What limited government is - and isn't

From the March 2008 Imprimis: Limited Government: Are the Good Times Really Over?, by Charles Kessler (Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.) :

Utterly missing in this election season is a serious focus on limited or constitutional government. The Democrats, generally speaking, want more government, not less, so their neglect of the issue is to be expected. But the Republican dereliction is more troubling. It represents a falling away from the standards of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism—a decline already reflected in the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush. After 9/11, many prominent conservatives—e.g., George Will, David Brooks, Fred Barnes —pronounced that small government conservatism is dead. That awful reminder of the dangerous world we live in, and of the need to defend ourselves, somehow meant that big government conservatism, as they called it, was now the only game in town. Conservatives would need to make their peace with this idea, they argued, in order to win future elections.

Were Will, Brooks, and Barnes wrong? For the most part, I think they were. To show how and why, I want to talk about seven propositions related to the problem of limited government in our day.

An example (one of the longest, but I think one of the more interesting):

Proposition five: Limited government, in the sense of constitutional government, is opposed to the political assumptions of the modern state, which arose after the New Deal. Those assumptions came largely from the political science of the Progressive era, whose proponents argued that the Founders’ limited government was an 18th century nostrum that was powerless to solve 20th century problems. From this point of view, natural rights were an immature form of genuine right, enshrining egoism and individualism that might have been necessary for frontier farmers but made no sense in an interdependent, industrial society. The Progressives believed that freedom did not come from nature or God, but instead is a product of the state and is realized only in the modern state. Far from being the people’s servant and, therefore, a possible threat to freedom—because servants can be unfaithful—the state is the full ethical expression of a people. The state is the people and the people are the state. This strange use of the term represents the Progressive attempt to translate the German concept of der Staat into American politics. America did not have a state theory of this sort until the Progressive era. Conservative and most libertarian anti-statism arose in opposition to this innovation; but too often, in recent years, hostility to der Staat has been confused with opposition to government per se.

To put the difference more plainly, consider Woodrow Wilson’s insistence that “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” In short, it is not the limited Constitution of the Founders, but the living Constitution, which is the ideal of Progressives and of modern liberal theory and practice. A fixed or limited Constitution would make sense if human rights are fixed and unchanging, as the Declaration affirms. But if human rights are essentially historical or evolutionary, then we should want a Constitution that is free to adapt and evolve along with them. In theory, then, no a priori limitations on government power—whether property rights, speech rights, or even religious freedom—can be allowed to impinge on government’s ability to bring about historical liberation. The old or natural rights have to be sacrificed in order to achieve the new rights of self-fulfillment. Thus for the Progressives—as for Barack Obama and many liberals today—political tyranny is no longer the ever-present threat that it was considered to be by James Madison or Alexander Hamilton. In liberal eyes, the real political threat is not tyrannical government or even the tyranny of the majority, but the well-connected capitalists, the “economic royalists” hiding behind the façade of democracy, who manipulate things to their advantage. Liberals ever since the New Deal have argued that limited government must become unlimited, in order to prevent the few from becoming tyrannical.

A new theory of the Constitution corresponded to this new theory of rights. FDR put it memorably in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Address: Government is a contract under which “rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights.” According to this view, we give the rulers power and the rulers give us rights. In other words, rights are no longer natural or God-given, but emerge from a bargain struck with the government. And it is up to liberal statesmen or leaders to keep the bargain current, redefining rights constantly—adding new rights and subtracting some of the old ones—in order to keep the living Constitution in tune with the times. Entitlement rights—rights created and funded by government—replace natural rights. Given this new relationship of people and government, we don’t need to keep a jealous eye on government anymore, because the more power we give it, the more rights and benefits it gives us back—Social Security, Medicare, prescription drug benefits, unemployment insurance, and on and on.

Full article here. Kessler argues that limited government is not a lost cause. He also argues that big government is not doomed to failure. In other words, those of us who want a constitutional government have some work to do.

Kessler argues that limited government is not the same as small government (although the concepts overlap), and that limited government can, and should, be energetic within its purposes. You'll need to read the article if you want the whole picture.

