Thursday, August 26, 2004

 
DUMB AND DUMBER.
External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26935-2004Aug23.html

"Yes, I would have voted for the authority [to use force in Iraq]. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have. But I would have used that authority, as I have said throughout this campaign, effectively. I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has. My question to President Bush is: Why did he rush to war without a plan to win the peace? Why did he rush to war on faulty intelligence and not do the hard work necessary to give America the truth?" -- Kerry, Aug. 9

"He now agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq. After months of questioning my motives, and even my credibility, the Massachusetts senator now agrees with me that even though we have not found the stockpiles of weapons we all believed were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power." -- Bush, Aug. 18

(Taken from the Washington Post's Web site)

So Kerry says that he felt that Bush should have been able to negotiate with Saddam while holding the authority to go to war, but that we should not have rushed to war. And Bush says that Kerry said that Kerry agreed that that it was the right decision to go to war. There is a huge, huge difference between what Kerry said, and what Bush says that Kerry said.

And why did Bush make that mistake? Is it because he's too stupid to tell the difference?

I don't think so.

I think it's because he thinks you're too stupid to tell the difference.

This is The Official Record. 1:16 PM
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2004/08/dumb-and-dumber.html

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Thursday, August 05, 2004

 
WHILOM.
External link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=whilom+&btnG=Google+Search

The wordsmith.org word of the day is "whilom," which means "formerly," as in "[H]e quotes the whilom CEO of RJR Nabisco, Ross Johnson . . . ."

So, I'm thinking, whoever heard of that word? If I use that word in conversation, who is going to have any idea what I'm talking about? Where did they even come up with their quoted examples of the use of the word (the above is from the Washington Post, 10/6/1991)?

So, I do a google search for the word, and the entire first page of results is nothing but dictionary definitions of the word, many calling the word "weird" or "difficult" or "brainy".

So, what is that? Is this even a real word, if its primary "use" is to be a hard-to-know word?

So, how do you know if you've found a cool, new difficult word, or a ridiculous, useless word, anyway? I'll tell you how: if it is useful. If "whilom" just means formerly, and has no "sense" other than the sense of being obscure, then it is useless, since we can do everything we want the word whilom to do, by just using the word "formerly."

By contrast, an almost equally obscure word, which was also a word-of-the day, is "callipygian," which is now one of my favorite words. It means, "having a shapely buttocks." That is a useful word that you can use at least a couple of times a month, and which describes a concept for which there is no other word, and which describes an extremely common phenomenon, for which we most certainly need a word.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that concepts are like crevices in the sidewalk, and useful words fill up those crevices, while useless words pile up for us to trip over.

P.S.: the blogger.com spell-checker has never heard of whilom or callipygian!

This is The Official Record. 12:30 AM
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2004/08/whilom.html

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