Initialisms

Initialisms are akin to acronyms and, like them, a recent development in the English language. One current example would be LMAO, which represents the phrase "laugh my ass off", I guess. It's evidently used to express an emotion with the minimum of characters in the instant messaging or texting environment. OK, as someone with a background in linguistics, I recognize that language, like everything else, changes over time. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I don't know about initialisms.

From time to time, I bump into my twenty-something daughter on gmail and get into a chat with her. My entries are normally complete declarative sentences or interrogatives, with subjects, objects, modifiers and punctuation and capital letters where appropriate. Her responses are, LOL, ha ha, and so on. I envision an individual sitting on a couch before a television, perhaps with music playing on some nuevo electronic device, texting on a mobile phone while gazing at a laptop screen. Super multi-tasking.

Be that as it may, what's the relationship between initialisms and communication? For decades I've personally deplored what seems to me to be the degeneration of colloquial English. The spoken vocabulary has become smaller and smaller. The trend would inevitably lead to a language composed of grunts and mumbles similar to that of a troop of baboons. While most literate Americans probably have some idea what common English written words mean, at least in a general sense, they don't ordinarily use them in spoken conversation. And written conversations no longer resemble the missives of the past, committed as they are to the email format. So we have initialisms. But what is the meaning conveyed by four capital letters? How much nuance can we detect in LMAO? Further, it's obvious that an enormous amount of this retro-communication is taking place. What is its purpose? It can hardly be the transfer of meaningful information. And, in fact, even normal telephone voice communication has exploded in dimension. What kind of information is involved? Has it any signifcance at all? Are mobile phone addicts texting initialisms really communicating?

Whatever the answers to these questions might be, count me out. I don't intend to learn to speak Finnish or Esperanto or American Sign Language or Ebonics. And I'm not going to communicate in initialisms.

A death

From “The Dregs of Life”, Royal Charles, Antonia Fraser

" The responsibility for making the first decision about treatment fell upon Bruce, the senior gentleman present. By this time one of the doctors, Sir Edmund King, had arrived in the bed-chamber and had witnessed the incident. Bleeding was the obvious remedy of the time. And bleed the King this doctor now proceeded to do in style, while a panic-stricken message was sent off to the Duke of York and the rest of the Privy Council were summoned as hastily as possible. By the time a Privy Council of sorts had gathered together in the outer room at midday, Charles had had sixteen ounces of blood removed via a vein in his arm, a task for which the doctor was afterwards paid L1,000.

Soon other doctors came flocking in as the news of the King’s collapse reached them. A series of remedies were frantically applied. The King’s head was shorn. Cantharides (Spanish fly or blister beetle) was used as a blistering agent. A further eight ounces of blood was removed. And as a result of these steps-or despite them-the King did actually recover. Two hours later his speech had come back.

__________________

In the general relief, the doctors at least did not let up on the application of their remedies. It was actually in the presence of his physicians - twelve of them by this time - that next morning, Tuesday, 3 February, the King was seized with another ‘fit’ or convulsion. Immediately and with renewed frenzy the remedies were stepped up and new ones were imported.

Lord Macaulay described Charles II on his death-bed as being tortured like an Indian at the stake. The comparison is apt, except that one doubts whether any tormentor of Indians ever had quite such a battery of instruments at his command as the seventeenth-century royal doctors. It has been estimated that a total of fifty-eight drugs were administered over five days, many of whose names are as exotic to us as their effects were painful to the King.

There was hellebore root (a sneezing powder to clear his nose) and plasters of combined spurge and Burgundy pitch (these were applied to his feet), as well as plasters of cantharides on his head. The ingredients of the enemas which were applied frequently were rock salt and syrup of buckthorn. As an emetic, an orange injfusion of metals, made in white wine, was employed. White vitriol was dissolved in paeony water; other remedies varied from the homely, such as the distillation of cowslip flowers to the more striking spirit of sal ammoniac. An anti-spasmodic julep of black cherry water, oriental bezoar stone from the stomach of an East goat and spirits of human skull were amongst other cures named.

The poor King’s body was purged and bled and cauterized and clystered and blistered. Red hot irons were put to his shaven skull and his naked feet. His urine became scalding through the lavish use of cantharides. Cupping-glasses and all the many weird resources of medicine at the time were applied. They all had one thing in common: they were extremely painful to the patient.

