Stanford University has published, to much-deserved derision, a kind of index of prohibited words, that is to say words that could possibly cause anyone, even animals, distress. Of course, if you treat people as eggshells, eggshells is what they will become, especially if they derive some kind of benefit, financial or other, from their fragility. The university has almost as many administrators as students, in the way that the Bolivian navy had admirals; and in the absences of any other or higher purpose, administrators do not administer, they manufacture administration. They do so both to ...
When in 1755 the great 18th-century man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson finally published his seminal Dictionary of the English Language after almost a decade of arduous toil, early purchasers were ...
How did Shakespeare use the word “race”? During the current Great Awokening, the Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries has increasingly come under attack, both on general principles ...
Thirty thousand people—I was tempted to write harridans and harpies, but there must have been some emasculated men among them—have petitioned the Oxford University Press to ...
Is attention to the correct use of words mere pedantry or, as Confucius thought, the necessary foundation of a healthy state? I am with Confucius on this, which is why I was ...
The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th ...
Foolishness springs eternal. And this is just as well for us journalists, because it gives us such easy targets when we have deadlines to meet and no time to think, which is most ...
It's official"words no longer have meaning. As a proud member of society's educated, progressive elite, I"m thrilled. Since Bill Clinton famously disputed the definition ...
A few weeks ago I noticed the following slogan painted on the walls of a supermarket in France: Hitler, Sarko"même combat [Hitler, Sarkosy"same battle] One ...
People often claim to have cultivated their inner child as if this were a good thing to have done. They are proud of it, in fact. The "inner child" that each of us ...
Here's the fastest, surest way to identify the subspecies hackus punditus"watch for them to display one particular behavior, especially when deadlines loom during summer ...
The most stubbornly hypocritical glitch in the egalitarian mindset is that eugenics is roundly and vigorously dismissed as a dangerous and discredited pseudoscience...unless it ...
Yesterday I stopped by a Methodist church that was having a charity Christmas-tree sale. A man told me the sale was over for the day and then wished me "Happy ...
For right-wingers, November proved to be the cruelest month in quite some time. The Kenyan Klepto won the White House again. Speaking of democracy: Here in Toronto, our most ...
A recent study from the University of Michigan finds that the ever-popular youth expression "that's so gay" is actually harmful to gay, lesbian, and bisexual ...
Although the adjective "fascist," as George Orwell pointed out during and right after World War II, was a slur applied to "those we don"t like," the ...
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