Hey, Kay Bailey! Shut (The F...) Up!

Texas is doomed. The current governor (Rick Perry, R-TX) is all hair and no brains and his likely principal gubernatorial challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), is a former cheerleader: all megaphone and no brains. Senator Hutchinson's characterization of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke (D-WA) brings to mind one of A. Lincoln's aphorisms: "'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." If this is a (fair & balanced) diagnosis of stupidity, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Family Secrets
By Timothy Egan

Tag Cloud of the following article

act ago america american balance birth born cabinet census chinese commerce congress count country don electoral enter family fear federal flew gary gave governor grandfather house human illegal immigrant job locke member obama oversee perspective president republic secret secretary slaves states story sure threats today told united week work years

created at TagCrowd.com

The new Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke of Seattle, is a former Eagle Scout, prosecutor, and popular two-term governor whose idea of a good time is to crawl under the kitchen sink with plumber’s tape and a gob of grease. Just one week into the new job, he flew home to mow his lawn.

After reading the background file that the F.B.I. put together on Locke, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison characterized the latest member of President Obama’s cabinet with one word — “boring.”

But Gary Locke does have a family secret that is anything but eye-glazing.

Yes, he is widely known as the nation’s first Chinese-American governor, with a stirring family saga, as President Obama said in introducing Locke.

“Sometimes the American story can be told in the span of a single mile,” Obama said, referring to the distance between the place where Gary’s immigrant grandfather worked as a house servant nearly a hundred years ago and the Capitol where Locke was sworn in as Washington state governor in 1997.

Yet there would be no Lockes in America, no great story of the kid raised in public housing who went on to Yale and high office, no presidential kudos, if that same grandfather had not lied to get into the country.

“Some members of my family are still very nervous about acknowledging what happened back then,” Locke told me nine years ago, when I spent time with him for a profile.

And when I asked him last week about that same family secret, he repeated the story, with some hesitation.

“I’m not really sure, but I think my grandfather claimed he was born here but the birth records were destroyed,” Locke said.

For more than half a century, in an act of overt institutional racism, the Chinese were barred from legally entering the United States, with only a few exceptions. The Chinese Exclusion Act lasted until 1943. Those who managed to get in were often called “paper sons,” using elaborate ruses about lost documentation to enter the country.

Locke’s grandfather — today — would likely be hiding in the shadows, fearing federal officials and the lash of those who don’t like the changing character of America.

All of which gives Locke an unusual perspective for his new job. As Commerce Secretary, he will oversee one of the oldest undertakings of the federal government: the decennial census, which takes place a year from now. As defined by the Constitution, the census is supposed to be a count of all residents of the United States — “actual enumeration,” not just citizens.

In attempting to translate that task for purposes of electoral representation, the first census counted black slaves as three-fifths of a human being. That 1790 head count put the population of the young republic at 3.9 million.

Locke was born in the United States, so you wing nuts can rest easy. His father served in the American Army, a staff sergeant who landed at Normandy Beach and fought the Nazis in Europe.

The Locke family narrative is the American story, even with that twist about how they first came to these shores. The fact that they felt some shame over this episode is not usual; they skirted the law, egregious as it was, to get in.

Some Americans don’t see the common heritage: the hushed story of entry paired with the later success borne of hard work. When Locke gave the Democratic response to the 2003 State of the Union address, he was besieged by hate e-mails and death threats, many telling him to go back to China. The reaction stunned him: Here was a deep hatred he had never been exposed to.

Few of us can trace our ancestry to the Mayflower. But it’s worth noting that, from a Native American perspective, those Massachusetts Bay pilgrims were illegals.

As Locke oversees the census, he says he will put extra effort in making sure everyone gets counted. Some Republicans fear he will use statistical sampling — an educated guess, based on partial numbers. But the Supreme Court has ruled against this, and Locke vows the census will steer clear of such projections.

“What we want is an accurate count of America,” he said. “A true portrait.”

At stake is more than $300 billion in state and federal funds, congressional seat allocations, and the balance of the Electoral College. Those slaves of 1790, though counted as less than human, gave southern states additional power in congress and the general election.