These prodigious efforts were much admired at the time. Colonel Thomas Fairfax, an Irish officer visiting London, hastened to write to Dublin of the employment of 'all the means that the art of man thought proper for the King’s distemper’. The doctor’s report afterwards spoke of 'every kind of treatment attempted by Physicians of the greatest loyalty and skill’. The doctors did not exaggerate the universality of their treatments; their loyalty was doubtless incomparable; but they did somewhat gloss over their own incompetence. The King’s mouth and tongue became 'much inflamed’ with scalding medicines and where his teeth had been forced apart during convulsions. Not all the doctors were as skilled at blooding as Edmund King. James Pearse, Charles’ Surgeon in Ordinary, and Surgeon General to the Navy and Land forces, could not find the jugular vein successfully, a desperate experience for the patient. Another doctor, Thomas Hobbs, who lived in nearby Fleet Street and Surgeon to the Household and the King’s troops of the Horse Guards, had to finish the job: for this efficiency he was later rewarded by inclusion in Dryden’s poem on the King’s death, 'Threnodia Augustalis’.

The need to keep up the patient’s strength through all this was however fully recognized: from time to time the King was given draughts of emulsion, light broth and liquid posset. At the same time the purges and emetics continued remorselessly to drain his resistance from him. Once again the comparison with torture arises, as when the tormentors are determined that their victim shall not finally elude them through death, and therefore fortify him."

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As terrifying and disgusting as this account is, as soon as one's revulsion abates one may be able to distinguish parallels between the medical expertise of the seventeenth century and the economists of the present. Just as blood letting was the automatic treatment for almost any ailment then, contemporary economists prescribe government spending for almost all economic ills. If human freedom survives in some stunted form into the future, our descendants may well be as appalled by the attempts to alleviate economic failures as we are by the measures used to treat hapless King Charles II.

What does the Haitian earthquake mean?

The natural disaster (for resident humans) that is the Haitian earthquake has the capacity of bringing out the human tendency we have to assist those whose lives have been immensely compromised through no fault of their own. People throughout the world will do what they can to alleviate the suffering there. Be that as it may, there are other disasters that cause human suffering on a similar scale involving not the impersonal forces of nature but the machinations of other humans. We have an extensive record of these in just recent history. The induced starvation of the Ukrainian peasants, the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and China are just examples from the twentieth century of catastrophic events that were the culmination of political activity, rather than the ravages of nature. Are calamities like these outside the scope of assistance? Evidently, not entirely, as much of the world took part in the effort to eliminate the Serbian attacks on their Muslim neighbors. However, in other arenas the humanitarian response is either subdued or discouraged by government. Today knowledge has spread world-wide of the killings in the Darfur area of Sudan but we hear of liitle effort being made to halt them. And the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq had a long record of monstrous treatment of its own citizens and neighbors, yet the effort to lift that yoke from the neck of them has been condemned, not by other monsters and tyrants, but by people who consider themselves true humanitarians. Is there less of a need for help if a child's parents are imprisoned or executed by a despot than if they were drowned in a hurricane?

More Doctors?

One of the arguments for universal health care is that 25 or 30 million Americans don't have health insurance. One of the arguments against universal health care is that adding these Americans to the health care system will require additional hordes of doctors to administer to them. That's not even theoretically true. The uninsured have always had health care, just no insurance. They haven't stood outside the hospital, their noses pressed to the lobby picture windows, wishing they could go in and have an appendectomy. They just went to the emergency room, where treatment can't be refused, maybe got a bill for it, maybe paid it, maybe not. Chances are the treatment for whatever issue they may have had would have involved less expense than years of premiums for health insurance. No matter, the indigent will receive medical care and the rest will pay for it. Pictured above are the POTUS Obama and Nancy-Ann De Parle, Counselor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Health Reform. Ms. DeParle has been managing director of a private equity firm, CCMP Capital, and a board member of companies like Boston Scientific, Cerner and Medco Health Solutions.

The First Black President

A quote from today's Chicago Tribune: "New surveys show steep declines in Obama's approval ratings among whites--including Democrats and independents--who were crucial elements of the diverse coalition that helped elect the country's first black president."

