“More than his usual state of instability”

From a letter to The New York Times by Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine:

We are currently witnessing more than his usual state of instability — in fact, a pattern of decompensation: increasing loss of touch with reality, marked signs of volatility and unpredictable behavior, and an attraction to violence as a means of coping. These characteristics place our country and the world at extreme risk of danger.

Ordinarily, we carry out a routine process for treating people who are dangerous: containment, removal from access to weapons and an urgent evaluation. We have been unable to do so because of Mr. Trump’s status as president. But the power of the presidency and the type of arsenal he has access to should raise greater alarm, not less.

We urge the public and the lawmakers of this country to push for an urgent evaluation of the president, for which we are in the process of developing a separate but independent expert panel, capable of meeting and carrying out all medical standards of care.

Lee is the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2017). She points out in her letter that she and the contributors to that book represent mental health professionals who “now number in the thousands.”

Madness, or method?

In The Washington Post, Ruth Ben-Ghiat responds to yesterday’s Daily News editorial:

Many have sought to diagnose President Trump’s mental health from afar, depicting him as delusional, narcissistic or a madman. Such an approach is understandable, since many of us struggle to make sense of his destructive behavior and attachment to falsehoods that are often of his own making. Yet it’s the history of authoritarianism that provides the best framework for understanding Trump’s words and actions. From Benito Mussolini onward, strongmen have ruled through a combination of seduction and threat, building up protective cults of personality and relentlessly pushing their own versions of reality until they’re in a position to make them state policy.

Far from being lunatics, leaders such as Trump are opportunists and skilled manipulators who may change their ideas on specific policy issues without ever deviating from their main goal: the accumulation and steady expansion of their own power.

Word of the day: sledgehammer

Walking through the hardware store, I wondered: why sledgehammer? Does it have something to do with sledding? A mighty hammer used to free a sled stuck in ice?

The Oxford English Dictionary traces sledge to the Old English slecg, equivalent to the Middle Dutch and Dutch slegge and related to similar words in Old Norse and other languages. The surprise comes at the end of the etymology: “The stem *slagj- is derived from that of slay.” So a sledgehammer is a killing hammer? No, not really: the obsolete slay in question means “to smite, strike, or beat,” and sledgehammer or sledge, as the dictionary points out, refers “especially” to a blacksmith’s hammer.

Sledge, as I vaguely remembered, does also mean “sled” or “sleigh.” But that sledge derives from the Middle Dutch sleedse — no smiting there, just a sled. And sleigh comes from the Dutch slee, a contracted form of slede. No smiting there either.

The word hammer comes from the Old English hamor, hamer, hǫmer, equivalent to similar words in a number of Germanic languages. Says the OED, “The Norse sense ‘crag’, and possible relationship to Slavic kamy, Russian kameni stone, have suggested that the word originally meant ‘stone weapon.’” Primitive, man, primitive.

[Whatever we were looking for in the hardware store, it wasn’t a sledgehammer. I think it was microfiber cloths.]

“Only appearance”

A complete story:


Franz Kafka, “The Trees,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

“Mad”

A Daily News editorial is saying it plainly:

The President of the United States is profoundly unstable. He is mad. He is, by any honest layman’s definition, mentally unwell and viciously lashing out.

[What prompted this editorial: what the paper calls Donald Trump’s “Wednesday Twitter spasm.”]

“Bon Appétit!”

Here’s a third piece of Lassie fan-fiction. The first two: “The ’Clipse” and “The Poet.” You can click on each page for a slightly larger view. Enjoy.














Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

And four more pieces of Lassie fan-fiction
“The ’Clipse”: “The Poet” (with Robert Frost) : “On the Road” (with Tod and Buz from Route 66) : “The Case of the Purloined Prairie” (with Perry Mason and friends)

[“You are alone in the kitchen”: inspired by the failed flip of a potato pancake. Julia Child did indeed prefer white pepper to black.]

Washington Phillips, Grammy nominee

Dust-to-Digital’s Washington Phillips And His Manzarene Dreams has been nominated in two Grammy categories: Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes. I wrote a review of this extraordinary album last year.

The NSA’s Grammar Geek

Now available at governmentattic.org: advice columns on grammar and usage from the National Security Agency’s Grammar Geek(s). “Gabby” took over as the Geek after “Gigi” retired. Both names are pseudonyms.

A choice bit from Gigi:

Oh! If I had a dollar for every time I have heard a news anchor solemnly state that such and such “went down” today, I would have enough money for several new grammar books — all of which I would throw at the TV.

How marvelous that the NSA can spy on millions of Americans and still keep its sense of humor.

How to improve writing (no. 73)

Today we have rearranging of parts. From a New York Times opinion piece, a sentence that needs improvement:

Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy.

I see two problems:

“Last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy” makes for a momentary muddle. Place “long before Trump announced his candidacy” at the beginning of the sentence, and you can see the second problem more clearly:

Long before Trump announced his candidacy, Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month.

See the problem? It’s a matter of tense: Long before x did y, Harding has been reporting. I suspect that the original arrangement of the sentence’s parts allowed the writer to miss this now-obvious error. Once more:

Long before Trump announced his candidacy, Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, was reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month.

I’d say bring back the copy desk, but I don’t think copy editors edit opinion pieces. (Anyone know?)

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 73 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. I’ve added italics to the name of The Guardian in the Times sentence.]

Dog science

The narrator (a dog) has explained that there are two kinds of food: food from the ground and food from above. Science has determined that there are two ways of procuring food: “the scratching and watering of the ground” and “the auxiliary perfecting processes of incantation, dance, and song.” But if the perfecting processes work to give the ground sufficient potency to attract food from the air, why do dogs look upward and not at the ground when they sing, dance, and chant?


Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

[Watering the ground? It seems to mean just what you think it means.]