Imprimis home page.

Imprimis archives.

Book market watch: Lady on the Beach, by Norah Berg

Going through a stack of used books I'm getting ready for sale, I stumbled across one called Lady on the Beach by Norah Berg, with Charles Samuels, published by Prentice-Hall, c. 1952. It turns out to be another of those "new life of contentment and adventure far from the civilization they eagerly left behind" books (quote from inside jacket copy). In this case, the author and her husband became beachcombers and clam diggers along the coast of Washington state.

Anyway, to my surprise, when I checked market prices, I found a couple for sale for around $13, but most copies were in the $45 and up range, with a few riding above the $100 mark.

Sigh. The copy that has fallen into my hands is in good, but not very good, condition, and sports a taped and torn dust jacket, and therefore will go out at the lower end of the range.

Anyway, you might want to keep your eyes open for a copy at yard sales, etc. As always, remember that prices might crash at any time (especially if enough of you find copies at yard sales, etc., and put them out for sale at once...).

Friday funnies

From Jokes - and how to tell them, by Sonny Fox (Young Readers Press, 1965):

Q. What is the kindest animal in the forest?

A. The skunk, because he is happy to give his last (s)cent to his worst enemy.

Another riddle, same source:

Q. What has a mouth but cannot speak, a bed but cannot sleep?

A. A river.

Without feeling

We heard from an old friend this week, one we hadn't heard from in a while. The big news in her family was that her son-in-law had a stroke last year which left him without feeling on, or use of, one side of his body, head to toe. Massive was hardly the word for it.

The doctors issued their usual dire predictions. (Do you suppose they have doom and gloom classes at modern med schools?) He would never walk. He would never this. He would never that.

Three months later, he still had not the least bit of feeling on that side. But he could use it. He can walk. He can, she says, even use a wrench if he watches what he's doing. If he doesn't watch, he can't tell if he's got a grip.

He's enjoying himself, at last report. I guess he goes out fishing more than he used to. (When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade, I guess is the operating principle here.)

We can identify with that sort of thing at our house. When we got married, my husband had no feeling in his legs below the knees. He'd been that way for quite a while before I met him, but had long since figured out how to walk without the feedback the rest of us get. He used a cane for balance, and to help catch himself if he miscalculated, but he booked right along. I have no idea how, all the more so since nerve damage has left his leg muscles atrophied. He doesn't look like he has enough calf muscles to walk. (Think of the legs of someone stuck in a wheelchair. They look like that.)

He couldn't tell when something dropped on his foot unless he saw it. He couldn't tell if he'd stepped on thorns. Etc. So the upside (such as it was) was that he didn't suffer from stubbed toes like the rest of us.

A few years after we got married, he got feeling back in his legs and feet. But it came back on some sort of strange delayed broadcast signal. He could, in other words, feel what he'd walked on a few seconds previously. Or, he could stub his toe or drop something on his foot and have time to anticipate how bad it was going to hurt. This was, as you might guess, even harder than not having any feeling at all, especially the bit about feeling what he'd walked on shortly before. He'd go from a gravel driveway into a house, and his body would want to be adjusting for gravel when it was on carpet. He'd walk through the house, and would be getting carpet signals several steps after he'd moved on to linoleum. Very odd, this was. Very tricky, too. You might not think about it, but you do tend to make minor, probably automatic, adjustments to compensate for slickness, softness, and security underfoot.

The rest of his body was relaying sensations in real time, I might stress. It was only below his knees that the dubbing was off, so to speak. This took some getting used to.

Stairs were especially interesting at first. He'd have a foot relaying that it was firmly on a step and it was time to put weight down, but it was no longer on that step. It took a bit of doing to get used to that sort of thing, and learn to outfox it.

For the longest time, he'd successfully get himself to the top of the stairs only to crash a few steps later. The signals were that he was still climbing, and his body would be trying to put weight on a foot that was a few inches above the floor. We learned to pause at the top of stairs, letting his brain work its way through the recording. Eventually he learned to transition from stairs to flat without mishap, despite the tangle of messed up signals.

