The United States of Booze

                        The United States of Booze

                         Published in Marietta Daily Journal Feb. 26, 2017

            The reason my father hated alcohol was that his father and only brother loved it.  One reason I hate it is that so many students I’ve taught loved it also.

            My father didn’t like what alcohol led to when his father and brother consumed it.  I never liked what it led to when high school and college students consumed it.  Memories of the deaths of students killed by alcohol on Saturday nights still plague my mind.  What a waste!  What a senseless thing for a nation to have such an intense love affair with a commodity that kills, maims, and destroys.

The ads tell us to drink in moderation.   There’s one thing for sure: there’s no such thing as moderate death.  Dead is dead.  A lost limb is a lost limb.  

            Alcohol-related statistics don’t seem to bother Americans.  We label alcohol an “adult beverage,” pretending our kids understand that they shouldn’t drink until they are of age.  Ha!

            Yes, we love our alcohol.  Gotta have it after work.  Gotta have it in our hands as we stroll around at parties.  Gotta stock it in our homes because it would offend our guests if they weren’t offered wine. 

            Georgia has had at least two governors who didn’t like alcohol.  At a political gathering over a decade ago I told Governor Joe Frank Harris that I appreciated his stand on drinking.  He replied that the only people who ever brought it up were reporters.

            The governor recounted an exchange with a reporter who asked, “When you’re traveling abroad seeking industry for Georgia, don’t you think you should respect your hosts and drink with them?”  Governor Harris said he replied, “Don’t you think any host I visit should respect me if I choose not to drink?”

            At another event, my wife quietly said to First Lady Mary Perdue, wife of Governor Sonny Perdue, “I appreciate the fact that you don’t serve alcohol.”  The First Lady’s reply was, “We don’t serve it in our permanent home, so we don’t think we should serve it in our temporary home.”

 Most public officials simply don’t hold such convictions.  A close political friend said to me once, “If anyone can’t be moderate about their drinking, that’s their problem.”  True, at least until the immoderate drinker gets on the highway.  Then it’s everybody’s problem, including those who preach moderation.

            But Jesus performed his first miracle by turning water into wine.  Yes, and my Italian sister-in-law was appalled when she came to America and observed what we call “drinking.”  In America she saw drinking and drag racing mixed on a flat stretch of road in front of our house.  She frowned to learn about drunkenness and its resulting carnage.

             In her faltering English she declared, “In Trieste, we no do this.  Wine be like water.”  Perhaps ancient Israel’s wine was more like Italy’s than America’s.  If Antonia were still living, she would be aghast that in 2013 over 290,000 “Amedicans” were severely injured by drunk driving crashes.

America is awash in booze.  We’re now even making it at college.  My wife’s alma mater, Middle Tennessee State University, is one of many colleges that now offer a degree in Fermentation Science.  Wonder how many millions the brewing industry is contributing to the university now. 

Located in Murfreesboro about halfway between Jack Daniels country and Nashville (the Baptist Vatican), MTSU has no problem teaching fermentation to undergraduate students who are too young to sample their fermented products legally in Tennessee.    

Oh, I forgot.  In 2016 the Tennessee legislature passed a law allowing college juniors and seniors under 21 to taste the fermented product they created as part of their coursework. Students can’t swallow, though. 

 Dear Lord!  What a message this sends.  Teach students to make a product that they can’t consume.  Sounds like an admission of alcohol’s danger, to me.  Just what we need.  Less emphasis on mathematics, language, history, and pure science and more on producing liquor.  Smoking is bad, bad.  Producing alcohol at college is good.

            According to a 2014 Center for Disease Control report, just over 88,000 deaths each year are traced to alcohol use.  I suppose that out of 321 million people, that’s a moderate number we can accept.  Moderate drinking, moderate number of deaths.  No problem, except the grieving families who lost a loved one.        