"The country's first black president"? For some time now, this concept has disturbed me. First of all, BHO is only half "black", apparently. Mainstream society no longer utilizes the antebellum nomenclature of "mulatto", "octaroon", and so on, so at what point of diminishing ethnic content would an individual cease to be "black" or Irish or Greek or whatever? In point of fact, BHO is just as much white as he is black, from a genetic standpoint. Secondly, BHO does not in any way fit the definition of an African American as it's generally understood. He isn't descended from Africans brought to the US in chains and eventually liberated by the Union army. He wasn't raised by or among blacks. He hasn't really participated in the "black experience". The idea that the American black community could not only accept him as one of their own but practically unanimously vote for his presidency on the basis of his superficial appearance is racism in high heels and fishnet stockings.

Certainly, the idea, of course, is not that he is the "first black president". I must have slept through the love fest during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The election success of BHO is just as much a product of left wing class warfare as racial solidarity and good ideas for governance.

MORE MALARKEY

137 Years Later

"It’s hard to believe that the 1872 mining law is still with us. Signed by Ulysses S. Grant four years before the invention of the telephone, the law sets the rules for mining hardrock minerals like gold and copper. Useful in the days of westward expansion, it is a disaster now. It demands no royalties from the mining companies and provides minimal environmental protections.

Its legacy, if it can be called that, is a battered landscape of abandoned mines and poisoned streams.

Republican and Democratic presidents alike have urged Congress to reform the law. Yet it survives, thanks largely to Congressional inertia and friends in high places. At the moment, that friend is Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader who resists reform because mining is big business in his home state of Nevada.

Still there is hope for change. In 2007, the House passed a good bill that would require mining companies to pay royalties, just like oil and coal producers do. The money would help pay for cleanups of abandoned mines. The bill would also strengthen environmental safeguards and allow the secretary of the interior to block mines that pose a clear danger to the environment.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a comparable bill in April. This is the first comprehensive reform bill the Senate has seen in years. But what really encourages those who seek a better law is the Obama administration’s ardent and public support.

Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, told Mr. Bingaman’s committee last week that he saw mining law reform as a “top-tier issue” that he hoped would not be buried under other Congressional priorities. And this week, using his emergency authority under another law, Mr. Salazar placed a temporary hold on any new mines on about one million acres surrounding the Grand Canyon. These are enormously encouraging gestures from a department that resisted reform during the Bush years.

It bears repeating that these reforms do no more than subject the mining industry to practices that oil and gas operators, coal miners and other intensive users of the public lands — including ski areas — have operated under without strain for decades. Our hope is that Mr. Bingaman’s leadership and Mr. Salazar’s enthusiasm for change will command the attention of Mr. Reid and, in time, force a vote on the Senate floor. One can live in the 19th century for only so long."

This New York Times editorial demonstrates the lack of understanding about the Mining Act of 1872 by the effete east and even the less aware segments of the rest of the country. First of all, as the masthead of the California Mining Journal says, "Without mining, there is no civilization". The development of mining and metallurgy is what made the leap from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age possible. Without the products of mining we would even now be living in that Stone Age. In the 19th century, common sense dictated that the mineral resources of the country be developed. This logic is still legitimate. The act itself allows a company or individual to stake public lands and perform assessment work in the development of mineral exploration and extraction at no cost to the government or taxpayers. When the prescribed amount of assessment is done, the claim becomes the property of the stake holder, provided exploitable mineral resources are found. No royalties are involved. The reality is that the Mining Act of 1872 is one of the very few ways that an individual can, with a minimum investment and a lot of hard work, make something out of nothing. Naturally, the east coast, big government folks can't stand that. The NYT not only doesn't understand the situation, they feel compelled to lie about it as well. Land claimed under the Mining Act is subject to the same environmental regulations as any other property. And the comment that "intensive users . . . have operated under without strain for decades" would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic. And the lament that a law passed before the invention of the telephone should now be considered antiquated reflects poorly on much of the US code. The NYT just doesn't know what it's talking about.

The WiFi coffee shop

Human progress apparently skipped a groove. We have gone from coffee shops that simply served coffee and pastries to those that wished to sit around in public without getting drunk to coffee shops with wireless internet service so customers can geek the internet or maybe work without getting drunk. But what happened to the intermediate step? Maybe I missed the era when coffee drinkers pulled small portable TVs out of their backpacks and messenger bags and watched Seinfeld and Simpson's re-runs while they caffeinated. Must have happened somewhere, probably California.