Just about the time he was getting really good at navigating using erroneous foot signals - just about the time it got habitual, in fact - his feet and legs switched to real time signals, like the rest of him. And the learning process started over...

You never know the loads you can carry until you get saddled with them, I guess.

Pan-fried waffles

The toaster broke a few weeks ago. When I stopped to think about it, almost all we used it for anymore was heating frozen waffles.

So, rather than running out and buying a new toaster, I tried cooking a waffle in a dry (ungreased), nonstick frypan. I was afraid it might dry out, since I could only brown one side at a time, so I used a glass lid. I browned the waffle lightly on one side, flipped it, browned it on the other. I wish I'd tried this sooner. The browning was more even than with a toaster, and there weren't dry spots and moist spots, either. I've tried it again since then, again with good results.

The downside is that you can't cook several waffles at once, but I don't generally need several waffles at once.

Now I don't have a toaster taking up counter space, and having to be cleaned and cleaned around. But I can still have my waffles. Such a deal. I've been trying to declutter the house. Decluttering by attrition is still decluttering, right?

Slamming the door

My husband was at our gas station/bookstore the other day when a car drove up to the pumps, and a mid-teen boy jumped out of the passenger side, dashed around to the driver's side, and opened the door for the woman inside. My husband was impressed, all the more so because the woman appeared to be the boy's mother.

"Hey, is that your mom in there?" he asked, or something to that effect.

"Yep!" the boy said, pleased to have been asked.

Whereupon the mother launched into a detailed explanation about why no one should be impressed with the kid's apparent good manners because he was only doing it so he could sit in the driver's seat and dream about driving, and he did this as often and for as long as he could, and so she was going to sit there until he got tired of it, because she was tired of how hard it could be to get him out of the seat once he got there and... and on and on, providing highly embarrassing details of previous run-ins, being heedless of the distress she was causing everyone in the vicinity, until the kid, humiliated, slammed the door and went back to the passenger seat.

Uhmmmm...

Let us concede that even the best of children can drive even the best of parents to the snapping point from time to time. But...

Here she was, with a grown man backing her up, a grown man who had pleased the kid by approving his good manners, a grown man who would have happily helped josh the kid out of the driver's seat if it came to that, and... she ruthlessly kept slamming her son until he slammed the door...

Uhmmmmm...

Try not to do that sort of thing. OK? Please?

Initiative lessons, part two

Sure, you want your kids to have initiative. But sometimes that means putting up with their ingenuity... :)

And, hey, I think Wonder Boy did good, don't you?

Book note: Sadie Rose and the Impossible Birthday Wish, by Hilda Stahl

I live in an old house. There are 18 inches of hanging space in the closet in the main bedroom, and an extravagant 21 to 22 inches in the second bedroom, which was added on years later. It's a good reminder that until recently most Americans (as I understand it) didn't have but a handful of clothes at any given time, especially of the sort that warrants hanging carefully on a hanger.

If you don't live in an old house, you can get the same message from reading old books, or books with historical themes. I recently read Sadie Rose and the Impossible Birthday Wish. The copyright is 1992, but the setting is pioneer Nebraska. Sadie Rose, the heroine, is coming up on her 13th birthday. Spoilers follow. She has two dresses, an everyday one and a good one. The good one is too small for her. For her birthday, what she wants, but the family can't really afford, is hair ribbon. Not a lot. Just enough for her two braids. One set of two ribbons, in other words. On her birthday, she gets her first "long dress," one about ankle length, made over from a dress someone else wore. She gets a few other things, but oh, those ribbons seem impossible. Spoilers end.

This is Book 9 in a series. I haven't read the others, but found that this one held up just fine as a stand-alone. It's Christian fiction, aimed at 9 to 12-year-olds, with a view of teaching them about patience and compassion. Sadie Rose and company manage to get into enough adventures and misunderstandings to keep it from being syrupy, and it's got some nice historical tidbits (OK, how would you keep dirt from falling out of a sod roof into food on the table? Did you ever think of that being a potential problem in a soddy?) but it's still in that class of Christian fiction that some people find too focused on the acquisition of virtue. (Or, at least, it felt a bit too much that way for me, perhaps I should say.) Still, it's better than many, and Sadie Rose is no wimp, bless her heart, and she's a likeable kid, but not perfect by any stretch.

I'm open to recommendations for other kidlit, both Christian and secular, that shows how people routinely used to get by with far less stuff than is generally considered normal today, not to mention far less entertainment, etc., but didn't whine about it. Suggestions?

Perspective

The things we think are important...

What you see isn't always right, with teens

Several years ago, we had a problem with teen boys gathering near our combination bookstore and gas station after the neighboring grocery store closed for the day. They'd park their pick-ups and cars in a huddle, and stand in front of them, trying to look tough as the rest of the community went by. For all intents and purposes, they'd taken over the grocery store parking lot (which adjoins ours). They were making people unhappy. They were making me unhappy, too. But I gritted my teeth and decided to wait them out, figuring they'd get bored with the game someday, figuring it would be asking for trouble to confront them.

One day, someone muttered angrily to my husband that 'somebody ought to do something' about those kids. My husband looked across at the kids, studying them, then said he thought the person was right. He grabbed his cane and walked alone over to the pack of teens. I watched with my heart in my throat. The next thing I knew, the kids were crowding around him, looking very happy, and shaking his hand.

My husband came back and I asked him what in the world had just happened. "I deputized them," he said. "You did what?!" I said, before I caught myself. He smiled. "The main thing wrong with those kids is that no one has given them any responsibility. I told them we'd been having a little trouble over here and I'd appreciate it if they kept an eye out for us while they were here." I was dubious, but he assured me it would work.

And it did. He was right. I was wrong. The kids weren't looking for trouble, really. They mostly wanted to be grown-ups, and weren't getting enough opportunity to practice, or enough encouragement in the right direction. So they were building facades.

I think that's true of a lot of teens. And it's one thing I tend to forget.

Amanda Witt has another angle on the subject.

Update: My husband offers a mild correction. What he was giving those kids was responsibility and authority. I consider that an important point. Some of the worst experiences of my life grew out of situations where I had responsibility without authority.

Book notes: The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer

For what it's worth, the New York Times book section has a feature article on a novel starring upper-middle-class women who decide to stay home to raise their kids. From Writing About Women Who Are Soccer Moms Without Soccer, by Motoko Rich, March 25, 2008:

It’s got hot-button issues written all over it, all right. But Ms. Wolitzer, 48, sidestepped the polemical debate that has characterized many nonfiction contributions to the motherhood genre.

“I’m not writing the Big Book o’ Motherhood and Work,” said Ms. Wolitzer, who has been a working writer since she was 23 and now has two children, Gabriel, 17, and Charlie, 13, with her husband, Richard Panek, also a writer.

What she wanted, she said, was to capture the nuances of characters who happened to have children and happened not to work.

Some of them miss their jobs; some don’t. Some feel guilt; others don’t. Amy Lamb is a former lawyer who worries constantly about money. Jill Hamlin once pursued a career in academia and then in film, but now stays at home and worries that she doesn’t connect with her adopted daughter. Roberta Sokolov, who once wanted to be an artist, is jealous of her husband, who, after years of slogging in a pays-the-bills job, lands a gig running a children’s puppet show.

All the women have thoughts likely to have readers nodding vigorously in recognition.

Before she began the novel, Ms. Wolitzer confessed, she judged those mothers who stayed home full time. But as she wrote, she realized that paid work wasn’t always fulfilling.

“The notion that everyone has a calling, that everyone has a talent, that everyone has a passion, isn’t true,” said Ms. Wolitzer, whose graying curly hair and laugh lines betray her age, but whose baggy leather jacket and battered brown leather satchel recall her years as a writing student. “I didn’t understand that.”

All right, I'd like to quibble with the attitudes in that last paragraph, and I'm a bit concerned that a book about a group of women doing ten-year stints at fulltime motherhood is called "The Ten-Year Nap," but at least the New York Times is quoting somebody who noticed (however late in life) that paid work isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be, and that different women have different priorities and goals.