So drink up, America.  Just be moderate.  But watch out for the immoderate ones, especially on Saturday nights.  And pray that your kids and grandkids will do the same.  But expect the typical results, because your moderation is not working.

Roger Hines

February 22, 2017

Religious Liberty without Religious Literacy?

   Religious Liberty without Religious Literacy?

                          Published in Marietta Daily Journal Feb. 19, 2017

            If literacy is a pre-requisite for liberty, westerners everywhere – particularly Christians – should be reminded that 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

            In fact, at the time this column was begun earlier this week, we were 258 days, 5 hours, 20 minutes, and 16 seconds from the anniversary of Martin Luther’s stand at the Diet of Worms on October 31, 1517.

 “I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand,” Luther declared as he stood before an angry council that was prepared to excommunicate him for posting his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg.  Luther’s posting called into question particular beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church.

            For those who dozed during 10^th grade World History or college Western Civilization, the Reformation wasn’t just another event in church history.  Luther’s action shook the European continent and would later affect the very origins of America.  In time it diminished a powerful, religious-social-political institution and grew a vastly different one.

            Without a deep forest of historical detail, suffice it to say that a German monk arrived at a conclusion which he was compelled by conscience to reveal.  From his own reading of Scripture he was persuaded that the Bible alone, not the church, was the guide for doctrine. 

Since the Roman Catholic Church was both the religious and political authority, Luther was treading dangerous ground.  No longer the sect persecuted by emperors for 400 years, Christianity in 1517 was the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the Empire.  From Constantine (337 A.D.) on, most emperors had Christian sympathies.  Long before Luther’s day, the Roman Catholic Church was indeed catholic (pervasive) and also very Roman, that is to say, powerful and authoritative.  It was a state church.

Into this secular-religious milieu came the first protestant, or the first protestant to shake the existing system so profoundly.  Soon thereafter, European kings, who owed their allegiance to the Pope, began to break with Rome, the most notable being Henry VIII of England.  Protestantism, born of protest, was spreading.

And why should modern working people whose days are spent laboring to pay bills know about Martin Luther? Because literacy aids liberty and a better life. Because knowledge of courageous people who turned history around can inspire those who think they are trapped.  Knowing about unlikely heroes can encourage us to be heroic.

No elite, Luther was an unlikely hero or reformer.  Unlike his fellow reformer John Calvin whose view of God matched his dictatorial, iron-fisted rule over Geneva, Luther was an humble scholar.

   Because of Luther’s stand, the Christian world today is made up of Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox believers.  Catholics still have a pope, Orthodox Christians still honor their icons, and Protestants still splinter off as quickly as one can say “church conference.”  But this is freedom and Luther birthed it.

If America isn’t a Christian nation, she is, as Supreme Court Justice William O. Justice observed, “a religious people.”  But according to a 2010 Pew poll, we are religiously ignorant. Particularly is Christian literacy in decline.  Only 46 percent of Americans know that Martin Luther initiated the Reformation.  Roughly 45 percent of Catholics don’t know that their church teaches that the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist have been transformed into the actual body of Christ.  Interestingly enough, 62 percent of Americans know that Hinduism is India’s majority religion.

Like once-Christian Europe, America has a case of cultural amnesia.  I suspect the growth of “nones” in Europe and America indicates forgetfulness as much as it does intellectual or religious choice.  If “faith cometh by hearing … ,” and children and youth don’t hear, then the chain of history (of cultural, religious memory, actually) is broken.  How shall they know of Martin Luther without a parent, teacher, or preacher to tell them?  Individuals and nations forget.

Happily, the schism brought about by Luther didn’t produce total separation.  Where would the pro-life movement be without Catholics and evangelicals working together?  How much more intense would America’s sexual chaos be without Catholics and evangelicals opposing it?  If two houses agree on traditional values, they agree on what should be valued.  Luther would be pleased with that agreement.    

We all need to know how freedom was born and how tyranny is best fought.  Come October, even Pope Francis will be commemorating the German monk who took a stand and changed the world.  In so doing, the good pope will be advancing religious literacy and religious liberty as well.

Roger Hines

2/15/17

Death by Communication

                                          Death by Communication

                           Published in Marietta Daily Journal Feb. 12, 2017

            Anyone who decries money or says it is evil has never been without it.  The same is true of technology.  Even so, as the old saying goes, “there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.”  With technology, we are just about to reach that point.

            Don’t think you’re about to read a rant against technology and a cry for the good old days when times were bad.  Having grown up without running water, with a single fireplace being the only source of heat, and with a much loved radio being the only connection to the outside world, I consider technology a wondrous thing.

            However, for all its wonders and utility, pervasive technology is producing certain effects that need to be considered.

  Today technological devices are creating pseudo-communication, and pseudo-communication is killing genuine communication.  It’s also affecting families negatively and decreasing the concentration skills of children and teens alike.  Technology has absolutely seduced the field of education.  How many schools are using technology because their little charges are drawn to it, not because of its lasting educational effect?

            Genuine communication is not always verbal, but whatever form it takes, it does require attentiveness.  Attentiveness requires – whether we like it or not, and most of us don’t – some listening, consideration of others, and Heaven forbid, some pause.

            These three requirements are not exactly what technology fosters or inspires.  Instead, technology feeds our immature demand for immediacy.  We want it and we want it yesterday.

            Surely the most reliable and fruitful communication is eyeball to eyeball, but since we can’t always be present with the one with whom we’re communicating, we should be grateful for all the technological advances that at least allow second-hand communication.

            But oh, how we abuse it.  No, strike that.  Oh, how we abuse others (usually those we love most) by misusing our technological devices.

            How often in restaurants do we see Dad and kids frantically thumbing their smart phones, either to chat or play a game while Mom sits amongst them in a separate, lonely world?  And why is it that so often Mom is the odd one?  Moms have smart phones too.  They know about and embrace technology’s wonders.  It may be that Mom desires something else for her family during dinner besides all the “connecting.”

                        Believe it or not, there are signs that our love affair with technology is cooling.  Silicon Valley still has its grip on us, what with music from the cloud, keeping our Do-List on a battery-powered device, and reading online, but according to David Sax, author of “The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter,” humans are beginning to rage against the machine.

            Sax points to these developments: sales of paper notebooks and board games have grown for a decade; Amazon is now opening the very brick-and-mortar stores it set out to displace; nostalgia is setting in among baby boomers who are backing away from technology; and (sit down for this one) millennials are being drawn to the “raw utility” of pre-technology tools such as (don’t get up yet) the notebook.

            Sax’s explanation and conclusion is that while opting for less-modern technology is surprising and might not make sense, more people of all ages are seeing that ”humans aren’t machines but are complex creatures of emotion whose human experience is still a reliable platform from which to solve problems, no matter how many technological platforms we embrace.”

            In December of 2015 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that electronic toys and excessive screen time have become hindrances to children’s verbal development.  Here and there college professors are banning laptops in their classrooms.  “Students aren’t taking notes, they’re streaming hockey games,” says Stuart Green, professor at Rutgers Law School.

            But wouldn’t you know it!  If this slight retreat from technology produces withdrawal symptoms, just strap the Muse Headband on your head, let it measure your brain-wave activity, and it will provide you with the “calm state” you need.  Is it ocean roar you need?  Chirping birds?  Falling rain?  Then escape your technology by plugging in to “meditative technology.”  (Is this crazy? Is it meditation?)

            In spite of Sax’s findings, I’m afraid human presence, the mother’s milk of all human communication, is eroding.  We are turning from depth to lateral “connection,” from communion to pseudo-communication, from human touch to the tapping of keys.

            I for one want to yell, “Stop it! Talk to somebody!  Do not go gentle into the murkiness of pseudo-communication! Resist it!  Never let a screen or a headphone become your master!”

Roger Hines

2/8/17 

Beware the Talkers

                                                    Beware the Talkers

                    Published in Marietta Daily Journal Feb. 5, 2017

            Talkers are all around us; professional talkers, I mean. It’s wise to consider just how much influence and power they have. 

            Professional talkers have the power to woo and impress the uninformed and unthinking. Spiffy looking and seemingly educated, they can lead low information voters into whatever opinion or perspective they wish.

            And just who are they?  They are America’s television “news” media, the chattering class of “reporters” and commentators who are blending news and opinion so thoroughly that reliable, non-print news is almost non-existent.

For instance, can anyone who watches network or cable television news deny that the majority of the news anchors and commentators are all out to get President Trump’s head?  Were they equally engaged in having President Obama’s head?

            Chuck Todd of NBC, George Stephanopoulos of ABC (a former Bill Clinton operative), Chris Cuomo of CNN (son of former New York Democratic governor Mario Cuomo), and Chris Matthews of MSNBC (former staff member of Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neil) are but a scant few of the many whose bile is poured out daily on the person – not just the policies – of President Trump.

  Their loathing for the President is writ large on their faces.  They view him as an unsavory interloper who is threatening their kingdom and who needs to be told how to do his job.

            However, for the first time in my life we have a president who ain’t gonna take it.  Donald Trump got into the game of politics knowing from prior business experience that he had better beware of the talkers.  His tact (and his nature) has been to give as good as he gets.  Trump has “shuffled America’s ideological deck,” as the Wall Street Journal recently put it, thereby confusing the chattering class.  How do you figure out a guy whose vice-president is a traditional, ideological conservative and whose Secretary of State has shown he knows how to take advantage, legally, of big government for the good of his business?

            President Trump is jerking the media around and they hardly realize it.  They characterize him as moving from one crisis to another while he’s actually distracting them by moving from one action to another, actions which he promised during his race that he would take.  Claiming that Mr. Trump’s presidency is in chaos, it is they who are in chaos.

            The most ironic thing about the situation is that America’s left, for whom the media are heralds, helped create Donald Trump.  How could the left and their heralds not be aware of the populist movements around the world?  How could populism go mainstream without their seeing it?   How could the American media be so out of tune to Europe’s growing opposition to immigration and globalism?

            Populism’s motto is “a pox on both your houses,” and both houses (national parties) are fast catching on.  The media, however, is slow.  Fast talking, but slow to see and understand the rising tide of the working class so ignored by Hillary Clinton.    

The chattering class is still in shock.  They didn’t even know Joe Lunchbox was alive and kicking, much less voting.  It slipped them that “borders” and “America First” are not considered ugly words by the working class, that the upper Midwest was up for grabs, and that the West’s Judeo-Christian ethic is not a relic of the Dark Ages after all.

            Because of the chattering class’ anger, President Trump will have to be and will be on his toes.  He is the target of people who are losing their power.  They will resort to smear. They are being dominated at every turn, however, by a President who is always on offense.  The media has never before had to play defense.

            In a much neglected 1972 case (Branzburg vs. Hayes), the Supreme Court rejected the argument of special privilege for the media.  The brilliant Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, argued that newsmen do not have privileges that other citizens do not enjoy. Enter bloggers, independent (meaning unknown) news organizations, and of course tweeters of which the President is one.  Now we see why media elites are mad.  At press conferences, the President’s press secretary seats little guys and gals along with the mainstream big shots.

            The President is effectively driving a wedge between the talkers and their viewers. Portrayed as the bringer of darkness, he is actually shedding light on who and what the talkers really are: media stars bedazzled by their own self-importance.

Roger Hines

2/1/17

Was Booker T. Washington Right?

                               Was Booker T. Washington Right?

