Category: Teaching

While I was writing last Friday’s piece, I decided to do a bit of follow up today.  I’m always interested in words and thought I would drag some along behind me.

Please note: These words are about the subject of that other essay, Despondency. They have nothing to do with my present state of mind. Suggestions that I need anti-depressants just might be inconsistent with what that essay said and with my current state of mind, although people commenting in my essays without seeming to have actually read them is a bit depressing in and of itself.

The closest word at the Online Etymological Dictionary (quoted liberally here) to despondency is despondence, a word dating from 1676.  It derives from the Latin despondere:

“to give up, lose, lose heart, resign” (especially in the phrase animam despondere, literally “to give up one’s soul”), from the sense of a promise to give something away, from de- “away” + spondere “to promise” (see spondee [we shall return to this]).  A step above despair.

So, okay.  How about despair?

The Storyteller took a deep breath and cast back for another memory, another story to tell.  The Listener was patient, but did require the occasional feeding.  The Storyteller chuckled at the observation.  The Engineer glanced backward and nodded.  And the Train switched to another happentrack.  

The Storyteller began to sing.  The Listener leaned forward.  The passenger turned over, but otherwise remained sleeping.

Pine was at it again, hectoring all of creation.  Canyon rolled its eyes as Sun passed overhead.  Canyon preferred peace.

The other day I ventured into an essay.  God forbid that I read an essay here.

Dude, I read almost all of the essays here.  Telling me I should just not read them I think misses the point of the whole exercise.

And I observed something written by someone trying to write about identity politics, someone with whom I have had extreme disagreements about the exact same subject in the past.  I might have actually read the whole thing through at once, but I got trapped pretty close to the beginning because, like he has a habit of doing, the author assumed a power-over position.  So I stopped before finishing to address it.  

He didn’t intend to do so.  At least I’ll give him that benefit of the doubt.  The power-over position is so natural to some folks that they assume it without a thought most of the time.  In what I thought was a crude attempt at humor, he decided that the alternative to use to the set of men and women, out of all the words available to him, was “hermaphrodites.”

I made a cultural faux pas at that point.  I assumed a position of equality in order to point out that he was invoking his power and presumed to try to educate him about his choice of words.  He spent the rest of our discussion trying to deny me that position of equality, to reassert his manhood and restore order in the universe.

Mind you, this is only my view, from the position as a member of a traditionally powerless group.

Was losing Major Elliot’s strategic location during the extermination of the Southern Cheyenne Arapaho at Washita by Lieutenant Colonel Custer acceptable by U.S. military standards? Captain Benteen thought not.

Source

“Surely some search will be made for our missing comrades” mocked Benteen’s piece, before concluding, “No, they are forgotten.”

Custer picked the wrong man to threaten horsewhipping.

Both the National Hurricane Center and the Colorado State University forecast team founded by Dr. Bill Gray are forecasting above normal Atlantic  hurricane seasons. The NHC is predicting 12-16 named storms, 6-9 hurricanes, 2-5 major hurricanes and an “ACE” range 100%-210% of the median. CSU is predicting (PDF) 15 (avg. 9.6) named storms, 8 (avg. 5.9) hurricanes, 4 (avg. 2.3) intense hurricanes and a “NTC” 160% of average.

However, these forecasts don’t address the “mystery” of the missing oceanic heat that has now been found.

Climate models had predicted that the heat content of the oceans would rise faster than the data were showing. A recent correction of the data set revealed that sea levels and oceanic heat content were rising 50% faster than previously determined.

The oceans have been growing warmer and sea levels have been rising at a faster rate than previously estimated, researchers reported. A review of millions of measurements over the past four decades revealed a subtle error, they said; after correcting it, they found that sea levels rose two inches from 1961 to 2003 – about 50 percent greater than previous estimates. Experts familiar with the work said the finding, published in the journal Nature, added credence to computer simulations predicting centuries of rising seas from human-caused global warming.

Also in Blue at BlueNC.

Every year is the same.  Father’s Day shows up, an uninvited guest which has already used up the first three days of its visit (as per the old saying) and is beginning to resemble the dead fish way too much.

father

O.E. fæder, from P.Gmc. *fader (cf. O.N. faðir, Ger. vater), from PIE *p@ter (cf. Sanskit pitar−, Gk. pater, L. pater, O.Pers. pita, O.Ir. athir “father”), presumably from baby-speak sound like pa. The classic example of Grimm’s Law, where PIE “p−” becomes Gmc. “f−.”  Spelling with −th− (16c.) reflects widespread phonetic shift in M.E. that turned −der to −ther in many words; spelling caught up to pronunciation in 1500s (cf. burden, murder).  Fatherland (1623) is a loan-translation of Ger. Vaterland, itself a loan-translation of L. patria (terra), lit. “father’s land.”  Father’s Day dates back to 1910 in Spokane, Wash., but was not widespread until 1943, in imitation of Mother’s Day.

—Online Etymology Dictionary

I mostly want to go hide somewhere, so I’ll mostly be watching men play golf.  Go figure.  It’s most assuredly not a good way to avoid Father’s Day.