From the article, I'm not sure if the book is what we'd consider 'family-friendly,' in more ways than one, but I hope it's at least an icebreaker amongst the 'a smart women is letting the sisterhood down if she doesn't devote herself to a fancy career' set. I've had enough of their fang-baring at women not in their clique, haven't you?

There are bikes, and then there are bikes

When I was a kid, I grew my way through a few bikes, but they were all of them practical. They had fenders to keep off the mud splatters, and they had baskets. I did not consider myself properly set up unless I had saddle baskets as well as a handlebar basket. The saddle baskets were rigid wire like the regular basket, but deeper, and straddling the back wheel as they did, they had a lower center of gravity. I could carry an astonishing amount on a bicycle. My violin posed a problem. On my way to lessons, I had to carry it on the handlebars instead of in a basket, but otherwise, those baskets could handle pretty much whatever I wanted to carry.

In Japan, I likewise had a practical bicycle. I was visiting a friend over there, and she happened upon a couple of bikes that had been thrown away, that she thought could be fixed up easily. So she brought them home, and with a bit of elbow grease and ingenuity, we were set. We horrified our Japanese acquaintances, by the way. "But those bikes are gomi," they said. Trash. Garbage. Rubbish. Something someone has thrown away. "So?," we crazy Americans cheerfully said, "just call us The Gomi Sisters." At that point I think several of our friends decided that they would never understand Americans.

But anyway, my recycled Japanese bike was sturdy and had a basket, and it made my life easier. Where we were was well set up for using a bicycle for going to the grocery store, and it was customary to shop daily. Considering the kitchen in my friend's apartment, and its lack of storage space, it was also along toward necessary to shop nearly every day, by the way.

So, the last few years, I have been looking, without success, for a similar bike, with which to do my grocery shopping these days. Does anyone around here carry a sensible bike? No. I can buy a bike and a trailer to go with it, by which fancy and somewhat expensive set-up I can use the bike for shopping, but, so far at least, I have not been able to find a basic, one-speed, workhorse of a bike, with fenders, and with baskets. There seems to be a horror of baskets these days. And of fenders, for that matter. Sigh.

You would think, with the cost of driving a car being what it is these days, and the push to use less fuel, that stores would be crawling with practical bicycles, ones that you can use on shopping trips. But, no. At least not around here.

While on the subject of bikes, this is interesting. And fun, albeit in a slightly wacky way. But I can't see how useful it would be, if you had groceries to pack home, etc. The Hyperbike (aka Body Rite) official website is here. What they tell you at the official site, but might not be clear from the television interview, is that the bikes shown in the videos are prototypes.

Friday funny

From Jokes - and how to tell them, by Sonny Fox (Young Readers Press, 1965):

Jim and Jack were fishing in the lake for the first time. They happened upon a spot where the fish were really biting. "We better mark this spot so we'll know where to come tomorrow," said Jim. The next day they were talking about their hidden cove. "How did you mark the spot, Jim?" asked Jack. "I put an X on the side of the boat." "What a silly thing to do," said Jack. "Suppose we get a different boat?"

Of course, it ought to be Ole and Sven instead of Jim and Jack, in my opinion...

Favorite lines from Narnia books sought

Phil at Brandywine Books is hosting a Narnia book giveaway. List a favorite line from the Narnia stories in the comments at this post, and you're entered in the drawing.

Hmmm. I've been re-reading The Screwtape Letters this week. Do you suppose he'd notice if I stuck in a quote from that instead? (Just joking, Phil! Just joking! Of course you'd know the difference.)

January sure has been long this year...

It is snowing. Again. Winter put in a stirring performance this year around here, and it seems intent on making curtain calls. In a man-made and man-run theater, we'd have audience members bailing out the exits by now, and stagehands hauling out the hooks to drag the spotlight-drunk star off the stage. But since we don't run the show, and since I can't afford a trip to, say, Hawaii, I'm settling in to enjoy the snow. I might as well, I guess. Two to four inches is predicted during this encore. I might have to dig the snow shovel back out from the shed. A few weeks ago I naively thought we were done with this sort of thing for the year, and happily packed the shovel away.