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal January 29, 2017

Why did it not bother old Dad very much when his two sons left college, without degrees, for other pursuits?  After all, Dad was a career teacher, a lover of the liberal arts, one who believes knowledge can expand one’s horizons and promote understanding of our swirling world.  Why did I not resist my two sons’ re-set?

              Oh, I remember urging them to consider seriously what they were doing.  I’m sure I said something about how a college degree can stack the odds in one’s favor.  I hope I didn’t argue that a college degree “looks good on a resume,” such a reason for learning being superficial as well as crass.

            Jeff’s major was art, and he was less than a year from getting his degree.  However, among other influences, his bull riding and love for rodeo pulled him away.  That’s right, a bull-riding art major.  A well-rounded boy, that son of mine.  His paintings and drawings adorn our house, but I take equal pride in a photograph of him riding high on a rip-snorting bull.

            Pride?  Yes, because while atop those bulls, Jeff was following his heart.  How often had I told teens and college students to do just that?  Could I now urge my own son not to?

            Reagan left college after two full years.  His comments about his classes and professors were positive, but other things beckoned.  For one, the lure of work that took him around the country and “out to sea,” even if no further than the Bahamas.

            Interestingly enough, Jeff and Reagan’s decisions came at the very time I was becoming troubled by the emphasis being placed on college degrees.  Essentially educators were beginning to say that everybody should go to college.  Nothing could be more inadvisable. 

Early this month I looked down and watched from a hotel window as two men built a Tiki hut between the hotel and the beach.  As the construction crane ascended with huge beams resting on its fork; as the two men moved hither and yon on the partial roof with hammers, a waist-strapped tool bag, and an old fashioned carpenter’s square; and as heavy steel was put in place by only two men and a crane operator, I marveled anew at both the beauty and the science of manual labor. 

            Booker T. Washington once remarked that “education has spoiled many a plow hand.”  Of course he was engaging in hyperbole.  His point, made at the end of the 19^th century, was that manual labor is a skill and a necessity deserving of honor, and that those blessed with manual skills should be acknowledged.

            As was true in 1890, so is it today.  We will always need people who can repair engines, grow crops, construct homes and schools, raise cattle, restore electricity, fell trees, and build Tiki huts.  Washington was tipping his hat to such crafts.  All of his adult life he extolled the working man, the artisan, arguing that “the worker” is the one who keeps society’s wheels turning.

 Strangely, Washington received sharp criticism from other black leaders who accused him of betraying his fellow blacks and minimizing college education.  Strange indeed since Washington was the head of the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for the last 34 years of his life and worked tirelessly to provide higher education for blacks.

            Actually, Washington understood what far too many modern educators don’t: that education should include and engage the head and the hand, the head for thinking and the hand for doing.  Our emphasis on doing took a hit decades ago as schools abandoned industrial arts (or “shop”) and began pushing college degrees.

            This emphasis has caught up with us.  According to David Gelernter, computer science professor at Yale University, American colleges have become “fancy-pants institutions,” whose commodity is “not education, but prestige.”  Gelernter, like Washington, believes that many there are who want a degree who don’t want to work.

            It’s time to honor and teach manual skills again.  Produce adults who can read, write, and speak, we must.  Produce citizens who understand Western civilization generally and Americanism specifically, we must.  But Booker T. Washington’s “plow hand” – in its various manifestations – is integral.

            Prestige doesn’t feed the world. Work does. 

            Incidentally, Jeff and Reagan are both in their 30’s now, and are Godly, hardworking, skillful men with families.  They would make any parents proud and any next door neighbor fortunate.

            They also understand what is meant by American exceptionalism, “the West,” and of course, parts of speech.

Roger Hines

1/25/17

Our Second Revolution

                                                 Our Second Revolution

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal January 22, 2017

            Well, well !  It does appear that our recent presidential election was won by bikers, plumbers, lots of doctors and their patients, welders, mechanics, electricians, small farmers, small business owners, country singers, Bill Gaither fans, pro-lifers, evangelicals, and small town America.  It was lost by political consultants, pollsters, career politicians, lobbyists, party loyalists, bureaucrats, donors, television news anchors, commentators, and socialists.  (For clarity, I will reluctantly call these two camps Group I and Group II.)