Today, the illegal immigrants — mostly Latino, but many Asians as well — will tip the balance another way. They include those who may one day have grandchildren in the president’s cabinet, a cycle as old as the republic. ♥

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Homer Simpson: Slangologist?

This blogger has never met slang that he didn't like. Some of it is better than the rest, but slang is cool. If it wasn't for slang (and snark), this blog wouldn't have a personality. If this is (fair & balanced) cognition, so be it.

[x Salon]
Watch Your Language!
By Stephanie Zacharek

Tag Cloud of the following article

1920s adams bail book brain chapter cognitive culture defining definition different either example explaining explores expression finds form fun give homer include jakobson jargon language linguistic lively loves means notes passage poetry possible preface probably process realize seems simpson slang slayer something subject thought used verb ways words writes young

created at TagCrowd.com

Slang is something most of us use every day without thinking, unless we avoid using it as a matter of principle — which probably takes more conscious thought than using it does. "Slang is always with us," writes Michael Adams in his meticulous and shockingly readable Slang: The People's Poetry. It is also, he concedes, a big subject, one that could probably fill twice the number of pages he uses (238, including footnotes and references).

That Slang is so slim, concise and lively is proof of Adams' commitment to the idea of language as something that's living, breathing and constantly changing. If you've even been trapped at a dinner party or a lecture (depending on the guests, sometimes they're indistinguishable), listening to an alleged person of letters use as many of them as possible to express how much he or she "loves words," you'll be grateful for Adams' concision. Slang is a gem that Adams has taken great care in cutting and polishing. Unlike so many academics — Adams is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University — he doesn't feel the need to give us the whole damn diamond mine.

And he approaches his subject with suitable humility. In 2003 Adams came out with a book called Slayer Slang: A "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Lexicon, and as he notes in the preface here, a reviewer of that book — a linguist — pointed out that nowhere in it did he include a definition of "slang." With Slang he attempts a definition — and more — after realizing that "slang was both more interesting and more complex" than he'd realized. Adams has organized the book into four sections: The first grapples with the definition of this admittedly slippery linguistic concept. The second explores the ways in which we create and use slang as a way of defining our own identities — either as a way of fitting into a group or separating ourselves from it. The third examines slang as a style, a means of creative expression either spontaneous (or seemingly spontaneous) or contrived, and limning the qualities it shares with its more high-toned cousin, poetry.

In the final chapter, Adams digs into the role slang plays in the way our brains process information. He cites, for example, an academic study in which the subjects' brain activity was measured while they read Shakespeare's Coriolanus: It would jump whenever they encountered one of the Bard's trickier and more playful uses of the language — for instance, when he'd recruit a word typically used as a noun for use as a verb, as in "He godded me." Adams writes, "It wasn't as if the brains were confused, exactly, but rather as if they had been awakened from linguistic boredom."

That clarity of thinking and of expression is typical of Adams' book, which was written, he tells us in the preface, not just for scholars but for regular people too. To that end, he draws inspiration from a broad swath of pop culture. Those include Web sites (he quotes a long and blush-inducing list of raunchy slang terms culled from the Web site of the Salem, OR-based "Sly Records"), magazines (he unearths a gold mine of girl slang from the late, beloved Jane), movies (he cites the effective use of "fuckin-A" in Mike Judge's 1999 film "Office Space") and television shows (including, of course, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," although he finds untold riches of slangification in "The Simpsons" as well).

In defining what slang is, Adams has to spend a great deal of time explaining what it's not. Slang is different, for example, from jargon, which might be defined as a set of words used specifically by insiders in a certain field — wait staff in a restaurant, for example. Slang, Adams notes, "is a casual language of being, not working language." If that seems like hair-splitting, the reality is that when it comes to language, there are an infinite number of hairs to split. And in exploring the meaning and significance of slang, Adams perhaps raises more questions than he can possibly answer — but that, too, fits the nature of slang, which evolves and changes not just with each new generation but almost with each passing day. Adams reaches enough solid, thoughtful conclusions to make the book satisfying, though the real pleasures of Slang emerge through his restless questioning: For Adams, getting to the answers is most of the fun.