We have, by the way, a baseball tournament in progress down the street. Baseball, if you haven't noticed, is not an indoor sport. Teams have come from all around the state just to play a summer game, and are, off and on at least, playing it in swirling snowflakes. Such a deal. It will make for good stories when they're middle-aged, if nothing else, I guess. "When I was your age, son, I played baseball in the snow. And we won. So stop your bellyaching... What's the younger generation coming to, anyway?"

It was just our luck that a cold winter coincided with a spike in heating oil prices. Is spike the right word? It doesn't seem strong enough, somehow... Anyway...

I grew up in a social niche where 72 degrees was room temperature. I think somebody in government recommended it as a good temperature, and somehow it came to be the most common temperature, and from there it became the expected temperature, and from there it became the temperature at which all self-respecting people (at least all the self-respecting people we knew) kept their houses year-round. I remember, as a kid, that amongst our friends were people who would lower their thermostats during the winter, but didn't want anyone to know about it. There were also people who closed off part of their house during the winter to save on heating costs, but likewise didn't want anyone to know. Common sense, apparently, was out of fashion.

I don't know what we were thinking. I can't remember the last time I had the thermostat at 72, nor the last time I didn't close off rooms I wasn't using. It's no hardship, and it saves enough money to make a difference. You wear a few more clothes in the winter? So what? You have to get acclimated to a lower temperature every fall? So what? As for the closing off of rooms, it makes it all the sweeter when spring comes around, and you can stretch out again.

Of course, I'm blessed with a cheerful temperament, and I enjoy outsmarting circumstances, and frugality is one of my favorite sports. Some people, I notice, are happier pretending to be put upon. I don't get it, but there it is.

A few months back, an acquaintance at church was telling me about where she lived, in a tumble down part of town. She was saying that the house she rented was really pretty comfortable, despite what people thought about houses along that street. She was also gushing with nice things to say about her landlord. I've had that landlord as a landlord in days past, and he really is a nice man, and johnny-on-spot when it comes to reported problems. If you'll work with him, he'll work with you, and he goes out of his way to keep rents down.

So, the other day, I had occasion to look up the acquaintance, and found that she was days away from moving to an apartment elsewhere in town. Now that she'd decided to move, she had not one good thing to say about the place she was leaving, but chief among her complaints was that she'd had to spend $900 on heating oil so far this winter. She was pointing out the cracks along the doors, and bemoaning the lack of insulation. She also tried to light into listing little things she thought the landlord should have done for her, but didn't. That wasn't flying well since we both know the man, so she shifted back to being really upset about the heating bill. "This place just sucks oil," she said.

Well, I've lived in places like that. I currently live in a place built back before much (if any) insulation in the walls or ceiling was considered necessary, and before windows were insulated, and there are cracks around our windows and doors, too. We put tape here, and foam there, and plastic sheets up, and it helps, but it's still a bit tricky to keep it heated, especially if you're trying to stretch your dollars. So I started in with pleasant commiseration (what are friends for?), and was starting to tell her about how we just bundle up a bit and turn the thermostat down, etc., and how it helped us a lot. I'm not sure what I expected, but I got a startled stare from her.

And then it sunk through my thick skull that while I was warmly dressed in a sweater, she was in a short sleeve shirt. Her oil stove was in the same room as us. Set at 72. I guess she never got the updated memo...

I didn't know quite what to say. From what I could pick up, she'd spent the winter being frantic about her heating bills, and yet she hadn't done the most basic adapting to reduce the bill.

She's on welfare. We're not. I wonder if that makes a difference, or if she's simply a few decades behind me, and thinks it's shameful to not have a room temperature of 72. Or what?

Oh, well. She considers me a self-respecting and respectable person. I can only hope that I helped her feel OK with the idea of turning down the heat.

Before you laugh too hard, or tut tut too much, I'm nearly willing to bet you've got some counterproductive social standard hanging around in your life, messing up your goal to be a sensible person. After I read this post a week or so ago (specifically, the last part of it), my husband and I have been cheerfully recounting all sorts of things we used to hold as important, or necessary, that we don't consider "imperatives" anymore.

