Aug 07, 2008 07:41 PM
You a nim
by Stefan Beck
Remember when wunderkind Rebecca Sealfon won the 1997 Scripps National Spelling Bee in spectacularly embarrassing fashion, screaming out each letter of her winning word, “euonym”? (If not, click here.) Cringe-making stuff, but, hey—at least she can spell. That’s more than can be said for a vast majority of students, even university students, according to the Times Higher Education Supplement.
But wait. Or weight, if you prefer. Though the author of the piece in question is “fed up” with his students’ “atrocious spelling,” he isn’t suggesting that (for instance) students be made to pass a spelling exam in order to go to college in the first place. Perhaps you can guess where he’s headed:
Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.
The spelling of the word “judgement”, for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of “judgment”, so why can’t “truely” be accepted as a variant spelling of “truly”?
He goes on to list the ten mistakes he encounters most often, without pausing to consider that effectively teaching ten words to adult students might be easier than persuading his readers to debase their language. The piece almost reads like satire, but it concludes so earnestly that the possibility seems slim. The good news: The commenters are near-unanimous in rejecting this immodest proposal:
• Here is a suggestion for Mr Smith: Given how many people ignore many of those rules of behaviour which we call Laws, why not draw up of a list of those which are most often disregarded, and repeal them?
• “Judgement” is the standard British English spelling, it isn’t “widely accepted as a variant”. “Judgment” is standard in American English.
• Some of the rules of English spelling may seem arbitrary. But using correct spellings shows attention to detail. It is a hallmark of professionalism. And we are judged on it: in CVs, cover letters, research papers, grant proposals, tenders for work. Not encouraging students to develop in this area, if they need to, hamstrings their employability.
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August 07, 2008 10:18 AM
Remembering Hiroshima: Political wisdom from The Guardian
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
It is not often that I agree with the politics espoused by The Guardian, England’s most left-wing serious newspaper. But an article by Oliver Kamm on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima last year won my wholehearted endorsement and it is worth reprising. Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of that fearsome event, [...]
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Aug 06, 2008 09:54 PM
One More Brand on the Fire
by James Bowman
The sensational charge by Ron Suskind, an inveterate and (as I show in my new book, Media Madness) foolishly credulous critic of the Bush administration that the CIA was ordered by the White House to forge a letter from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief demonstrating the dictator’s complicity in the terror attacks of 9/11 seems to have left out a stage. This is the part where everyone slapped his forehead and said: "Look at this letter! Boy, were we ever suckers. There was a link between Saddam and the hijackers after all! President Bush obviously knew what he was doing when he went after Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11." It’s true that there were some lonely voices on the right saying things like this back in 2003, but they were largely unheard in the mainstream media. And you kind of need this earlier chapter in the media narrative if you are then going triumphantly to produce, like a rabbit out of a hat, the evidence that something nobody knew about in the first place was all a con.
There might even be some among the Bush-haters who will resent the implication that, up until now, they’ve been more Bushite than the administration itself, which has always declined invitations to assert positively the link between Saddam and 9/11. They are likely to start scratching their heads and saying: "We never believed in this letter, even if we ever heard of it. So what’s the big news in claiming it’s a forgery?" And, from the administration’s point of view, I wonder what was the point of having taken the risk of commissioning such a forgery only to let the letter languish among the masses of similar documents which can hardly be supposed to prove anything? If you were going to forge something, wouldn’t you forge the unequivocal evidence of a smoking gun? Nobody that I know of thought there ever was any such evidence. You can hardly create a sensation by denying the existence of something no one believes in anyway.
If he had any evidence that it was an administration-sponsored forgery, even if it wasn’t used, he might provide a matter of interest to the likes of Dennis Kucinich, which some of the press reports seem to suggest he was trying to do. "It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings," Mr Suskind was reported as saying. But, alas, his book seems sadly lacking the evidence necessary to back up such a serious charge. According to today’s Washington Post his only named sources are strenuously denying that there was ever any such forgery. It’s hard to see what is the use of such feeble journalistic sallies except to make yet another small contribution to a general media climate of hostility and hatred to President Bush and all his works. This may be pretty useless stuff, but nobody outside the right-wing media ghetto is likely to care if it is treated as just one more faggot on the presidential pyre.