            How many in Group II, do you suppose, know who Bill Gaither is?  How many had to decide which bill or two they would lay aside and not pay this month?  How many of them go to church?  (That question doesn’t question their faith.  It questions the breadth and depth of their knowledge of the heartland.)

            Of the rise of Group I, Andrew Jackson would be proud. So would Thomas Jefferson and Margaret Thatcher.  The Iron Lady was a grocer’s daughter.  Her family lived above her father’s store.  Donald Trump has nothing that compares to Thatcher’s piercing eyes and always-ready words for the Group II of her Prime Minister days.

            As for Jefferson, his ideal of participatory democracy has been advanced.  Donald Trump caused voter lists to swell.  The political class (Group II) should ask why.

            This second revolution has surprising facets.  One is the political left’s new disdain for Russia.  The political left was always soft on communism. Even after Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul’s demolition of communism, the left was still inclined to love the Soviet Union’s old order, her socialism in other words.  The left reacted in horror when President Reagan remarked, “My policy toward the Soviets is ‘we win; they lose’.”  The left was afraid that Reagan and Thatcher were going to get us all blown up.

            But now the left pretends they just can’t stand Russia.  We know why.  The Russians, they argue, defeated Clinton and elected that mad man.  Since the losers in the election think Mr. Trump is not “legitimate,” they obviously think that those who voted for him are illegitimate as well. And unwashed.  Farmers and mechanics, you know, have to get dirty.  Pro-lifers are religious fanatics, and small town America is unsophisticated.  Still in shock, Group II cannot think straight about the election.

            (I hate to use the word Group like this, but identity politics is what those who lost understand.  I’m trying to help them.)  

            In 1988 a colleague said to me, “Have you heard this new Limbaugh guy on the radio?  You would enjoy him.” My colleague and I shared not one political or social viewpoint, but she and I were great friends.  When I tuned in to Limbaugh, I heard a national voice defending the pro-life position, resisting intrusive government, extolling the little guy, and even challenging the growing argument that everybody should go to college.

            I was amazed that any national voice was saying what Limbaugh was saying.  Why?  Because ABC, CBS, and NBC had effectively kept traditionalists like myself in the desert.  It was a desert we were resigned to.  We didn’t expect the networks to be anything but the eastern seaboard megaphone that they were.  Their painting of both Goldwater and Reagan as crazy cowboys void of east and west coast enlightenment was typical. The Washington-New York nexus plus L.A. was where all wisdom lay.

We desert-dwellers waited for the light.  William F. Buckley was singing our tune in his National Review magazine, but appealed primarily to conservative intellectuals, not to the patriotic little guy.

            With the advent of Limbaugh and cable television, a different viewpoint was beamed out.  The second revolution was waged.  Since its seeds were sown by Goldwater and Reagan, traditionalists thought that the Obama interlude would be followed by a Reagan-type leader, but it was not to be.   Sometimes you just have to be content with a doggone billionaire who is as imperfect as the rest of us.  But if he’s fearless, as was Reagan, …

            Group II is not going to be quiet.  They have been stung and the stinger stuck.  Angrily, they will strike back for the next four years.  But note the big difference between the two groups.  Review the lists above. Group I makes its living by working, Group II by talking.  I believe Group I simply got tired of all the talkers, not to mention their elitism and pro-statist, anti-individualist views. 

The proletariat has spoken and won, the bourgeoisie is apoplectic, and that’s a revolution.

Viva la revolucion !

Roger Hines

1/18/17

            

Between You and I, the English language is, like, Awesome!

     Between You and I, the English language is, like, Awesome!

                       Published in Marietta Daily Journal Jan. 15, 2017

            Awesome, indeed!  Were it not, the English language could not have withstood so much abuse and manipulation since the Angles introduced it to Julius Caesar’s “Brittania” around 450 AD.

            But let’s not be too hard on ourselves, especially on teenagers, when it comes to what we call abuse.  I realize that schools (and parents, please!) must foster Standard English.  No standard at all equals linguistic chaos.  In all things we need standards.  But language isn’t a matter of absolutism.  Language isn’t a moral issue, except maybe for ugly words which we will address momentarily.

            Language, like dress, is social adaptation.  We put it on and take it off.  On, when invited to the White House, or when persnickety Aunt Alma visits, or when sitting for a job interview.  Off, when seated at the supper table with family.  We don’t wear coat and tie to the beach and we don’t wear swim suits to church; well, I have a few guy friends who may as well.

            Anyhow, neither is language like the U.S. Constitution.  The Constitution isn’t dynamic (changing).  It is static (at rest).  The Constitution means what the Constitution writers meant.  But words don’t necessarily mean what their inventors or first users meant.  “Tyrant” first meant ruler, but because of so many evil rulers, tyrant came to mean evil ruler or autocrat.  “Rhetoric” originally meant the art of speaking.  Today it means hot air. 

            This is not to say that word choices don’t matter.  The young man who said to his sweetheart, “Your face would stop a clock,” when he meant to say, “Your face is timeless,” probably didn’t make it all the way to the altar with her.  He would have fared better with the advice of Mark Twain, “Always use the right word and not its second cousin.”

            Using the right word is a national problem these days.  Social and political pressure is causing us to call things everything but what they really are.  Educators, not politicians, are the chiefest of sinners in this area.  For instance, what in the world is a paradigm?  “Para” seems always to be positive: paradise, parallel, paramedic, but paradigm?  To me, the word is just too fluecy.  If they were alive, Mark Twain and Will Rogers would die at the sound of it.

                        Actually, language change is not proceeding at the fast rate that it did as recently as two centuries ago.  Noah Webster slowed change by suggesting we spell and define words a particular way.  Attempting to be descriptive and not prescriptive, Webster sought initially to inform his homeschooled children on how Americans were using the language.  His efforts to simplify the language for a frontier people (in both spelling and definition) caught on and his description (his dictionary) became the standard.  Before Webster came along, there was no widely recognized standard. 

            It is amazing but understandable how celebrities can affect our language.  When President Eisenhower used the word “final-ize,” America’s English teachers hit the ceiling.  Now we will be “… izeing” every verb in the language, they argued.  They were right (“privatize,” “prioritize,” and that wondrous jewel, “dis-incentivize”).  Most linguists point out that it was CBS anchor Walter Cronkite who birthed the pronunciation, Ca-RIB-e-un, that in most quarters has displaced Ca-ra-BE-un.  Celebrities are as influential as we all suspect.

            A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a word is also worth a thousand pictures.  This fact is what makes ugly, salacious words (bathroom humor, etc.) so despicable.  Words being pictures, who wants to see ugly pictures, especially when they stream from the mouth of a friend or family member who thinks there is no other way to verbalize?  (Oops, sorry about that, English teachers.)

            One definite change in English rules is the controlled acceptance of the sentence fragment.  My wife, who happens to have a degree in English, hates a fragment of any stripe.  Makes her ill.  But I say fragments do have their place when placed carefully.

            The most amazing thing about English (actually, Angle-ish) is that a nation the size of the state of Alabama gave it to the world.  No amount of imperialism or colonization could spread English as it has been spread.  Spirit, pride, and workability are what spreads a language.  English, for instance, has a greater richness of synonyms than any other language.

            So, I can accept language change, but spare me of that most atrocious neologism, “dis-remember.”  In fact, join me in my crusade to stamp it out.

Roger Hines

1/7/17