For instance, my mother's rule was that when you took clothes off in the evening, they went into the clothes hamper. It makes no sense to me to wash clothes every time you wear them, if they aren't dirty. It's more work, it uses more water, it uses more electricity, it uses more detergent, and it's harder on the clothes. But, I kid you not, it was a struggle to overcome the idea that I was doing something wrong by quite sensibly wearing a dress or shirt or slacks or skirt more than once without laundering.

And what was that nonsense we had back in the day that if two girls showed up to the same event wearing the same dress or outfit, that we were expected to run crying from the room? Or that we had to have a new dress for every "event"? I can't make sense of either "imperative," but I recall feeling something akin to horror if someone's clothes were too much like mine, or if I couldn't get a new dress for a dance or other special occasion. If I remember correctly, it was generally considered less humiliating to stay home than show up in a dress you'd worn before.

Excuse me? Where in the world did that come from? And why didn't the grown-ups sit us down and chew us out for behaving deplorably?

Oh, wait. We learned it, for the most part, from our mothers...

So where did they learn it from? And why? I've long since tossed those attitudes overboard as rules not worth keeping, by the way. (A lot of the rules we learned in the '60s and '70s, are, to my mind, not worth keeping, but that's another story.)

Anyway, I'll bet you've suffered a few such glitches in common sense at one time or another in your life just because 'everyone else is doing it'. Yes? C'mon. What are some silly rules you used to follow that you've opted to not 'honor' anymore?

Latin today: an update

Mary Beard asks Do we need Wikipedia in Latin? Because there is, surprisingly, just such a thing being built. From another link in her article, there are ways to get news in Classical Latin in Finland. (Or on the Internet, I guess. I can't read Latin, or speak or understand it, for that matter, so I'm not quite sure what to do with the website.)

What I find almost funny is that she chronicles these and other instances of Latin being used - for instance:

I’m pretty keen too on the general idea of using Latin in books meant for modern classical scholars. If you are a publishing a collection of ancient Latin inscriptions, you might just as well publish the commentary and explanation in Latin too. After all, anyone wanting to consult a Latin inscription is, by definition, bound to know the language – so it can be more inclusive to publish the commentary in Latin than in one particular vernacular, whether English, Swedish, or Japanese. It’s the lingua franca argument.

- but at the same time concludes:

The whole point about Latin is that it is a wonderful language, with wonderful literature worth reading on any evaluation of the world culture. But it is also well and truly dead. It doesn’t help the cause of Latin one bit to pretend that it is remotely worthwhile inventing new Latin words for “web” or “wind turbine” or “EU”.

So sorry if I’m being a killjoy, but I’m hoping that Vici dies a death.

Uhm. I'm not sure killjoy is the right word. Snob, maybe?

What in the world is wrong with more and more people learning Latin, and finding ways to keep practiced in it? Or keeping it up to date? Of making it another world language, even if on a smallish scale? English can handle the competition, at a guess. (And this is not to mention that studying Latin seems to help people become better at using English.)

For that matter, what would be wrong with just a handful of devotees using it, without it catching on in any big way?

Or with enough people using it that some more of it sloshes over into English, adding a bit of precision or color here and there? Not to mention fun?

I guess that if people keep using Latin, it will probably evolve the way other living languages do, and that might make it harder to get a handle on classical works? But how would that be different from any other language? Not a whole lot of people can read untranslated ancient English without training and/or good footnotes, either. So?

She reminds me a bit of those sad, distressed official wannabe protectors of the French language, who are forever shouting "Stop!" (more specifically, the French equivalent deemed most proper by the current panel of language police) when they find nearly everyone else around them delightedly shoving French both higher and lower as they pick up new ways of saying things from each other and from the rest of the world.