Last year I wrote the following, which flashes back to an even earlier post in another SpaceTime.  It made the Rec List at the Orange.  Think of it as a way for me not to have to write something new.

Last month, to far (FAR) less attention than it merited, the House of Representatives (facing an Administration veto threat) passed the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act with $20 billion for greening public schools across the nation.

Taking aggressive action to green schools is about one of the smartest steps the nation can take, action that should go beyond bipartisanship to true unity of action as it is a win-win-win-win strategy along so many paths:

And, well, other benefits. In the face of these benefits, “The White House threatened a veto, saying it was wrong for the federal government to launch a costly new school-building program.”

Nine Comments

Yesterday was interesting.  There were so many comments I made which I could have expanded upon…whole chapters in their own right.  What generally happens at a time like that is that nothing happens.  The comments just drift away into nothingness.

So I grabbed an assortment and decided to comment on the comments.  And stuff happens.  If it weren’t for the fact that my computer is currently crashing, I might have selected an assortment of thoughts from those responses and turned them into a poem.  Sometimes, however, stuff doesn’t happen.

For those looking for an etymological moment, I give you

woman

From late O.E. wimman (pl. wimmen), lit. “woman-man,” alteration of wifman (pl. wifmen), a compound of wif “woman” (see wife) + man “human being” (in O.E. used in ref. to both sexes; see man).

You see, the thing is that originally man (or homo in Latin) meant human being.  Wer (or Vir in Latin) meant male man.  Wif  meant female man.  They were less knowledgeable about other possibilities at that time than we should be today…one would think.

In the late 1200s (after the signing of the Magna Carta, one might notice) wer stopped being and man became the word used to refer to a male human.  Those things we said before about human beings?  They now mean males only.

Cf. Du. vrouwmens “wife,” lit. “woman-man.” The formation is peculiar to Eng. and Du. Replaced older O.E. wif, quean as the word for “female human being.” The pronunciation of the singular altered in M.E. by the rounding influence of −w−; the plural retains the original vowel.  Women’s liberation is attested from 1966; women’s rights is from 1840, with an isolated example in 1632.

Since some have questioned the validity of the Police Brutality against Longest Walkers in Ohio, perhaps a little history review is in order. Who is innocent and who is guilty? Which side of the story is predominantly told and why? These are questions needing to be asked, for the devastating effects of genocide are still alive today.

Attempts to revise history are abundant in this video.

Geronimo

The soldiers never explained to the government when an Indian was wronged, but reported the misdeeds of the Indians.

And especially having “never explained to the government when an Indian was wronged,” was Custer. Distrubing is the fact that some people still try to spread his lies after 140 years.

I have a fascination with words and how they came to mean what they do and take on the connotations that they have.  

Of Queers and Fags, Hussies and Catamites

queer – 1508, strange, peculiar, eccentric, from Scottish, perhaps from Low Ger. (Brunswick dialect) queer (oblique, off-center),  related to Ger. quer  (oblique, perverse, odd), from O.H.G. twerh (oblique), from PIE base twerk (to turn, twist, wind), related to thwart. The verb “to spoil, ruin” is first recorded 1812.   The sense of “homosexual” was first recorded in 1922; the noun in this sense is 1935, from the adjective.

I admit to being queer.  But I am not spoiled or ruined.

The word homosexual dates from 1892, in C.G. Chaddock’s translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, from homo-, a combination form from the Greek homos (same) and the Latin-based sexual.

‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.

— H. Havelock Ellis, Studies in Psychology, 1897

Homosexual was first used as a noun in 1907 in French, in English in 1912.  Interesting comment in the etymological dictionary:  In technical use, either male or female; but in non-technical use almost always male. The slang shortened form homo first appeared in 1929. The alternative homophile was coined in reference to the homosexual regarded as a person of a particular social group, rather than a sexual abnormality, in 1960, but it didn’t catch on.  Homophobia is from 1969.

Well, I’m sure homophobia is from way before that, but the word is from 1969.

This is a review of two books suggesting a constructivist critique of the public school system as it stands: Kaia Tollefson’s Volatile Knowing, a constructivist critique of NCLB, and Tollefson and Osborn’s Cultivating the Learner-Centered Classroom, a practical guide to constructivist teaching.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Your resident historiorantologist has lately been puzzling over the matter of how it is that Alberto Gonzalez and the current rubber-gavel-wielding “Chief US Law Enforcement Official” have not been brought before the World Court to stand for their crimes.  Clearly, it doesn’t take the piercing legal intellect of a Harriet Miers to recognize that torture goes against everything Americans believe in – our nation is, after all, a product of the Enlightenment, that 200-or-so-year period starting around 1650 in which thinking humans chose to recognize science, redefine the roles of government and the governed, and repudiate things like tyranny.  Given this definition, of course, the aforementioned “legal” experts clearly are not Enlightened individuals, but closer examination of what actually went on before the bar back then shows that the Gitmo Gang would find themselves right at home dispensing “justice” in a court of that era.

So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll look at criminal justice in the Age of Powdered Wigs – and may find that the current cadre of ethics-averse thugs running our penal/information extraction system would have been right at home in an Enlightenment court.