Words from politics

This week from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, words from politics: malfeasance, nepotism, emolument, collusion, impeach. Yep. They all fit.

Lucy’s whom

[Peanuts, July 2, 1971.]

Lucy has asked Charlie Brown, “Which is correct, ‘Who are we kidding?’ or ‘Whom are we kidding?’” Charlie Brown: “Well, I suppose ‘whom’ is correct although most people would say ‘who.’” (He’s right.) And what does he think are the team’s chances of winning today? “Oh, I’d say about fifty-fifty.” Thus this panel.

Google hits for “who are we kidding”: 650,000. For “whom are we kidding”: 27,000. The informal kidding works strongly in favor of who. But not for Lucy.

*

11:36 a.m.: Comments on today’s strip claim expertise: “Lucy is WRONG… Whom is only correct when preceded by a preposition… One of those words with which you should not end a sentence!!” Um, no.

“‘Who (Nominative case, the case of the subject of the sentence) are we kidding?’ is correct.” Um, no. The subject of the sentence is we: we are kidding whom?

[Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.]

Another

Another mass shooting, this time at a Maryland newspaper. And the president who calls journalists “the enemy of the people” has offered his “thoughts and prayers” in a tweet. To paraphrase Stephen Dedalus: current events are a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

College radio

“College radio can still be heard in the cacophony”: The Economist reports on college radio in the age of streaming.

Some years ago, I wrote an obituary for my university’s radio station. The station remains on the air, but in 2004 the programming changed. No more classical music, jazz, indie rock, “world music,” country, folk, bluegrass, blues, or hip-hop. No more (highly coveted) free-form shows on Saturday nights. Everything disappeared, along with the station’s deep record library, replaced by a bland, commercially oriented Hit Mix. (There’s also a rhyming name for the Hit Mix.)

Here are playlists from two of my free-form shows, made of my records and the station’s records, as preserved on cassettes. (Late 1980s?)

Jackie Wilson, “Reet Petite” : Clifton Chenier, “I’m the Zydeco Man” : Taj Mahal, “Texas Woman Blues” : Rickie Lee Jones, “Easy Money” : Canned Heat, “Skat” : Little Richard, “Get Rich Quick” : The Rolling Stones, “Time Is on My Side” : The Isley Brothers, “Shout” : The Gun Club, “Preaching the Blues” : X, “The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss” : Joni Mitchell, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” : Elvis Costello, “My Funny Valentine”

Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, “Elvis Is Everywhere” : Tom Waits, “Hang On St. Christopher” : George Clinton, “R & B Skeletons in the Closet” : James Brown, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (Parts One and Two) : Johnny Burnette, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” : Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel” : Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Africa ’70, “Shuffering and Shmiling” : Talking Heads, “I Zimbra” : Augustus Pablo, “Pablo in Dub” : Ladysmith Black Mambazo, “Hello My Baby” : The Specials, “Monkey Man”

Talk about another lifetime! What was I, an assistant professor wanting to make good, doing on the radio? I did draw some lines: when a caller requested Lou Reed’s “Heroin” — with a dedication, no less — I politely declined.

[Stefan, did you call and request Elvis Costello?]

Reason to hope

Michael Bechloss, historian of the American presidency, has thoughts that give me some reason to hope:

If you look at presidential power in terms of checks and balances, Donald Trump may feel as if he is riding high. If he manages to get his first choice confirmed, he could soon enjoy a strong conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and he dominates his party in Congress in a way we have rarely seen in modern times.

Polls show him with high standing among Republican voters. But history suggests that this may not last forever. Trump is under the growing shadow of the Mueller probe and other investigations. If those inquiries or failure of any of his key policies should undermine his popularity and standing, he may find that Republican senators and members of Congress are no longer so obedient.

As for the Supreme Court majority, history is full of examples in which justices have not turned out to consistently vote as expected. And how often in history has a President been opposed by a majority of the voters with the intensity of the current national opposition to Trump?"

[Axios gives no source for these observations. They appear to be a Twitter thread, but I find no trace of one. I’ve redone the paragraphs to make a less choppy line of thought.]

