness. We now have a Bizarroworld tyranny of the minority where Miss Bizarroworld (aka California) gets lynched for expressing a popular opinion held by the majority of people, and formally endorsed by them at the ballot box. And stupid old James Madison thought it was minority views that needed protection.

The most currently arresting and immediate example of this is the so-called health care bill in any of its various versions—Obamacare Genus Edition, House 1, Senate, House 2.0/Reconciliation, ad nauseam. For reasons unexplained, the analysis of this process is less than even superficial. Many media moments are spent talking about how exactly the White House is pressuring Dems in Congress who do not want to vote for the Plan, how the House leadership can force the votes at the most advantageous times for them (often it is 3 AM on a Sunday during a vacation, while locked in a vault with no lights), and whether the Senate leaders can get away with abusing and or violating their own rules and calling it “reconciliation” in order to bypass the pesky requirement of an actual number of votes to pass a bill. Stupid parliamentary procedure. In other words, the discussion is all process and no substance so far as the “merits of the case” go. None of these pundits are focusing their barritone curiosity on why exactly all this threatening, bribery, arm-twisting, and deception are needed: Because the public doesn’t want it.

Ouch!?— well, no, not really. The liberal elites are fully aware of this and don’t give a damn. That is the really horrifying thing here. The Obamastration and the Dems in Congress (who for mysterious reasons feel “pressured” by the executive branch that doesn’t give a spit about them), are simply determined to pass something they can call health care reform, the public be damned. Three elections and consistent opinion polling tell them the people they are supposed to be representing do not want this. But they keep riding the lame horse anyway. Their own advisors tell them to back off this thing— but they keep pressing forward, waving their rubber swords in the air. Obama himself is blitzing the country, trying to rally public support for something he claims was part of his electoral mandate, and thereby giving obvious lie to that claim. Meanwhile everything else on the socialist agenda sits— cap and trade, more “stimulus”, card check. With this kind of neglect at the helm, the ship of state might just right itself by itself. Then the America Is The Problem crowd itself will be very upset; their destructive machinations gone awry, or rather, aright. So why are they doing this? Why so hell-bent on this health care monstrosity, at such political expense?

There are probably a lot of answers, but none of them are decent in any sense. Some constituencies from the blackest core of the Party insist on it as a move toward their real, easily smellable goals. If our Terry character is any indication, then the “Democratic base” insists on something. But anyone who actually thinks that this has been about insuring the uninsured could be easily fooled and placated by the right touchy-feely words from the Obamachine, backed by the Obamedia.

No, it has to be about ego. Enormous, baseless, and uncontrolled. For the politician-activists who’ve spent long years working toward this, and Obi who has invested his self-image in this (and has a big enough ego to drag a party, and a country down with him, easily) this outrage must be completed. It’s all about this tree—not any forest.

It also has to be about hatred. Hatred, in its pure irrational sense, of private enterprise capitalism and individualism that leads any person capable at least of buttonhing his own shirt to honestly believe that government can, let alone should, do much of anything well. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these socialist fundies are convinced that government health care really is a desirable thing. No different from their socio-economic archenemies who know without reflection that men walked with dinosaurs through the earliest days of Earth 60 centuries ago.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter why they believe the ludicrous or why they insist on this vainglorious path even in the face of their own (we hope) destruction. The fact is that the people don’t want this sick fix and if representative democracy or democratic republicanism have even the slightest validity anymore, then The Established Elite cannot be allowed to do this. The Second Amendment starts to seem more and more like the fundamental issue undergirding the politics of everything. And that is probably not good.

A ZEBRA BY ANY OTHER NAME

Chris Matthews sticks his tingle-launching foot in his mouth and says that during the State of the Union address, he pretty much forgot that Obama was black. That is not news. Neither Matthews’s verbal unctuousness toward the Obi One (that would embarrass an eleven year old girl with a crush on a Hanson), nor his failure to note something obvious—like Obama’s rank amateur sophistry— is unusual, but rather par for his course. But Miss Matthews’s reasons for overlooking this particular part of the president’s [sic] short but colorful resume are interesting and, probably, say a lot about the Liberal Left that has rented the White House to this oddball.

First, it is easy to forget he is black because he is not. He is half black and half white. He is, properly speaking, a mulatto. To say he is black is like saying a mule is a donkey. It’s not. Or, a better analogy would be that painting a zebra all black doesn't make it a pony. It's still a zebra-- with black paint. Even better yet, a zebra can simply SAY it's black; nonetheless it is, in fact, striped. The person who is robbed by this claim is the yet-to-come actual first black president. If I were him or her, I’d be danged mad. Second, what is, “I forgot he was black” supposed to mean, exactly? Was he speaking so “whitely” Chris altered his mental picture? Kind of like listening to Charlie Pride from the Grand Ole Opry? Was it the fact that he spoke about something— anything— other than race, which is what we have been conditioned by experience to expect to be the only thing any black politician really speaks about? One certainly got the impression that Matthews, who falls all over his floored tongue to be counter-racist, intended this remark to be complimentary. Is he still as surprised as Harry Reid that a black man can be so “articulate”, so in-command of elocution (corpse-men aside)? But if Chris really forgot BO was black, then that couldn’t be the case. Only black speakers get noted and applauded for their ability to speak standard English. If Chris really forgot, he wouldn’t have thought anything of rhotic r’s. At the end of the day, it is such a strange comment that one is left to conclude, simply, that Chris Matthews is the Michael Scott of political show-guys: An idiot.

But there remains this “he was black” issue that is unwittingly (really unwitting) raised by the remark. Barack “Barry” Obama was born of a white mother, raised by white grandparents in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, yet considers himself black. Why? Because he self-identifies with black culture? How? He didn’t know his father. How old was he when he met his first black person? White people should find this disavowal rather offensive. Black people should find this dishonest bandwagoning offensive. And mulattoes should find this disrespect to be downright insulting. And right when they are demanding redress of their long sense of census insensitivity, too. Then again, given the performance of the product, I’d be willing to forgo credit by any association. Maybe it is understandable that the mulatto community is silent. When the black community starts pointing out that the Obi One isn’t really as African American as, say, Condi Rice, he will know he is really finished. And when people like Chris Matthews start claiming him, it proves the final point: Chris Matthews is an idiot.