Most of this post has been drawn directly or indirectly from Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language", which is absolutely terrific and highly recommended.
For those of you familiar with Semitic languages, what I'm talking about will come as no surprise at all.
For those of you who aren't, but who are generally culturally literate, you will likely have encoutered the word "shalom", which is Hebrew for "peace", used as a greeting and in other social interactions as well as its literal meaning. You might greet the ambassador from Israel with "Shalom" even as you prepare to discuss ways to advance the cause of "shalom" in the Near East.
Consider the phrase go home. What part of speech is home? I'm going to suggest, following the analysis of Huddleston and Pullum in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, that it is an example of something that traditional grammars do not recognize.
Just FYI.
Well known as one of the very few notably poisonous lizards, common in the American southwest. Sluggish-looking, with thick lips and fat mouth, it doesn't look that threatening. Sure, the wound would be poisoned, but it wouldn't be dangerous in itself.
Yeah. Hidden behind those thick lips is a battery of long, sharp, recurved fangs that will grab on to ensure maximum venom transfer and rip the hell out of the flesh when being removed.
And that mouth is fat because it has big ol' masseter muscles that power those fangs and lock the jaw into a bite.
So now you know that "monster" is more appropriate than you think.
So I'm watching the latest episode of Numbers, which is about a cargo train and passenger train collision in LA, and the FBI team is doing search and rescue in the wreckage.
Because of course you send FBI senior investigative special agents into dangerous wreckage. If they're the stars of the show, I guess.
Anyway, I'm watching them pull people out of the wreckage. The most egregious case is when the guy scrambles out of the wreckage with an injured woman on his back in a fireman's carry, and he hands her off to his partner who holds her in the classic honeymoon carry, and through all this, her head is flopping around.
Where the fuck is her cervical collar? I can see the head injury. There is an unacceptably high probability that these untrained FBI jackasses have just killed that woman, or paralyzed her for life.
We see them pull a couple more guys out of the wreckage, with the same carelessness about neck injuries. And yes, there's a certain amount of rush necessary here, because there's a chemical leak. But for gods sake, you can try. Even if you can't hold c-spine while extracting her, you can slip a c-collar on and get some stabilization.
Yeah, this is a stupid show that crowbars its premise into every inappropriate situation. But there's a difference between forgiving FBI guys doing things like S&R they wouldn't do in the real world, and them doing things wrong that cause more harm.
Bah, humbug.
Eight years ago, I wasn't ashamed as such. Just embarrassed at the shenanigans my country had got itself up to screwing over the rules to put the lesser man in office.
I had thought that the worst President of my lifetime was long behind me, the barbarous and criminal Richard Nixon. I had no idea what the worst President of my lifetime would actually entail.
Then the disaster of September 11th came. I was underwhelmed by the President we'd got's apparent uninterest in leadership.
Then the invasion of Iraq, by which point I was appalled by the incompetence and mendacity.
And the revelations of the abuses of power that the President we'd got did in our name--the secret renditions, the turning over to torturers, and the torturing ourselves, of people whose guilt or innocence we did not know and cared less about; and the grotesque grabs for dictatorial power's clearest bellwether, the warrantless, unreviewable taking of prisoners solely on executive say-so in defiance of the rule of law.
By the election of 2004, in which millions of people knew--or should have known--what I knew about the evil that the President we'd got had done in our name, and switched their vote to him, I was ashamed.
That man and his lickspittles and courtiers had taken my country, the land that I love as deeply as you can love, and made me ashamed of it.
I have been ashamed of my country. Of its rulers; of my countrymen for approving of them.
Tonight, I am not ashamed.
The hard work begins, and I am willing to believe that we have a President capable of leading us, actually leading us, out of the wilderness.
Si se puede.
It occurs to me that, with the Republicans facing a likely defeat in the presidential election, that, while most of them might become resigned to defeat, some of them will become more desperate. And desperate men commit hopeful crimes--high-risk crimes that you hope you don't get caught for.
And by that I mean, we might see some blatant, unusually large-scope or large-effect attempts to defraud the election, as some desperate Republicans push their usual vote thievery and suppression and miscounting beyond safe limits.
And that would be ironic, because it might be the Republicans' voter fraud that finally gets us to fix voter fraud--but not the fake, minority/poor voter suppression type of "voter fraud" that Republican operatives have been shamming about for a decade now, but the real, systemic, voting machine and voting system vulnerabilities that the computer scientists and security specialists have been warning us about for a decade now.
But the real world isn't as neat about its ironies as stories are, unfortunately. Still, the underlying thought, that we might see relatively a lot of Republican vote trickery get exposed this season because their desperation will lead them to take greater chances, that's a pretty good supposition, and I'll stick with it.
(I early voted last week.)
Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands
Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody
In the name of anti-terror, and in the name of being tough on illegal immigration, we have regressed fifty years to how prisons in the darkest part of the South treated poor blacks. Immigrants in custody aren't treated as well as livestock or property.
We have taught our employees that immigrants who run afoul of the system are not human. We have taken the established legal position that citizens have some rights that non-citizens do not, and expanded it to the full extent that non-citizens have no rights we are bound to respect.
This is evil. We as a nation have chosen to do evil to other humans in the only way that humans can do evil to other humans, by declaring them non-human.
We have chosen to do this.
If we are to save America's soul, we must choose to fix what we have done, to choose moral and right behavior, to treat everyone with the full respect and dignity they are entitled to by their very existence.
It is not the easiest choice. It will cost money, it will cost time and effort. It will require us to give us some tiny measure of our own comfort and safety in order to improve the lot of people who are not us. But that is the fundamental compact of society. We accept small risks and forego small rewards in order that everyone can avoid the big risks and reap the big rewards.
Moreover, we may not stand in splendid isolation from the world. We are a part of the world; it is at our fingertips wherever we turn. If we speculatively improve our own immediate and marginal safety by evil treatment of non-citizens, we make ourselves vulnerable to a whole world of non-citizens who will rightfully fear and resent our evil treatment of themselves and their relatives, friends, and neighbors. What we visit upon our prisoners today will be revisited upon us, directly or indirectly, and we will suffer punishment for our evil here on Earth.
We hold this truth to be self-evident: All humans are created equal.
We are a great country. We deserve to be held to that standard.
Blame Mason for encouraging me in this terrible exercise of mortifying indulgence.
Out of pure cussedness, I hereby declare that the racial name of the dragonborn in D&D 4e is "ushutud", which is literally "dragonborn" in dog-Sumerian, based on this Sumerian lexicon. Compare ur-tud, "debt-born", i.e. "domestic servant" (probably "slave").
Why Sumerian? Well, 1. I have an unreasonable affection for Sumerian mythology, which is an elegantly simple polytheism (see digression below), and 2. Sumerian shades gracefully through Akkadian to Babylonian, which is where we find Tiamat, in many ways the ur-dragon of D&D.
Also, who wants to try to figure out enough Akkadian morphophonemics to translate "dragonborn"? Better to stick with Sumerian.