Separated at birth

 
[Colonel Wilhelm Klink (Werner Klemperer) and Rudy Giuliani.]

I saw the colonel (from Hogan’s Heroes) while flipping channels. And having seen the resemblance, I cannot unsee it. I hope you can’t too.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Some Tuscan rocks

Stefan Hagemann sent along a photograph of some noble Tuscan rocks, with permission to post it here. So here it, and they, are. Thank you, Stefan.

“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

Related reading
All “some rocks” posts

Recently updated

Amphiboly, achoo Now with another version of the cold and fever maxim.

Rabbits

About the previous post: as Brett Terpstra says, in a markedly different context: “Some of us always follow the rabbit.”

Amphiboly, achoo

An example — or so it seems — of amphiboly, “a fallacy produced by ambiguity of syntax or grammatical structure”:

Feed a cold and starve a fever.

Here feed is subjunctive. The sentence is a warning; it means: If you feed a cold, you will have a fever to starve. As commonly interpreted, however, feed is taken to be imperative, and a meaning just the opposite of the one intended is derived.

Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, ed. Marguerite McGlinn (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books 2002).

The editor adds a note: “Surely, this explanation of the ‘feed a cold’ conundrum solves one of life’s minor mysteries.” Or as Mac Dictation would have it, “one of life’s murder mysteries.” But there’s no explanation in this book of why feed should be read as subjunctive.

The notion that one should starve a fever is widely attributed to the lexicographer John Withals, who is said to have written, in 1574, that “Fasting is a great remedie of feuer.” I can find no evidence that he wrote that. The notion that feeding a cold leads to a fever has been attributed to Hippocrates: “If you feed a cold, you will have to starve a fever.” The notion that feeding a fever leads to a cold has also been attributed to Hippocrates: “If you feed a fever, you will have to starve a cold.” Google Books has all the answers. The closest approximation I can find in the works of Hippocrates is this aphorism:

If the same diet be given to a patient with fever as would be suitable for a healthy man, although it would strengthen the healthy it would cause suffering to the sick.

Hippocratic Writings, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd, trans. J. Chadwick and W.N. Mann (London; Penguin, 1978).

But also:

Hippocrates[’s] “On the Method of Diet in Acute Disorders,” gives the foundation of all the correct rules which pertain to dietetics in the treatment of fever connected with a high grade of arterial excitement. And so much did he insist upon their strict observance, that his plan of treatment, by one (Asclepiades) has been spoken of “as merely a contemplation on death.” Although abstinence was a favorite measure with the Father of medicine in commencing the treatment of what, in his day, were called acute fevers, he, nevertheless, says that “a diet which is a little too plentiful is much safer than that which is too sparing and thin.”

John Dawson, “Diet in Typhus Fever,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 34, no. 20 (1846).

What to do? An Scientific American article from 2014 resolves the feed/starve problem nicely: “The answer is simmering in a bowl of chicken soup.” In other words, cold or fever, feed it. Eat something. You need to keep up your strength, right? How else are you gonna learn about the trivium?

*

3:05 p.m.: Chris recalled another version of this maxim in a comment: “Feed a cold, starve of fever.” Starve here means “to die, or cause to die.” This version is often rendered as “Fede a cold and starb ob feber,” with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales named as the source. Here’s a linguist making the claim for Chaucer. But there’s never a tale or line number to go with these attributions. And as you’ll discover if you search the text of the Tales, “Fede a cold and starb ob feber” won’t be found therein.

Reasons to discount an origin in anyone’s Middle English: The obsolete fede never meant “feed”; it meant “an enemy; spec. the Devil.” And though the Swedish feber appears in the OED’s etymology for fever, the dictionary has no record of feber or starb as an English word. And here’s the most interesting part: the OED first records the preposition ob in 1839, as “U.S. regional (chiefly in representations of African-American usage).”

With all that in mind, look at the faux Middle English again: “Fede a cold and starb ob feber.” Starb, ob, feber: the language begins to look more and more like a relic from the world of the minstrel show. But whatever the source, it’s still better to eat something.

[If it doesn’t go without saying: I’m unable to find a source for the Hippocrates passage that Dawson quotes.]