I'm not saying that all the language changes that get invented are good. Uhm, no. I have several word origin books, and several history of English books, and it has not escaped my attention that words tend to degrade and dissolve in meaning as time goes on. It's not all that uncommon for them to take on contrary meanings, for that matter. I sometimes take a stab at protecting a word or phrase from being misused into uselessness or confusion. (Sometimes I find it impossible, however. Not all that long ago, I found myself diving out of the crossfire when one group started demanding that the word tragedy be used only under certain circumstances, and another group was stoutly defending another, utterly incompatible, exclusive definition of the word. Harboring respect for the leaders of both camps, I picked up my marbles and went home, as the saying goes, vowing only that I would try to remember to think twice before calling anything a tragedy.) But to declare a language not only dead, but rightfully and properly dead, in the face of an enthusiastic and growing fan base for it? It seems a bit too much like standing on the seashore telling the tide what to do, doesn't it?

For what it's worth, I also find Beard's statement "After all, anyone wanting to consult a Latin inscription is, by definition, bound to know the language" questionable. Don't rookies who are in way over their heads ever make a brave or comical or deluded go at it? What is this attitude that there are modern classical scholars and then there is the rest of the world? Do scholars in her world spring fully formed from the womb? Or are her 'Latin inscriptions' (I'm not sure precisely what she means by that) something that is zealously guarded by some equivalent of an ever-vigilant three-headed monster, and only friends of the beastie's master get access to them? What?

Is she serious? Or joking? I guess I might have asked that earlier. Perhaps she thinks that looking down her nose at anyone who uses Latin without belonging to her little circle, or without their reluctant but gracious consent, is a variety of sophisticated jest?

For that matter, I'd like to clarify that I'm not angry with Beard, or offended. Mostly I'm perplexed. Tinged with amusement.

Perhaps I should have some pity. It must be rather difficult, being an academic sort in a day and age when academia can no longer control the flow of information and ideas to the extent it used to, even a generation ago. I can see where it might make anybody inclined to be defensive and dismissive. I'm not saying it should. I'm saying I can see where a person could get that way, if she wasn't careful.

hat tip: Frank Wilson

Not as ripe for harvest as they thought

Oops, indeed.

One thing and then another

I've been having one of those weeks where I can't seem to find time to get online. We're fine. Just busy. I'm expecting things to slow down in a few days. In case I don't get back before then, Happy Easter!

"Horton Hears Political Correctness"

Patrick Deneen took his kids to see the film adaptation of "Horton Hears a Who" and found it not quite true to Suess, and not kind to homeschoolers, either. Let him explain.

Holy Week, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, and 'friendly' older men

At A Hen's Pace: Holy Week, Easter and St. Paddy's Day says that St. Patrick's Day was officially March 15 (Saturday) this year, to move it out of Holy Week. Don't tell that to people who are happily wearing green or pretending to be at least part Irish today, OK? People are having too much fun.

And, no, I didn't know it wasn't "officially" St. Patrick's Day today, until I read that post. I almost wish I had known. I helped out at a senior center luncheon today, and some of the older ladies who'd forgotten to wear green needed all the help they could get, fending off pinches from older men happy for the excuse to chase ladies around or sneak up behind them and pinch.

(I was wearing green. I got a marriage proposal. Or a proposition. I'm not sure which. "I'm single, too!" was how the stranger enthusiastically opened the conversation. The gents were certainly feeling frisky.)

No, wait, I might be leaving you with the wrong impression. It wasn't entirely over the top at the luncheon, the chasing about was mostly all in fun, only a few of the men were participating in the hijinks, and my suitor cheerfully gave up the chase as soon as I told him I had a good husband. A few men were playing at being wicked, and showing off a bit to each other, but they were being careful to be considerate about it, is about what it amounted to. In fact, one of the gents, seeing that one of the volunteers was upset, dug a necklace of green beads out of his pocket, and gallantly bestowed it upon the lady, so she'd be properly off limits the rest of the day. Good on him, as some people might say.

And, by the way, the post at At A Hen's Pace explains that we don't have to worry about Easter (and therefore Holy Week) falling this early again in our lifetimes. I don't know about where you live, but we've had an exceptionally cool and snowy March, so it's not just that Holy Week is so early, it's that it's so early in a year in which spring is kind of late, so to speak. Brrr.

We had snow on the ground this weekend. It's melted, but we've got a fresh batch coming down as I type this.