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What do you think of when you read a headline like: "Fossils Add More Proof Of Global Climate Shift"? Global Warming, right? What else? Any "Global Climate Shift" that doesn’t involve prognostications about whatever disasters may or may not await "the planet" as a result of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures isn’t generally a matter of public controversy and therefore doesn’t require very much in the way of that journalistic fiction, "proof." But if you look at Henry Fountain’s "Observatory" column in Tuesday’s Science section of The New York Times, you will find that just that headline is used to refer to the discovery of fossils in Antarctica which suggest that sometime between 14.07 million and 13.85 million years ago, that continent underwent a 14 degree drop in temperature which essentially wiped out the life forms that have left their fossils there. Of course, nobody blames this Global Freezing on human activity, which didn’t exist then. Nor can it be connected to the Global Warming people are speculating about today, except insofar as it reminds us that climate change is a normal part of the earth’s history and always in the past has taken place without reference to us, one way or the other. But some sub-editor at the Times must have seen an opportunity further to confirm the prejudices of the believers in man-made global warming — at least the ones who only skim the Science section — by providing such a misleading headline.
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August 05, 2008 01:36 PM
Outrage du jour, or: How the the EU Bureaucracy is Helping the Islamic Cap’n Hook Evade Justice
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
My friend Andrew McCarthy has alerted me to the latest outrage perpetrated by the European Court of Human Rights. What is it about institutions with the phrase “Human Rights” in their title? Why are they reliably the enemy of freedom and human rights? (Take, for example, the case of the Canadian Human Rights Commissions.) [...]
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August 04, 2008 12:58 PM
A footnote on Solzhenitsyn
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died yesterday at 89, was one of our greatest chroniclers of Soviet tyranny. Beginning in 1962 with his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and continuing with The Cancer Ward and the multi-volume Gulag Archipelago, he unforgettably anatomized the inner workings of that hideous, soul-destroying engine of [...]
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Aug 04, 2008 01:26 AM
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918–2008
by Stefan Beck
The Times reports the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, aged eighty-nine, in Moscow:
Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.
Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like The First Circle and The Cancer Ward and historical works like The Gulag Archipelago.
There are other obituaries here and here. Readers with a complimentary Times subscription can also read one of the first interviews Solzhenitsyn ever gave to an American journal (1980), conducted by none other than Hilton Kramer:
Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who spent 11 years (1945–56) in various prisons, concentration camps and places of forced exile in the Soviet Union because of some disrespectful references to Stalin in private correspondence with a friend, caused a worldwide sensation in November 1962 when his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in the magazine Novy Mir. This occurred in the brief heyday of “de-Stalinization,” and publication of the novel—which gives an unforgettable account of life in a forced-labor camp—had been personally approved by Nikita Khrushchev.
“Yes, Ivan Denisovich made a strong impression in the West as well as in the Soviet Union,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn recalled. “But,” he quickly added, “its literary qualities have to this day been almost completely ignored in the West.” For that matter, he said, “I don’t know of a single critical work that attempts an analysis of the literary aspects of The Gulag Archipelago,” his epic-scale account of life in the Soviet camps. He described this work—which in English occupies three stout volumes—as having a mosaic-like structure in which the details of the personal stories of some 227 witnesses, all scrupulously collected by himself, are pieced together to form a vast panorama of life in the Soviet Inferno . . .
Read the whole piece here.
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August 03, 2008 03:56 PM
Stanley Kurtz on Obama’s “lost years”
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Reviewing the forty-plus columns that Barack Obama wrote for the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender between 1995, when he entered politics, and 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, Stanley Kurtz provides a revealing and disturbing glimpse into the formative opinions and associations of the presumptive Democratic candidate for President.
Reportage in these [...]
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August 03, 2008 02:05 PM
Do symbols matter? The case of the Obama’s campaign plane and its missing American flag
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
As of July 29, Barack Obama had raised some $340 million for his campaign to be President of the United States. (John McCain, by contrast, had raised something less than $150 million.)
Even today, $340 million is a lot of dough. What do you suppose Obama does with all that cash? One expense was having his [...]
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August 03, 2008 11:12 AM
Adventures in the Land of Counterfactuals: What if Bush had listened to Obama on Iraq?
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
In The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti has some illuminating reminders about the recent history of our involvement in Iraq, The Surge, and who was saying what when about our best course of action. “In January 2007,” Continetti writes,
with Iraq in flames and Democrats set to take over Congress, President Bush had two [...]
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August 02, 2008 11:27 PM
Looking backward to look forward: some wisdom from John Locke on tolerance
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Look through some notes, I stumbled upon an excellent little piece by the British journalist William Rees-Mogg regarding the wisdom of John Locke on the subject of tolerance: “As usual, the great John Locke got it right,” Rees-Mogg wrote in the London Times. “The world ought to be more tolerant but some things remain [...]
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