Adams finds some clever ways to trace the historical development of certain types of slang. For instance, he gives us a timeline that outlines the popular terms over the years for the state of being extremely drunk. Before the 1970s, no one used the words "annihilated," "shit-faced" or "ripped." And no one, it appears, has used "jammed" since the 1920s. But "bent," "loaded" and "lit" or "lit up" just keep on kicking: They've been in use since the Prohibition era and show no signs yet of going down the toilet of linguistic oblivion.

In explaining what slang means and where it comes from, Adams writes about how African-American slang finds its way into white culture (and, in the process, often loses its hipness). He describes how full phrasal verbs can be clipped into shorter forms with slightly different shades of meaning: "Bail out" is essentially the same as "bail," but sometimes the jazzier abbreviated form is just the ticket. And Adams finds some lovely ways to describe slang as the language of youth (though it isn't, of course, confined to the young). He quotes a lively, descriptive, jargon- and slang-filled passage written by a young snowboarder in the magazine SnowboarderGirl, noting, with charming and perceptive precision, that the writer "spends whole paragraphs being young."

But Adams really hits his stride in Chapter 3, "Standing Out: Aesthetic Dimensions of Slang," which is where he digs deep into one of the book's central ideas: That slang, as he hints in the book's preface, "may not be poetry, but it's on the way to poetry." In exploring the link between slang and poetry, Adams name-checks the right guys, among them Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. But his Exhibit A is none other than Homer Simpson, an unwitting expert at "infixing," the act of making a new word by inserting something in the middle of it. Nonwords coined by Homer include "edumacation," "metabomalism," "pantomamime," "macamadamia" and "saxamaphone." Adams writes, "Homer, who isn't the brightest bulb and seems to have absorbed little enough from his edumacation, may have trouble pronouncing words like 'metabolism'; they're all nonsense syllables to him, so how does he know when to stop?" But Adams recognizes Homer as a "sort of idiot savant": "Saxamaphone," he writes, is "Homer's loving wordplay with his daughter, Lisa, and 'pantomamime' and 'macamadamia' are examples of fun words made more fun to say because the infix also duplicates the preceding syllable — which is to say that it constructs a sort of rhyme within those words." Then he heads for the capper: "There's plenty of phonetic pleasure in saying these words, and the pleasure is in the poetry." (Adams doesn't address our former president's similar mangling of the language, but if he did, he'd probably find it a lot less poetic than Homer's.)

Only in the book's fourth and last chapter, "It's All in Your Head," does Adams slip a little too far into the tunnel of academicspeak. The chapter's subtitle is "The Cognitive Aspects of Slang," and I don't know about you, but when I see the "c" word, I immediately smell academicspeak — that is, jargon. Still, not even in this chapter — in which Adams explores the ways in which the brain processes playful or unusual language — does Adams completely abandon his goal of writing about slang in a way that's meaningful for a general readership. I confess he lost me when he began parsing the views of king-bee linguist Noam Chomsky as compared with those of Roman Jakobson, a member of the Prague school of linguistics of the 1920s and 1930s (in case you didn't know). Though I realize the Chomsky vs. Jakobson distinctions must mean a great deal to linguists, they made my eyes glaze over: This section of Slang is a little too much like a crawl explaining the back story of the war between the Klingons and Lord Sauron.

Adams does make his points as clearly and as swiftly as possible, and not even the book's slower passages can dilute his strong, overarching ideas: that slang is both shaped by the changing culture around us, and in turn helps shape it; and that the rebellious invention of and appropriation of words — by the young, by subcultures large and small, by the likes of Homer Simpson — are part of what keeps language vital. In fact, the last chapter of Slang is probably much livelier than any chapter with "cognitive" in its subhead has a right to be. Even so, when they come up with a slang substitute for "cognitive," I'm there.

[Michael Adams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University; he teaches courses in the history of the English language. Adams received three degrees from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbot: A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. between 1983-1988.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer and film critic for Salon. Her writing on books and pop culture has also appeared in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, and Newsday. She is a member of both the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves