More bad words

The Washington Post reports that the Centers for Disease Control is not alone in cuts to vocabulary:

A second HHS [Health and Human Services] agency received similar guidance to avoid using “entitlement,” “diversity” and “vulnerable,” according to an official who took part in a briefing earlier in the week. Participants at that agency were also told to use “Obamacare” instead of ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, and to use “exchanges” instead of “marketplaces” to describe the venues where people can purchase health insurance.

At the State Department, meanwhile, certain documents now refer to sex education as “sexual risk avoidance.”

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The seven words you can’t write at the CDC

The seven words you can’t write at the CDC

From The Washington Post:

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

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From the Saturday Stumper

A nice clue from the Newsday Saturday Stumper, 20-Down, nine letters: “What a pump might hold.” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by Lester Ruff. Finishing a Saturday Stumper is always cause for minor self-congratulation.

A Bob and Ray motto

Bob and Ray did much to foster my youthful appreciation of incongruity and silliness. When I see an ad for prune shakes or read about tie slimming, I think of Bob and Ray.

A photograph of Bob and Ray’s stationery in David Pollock’s Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons (Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2013) shows a company motto:

PUISSANCE WITHOUT HAUTEUR

Words to live by!

Here is a photograph of a Bob and Ray letter to a young Keith Olbermann. Motto top left.

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[Of course, using the word puissance might be the very essence of hauteur.]

Cartoon of the day

[“Net Neutrality,” by Ellis Rosen. The New Yorker, December 15, 2017.]

Manually operated elevators

“Collectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock”: The New York Times visits some of the city’s manually operated elevators.

See also The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. And in Chicago, the Fine Arts Building.

The boy with the orange scarf

[Henry, December 15, 2017.]

This comic strip does not predate the invention of the winter coat: plenty of Henry people wear coats, just not the protagonist. I like the scarf and the scarf rack, the wintry weather in the window, and the concessionaire’s uniform. Henry would have been better off sans scarf: an irked moviegoer will soon be using it to tie Henry’s mouth shut and silence his popcorn.

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Sunny Murray (1936–2017)

The drummer Sunny Murray has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary. I know Murray’s music mainly from my small cache of ESP-Disk LPs. This one, for instance. And this one.

Recently updated

Words of the Year Oxford Dictionaries announces its word.

PDB

A long feature in The Washington Post: “Hacking Democracy.” An excerpt, with my emphasis:

U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump’s main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.

Yet another indication that our president is virtually a non-reader.

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Donald Trump’s spelling