Tag: Blithe Spirit

Touting tout le monde

Double entendre postcard. "All right boss...
Double entendre postcard, late '30s to mid-'50s

Is it time to retire “tout”? So-and-So touts this, touts that, we read and hear it all the time. But does it always mean “recommend,” as the guy hanging around the race track recommends a pony, and with the seamy side of life, if not sleaze, that this usage implies?

Maybe ironically. We do live in an Age of Irony, where double entendre has become the lingua franca and you have to be on your toes whenever anyone says anything. (Not anyone. Transparent and forthright people we still have among us.)

But “tout”? TheFreeDictionary.com has this:

v. intr. 1. To solicit customers, votes, or patronage, especially in a brazen way. 2. To obtain and deal in information on racehorses.

Brazen. That’s good. And racehorses, yes. In the last half of the 14th century, before my time, there was the middle English tuten, to look out, peer, probably akin to the Old English tōtian to peep out, says Dictionary.com, which has the current meaning, “to provide information on (a horse) running in a particular race, especially for a fee,” and close to that, “to spy on (a horse in training) in order to gain information for the purpose of betting.” Also simply “to watch or spy on.”

So it goes with thousands of words. Poke around in their genealogies and you find history. Long time ago as a teacher, I had my high school frosh buy 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary or another such vocabulary-helper in paperback and instituted a daily quiz on its contents. I have since thought that whole subjects could be taught entirely with vocabulary lessons, that is, definitions. Define the world and you own it, at least conceptually, which is all you can expect from classroom learning.

As for our daily, over-exposed meaning of “tout,” Dictionary.com has “to describe or advertise boastfully; publicize or promote; praise extravagantly: [as in] ‘a highly touted nightclub.'”

Is it used a lot?

Search Chi Trib online on this day, and you get 262 occurrences (since 1999), from an eye cream in yesterday’s paper that “slips on smoothly and absorbs immediately. . .” and “touts the ingredient VitaNiacin” — wrong: the advertiser does the touting, not the eye cream, which can’t tout anything, no matter how smoothly it slips on and how immediately it is absorbed. Nor does it do the absorbing, unless you mean your epidermis is pulled up by this skin-eating salve. As for the advertiser, he touts on the basis of inside information gotten by spying on the manufacturing process . . .

to

a travel book chapter on Los Angeles, in the paper three days ago, that “touts not its fly-by-night, forever-young culture but rather its historic buildings and the revitalization of its old and formerly abandoned neighborhoods” — a now-standard editorial use that denudes the word of nuance and history and color. . . .

and on and on 260 instances later, to

an April, 1999 feature about finding a real estate agent: “While some agents tout their extra training, others say it’s not that important.”

Newspaper and copy writers work under the gun and search for the word that comes quickest to mind. They find “tout,” ready and willing to serve. But he’s tired. Give him a rest. Retire him (or her, if you insist: anything but the unutterably squeamish “them.”) Please.

DeLay’s laundering

Not being legally educated — not illegally either, I mean in the law — and reading over the years about money-laundering, I thought it meant sending ill-got gains to somebody overseas who used it to buy a house which you could then sell, pocketing the proceeds. Or something like it.

But ex-Rep. Tom DeLay did or initiated a series of legal deposits — from his PAC to the Republican National Committee to Texas state legislature candidates who then won office becoming part of a new Republican majority that led redistricting of Texas when DeLay as Congressional majority leader called for redistricting, which was followed in due time by election of a new batch of Republican congressmen from Texas.

And he may do 99 years.

“It will put more people on notice that something which by one perspective might be considered as legal on the other can be characterized as money laundering,” said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School.

Which strikes me as a very cautious statement. Look out, people, you may think it’s legal, but someone might not. And there you will be.

Get insulted, black people

Mary (Black Maria) Mitchell about a black commentator:

[Garrard] McClendon was stunned that after working so long without a contract, CLTV, which is owned by the Chicago Tribune Company, pulled the plug rather than pay him what he felt he was worth.

He may have been stunned, but so what? How many listeners or viewers did he have? Does Mitchell know? As for feeling underpaid, in this he may join millions of the same persuasion, each about himself or herself.

McClendon, who taught school for 17 years and holds a Ph.D. in education, told me that he basically thinks he was being paid under scale.

What’s the relevance of the Ph.D. etc.? Performance, not credentials, count.

There are few black male commentators working in the Chicago market. Cliff Kelley on WVON is the only one that immediately comes to mind. Since Chicago has such a large African-American population, the absence of the black male perspective is insulting.

To whom? People didn’t want to listen to this guy, and blacks are insulted? Not unless they like getting worked up

Lemmings hop on Palin

Now and then, rather often in fact, the left-wing bias becomes crystal clear. What did the lemmings do lately? Try this, with comment by Power Blog:

Sarah Palin referred to “our North Korean allies” on the Glenn Beck show, a slip of the tongue that was deemed newsworthy by CBS News, the Washington Post, and many other outlets. Did those same sources publish gleeful headlines when Barack Obama talked about campaigning in all 57 states? Of course not; Obama is so, you know, brilliant. Everyone who talks in public will occasionally mis-speak; whether slips of the tongue are newsworthy is an editorial decision that is entirely motivated by political loyalty.

Remember it, remember it when you pick up a newspaper or watch TV news or even TV features, which also toe the line.

Later: Even Fox, where Shep Smith follows the crowd.

Notre Dame’s selective prosecution

President Barack Obama bows his head during th...
Bowing the head at Notre Dame

Dennis Byrne hits on the prosecution of 88 protesters, in a column about Notre Dame’s abdication of responsibility for the attempted rape of a St. Mary’s woman:

While leaving to its own police force to investigate the sexual assault charges it quickly handed over to the local prosecutor the case of 88 people who were arrested by school police for peacefully demonstrating on campus the selection of anti-life president Barack Obama as an honored commencement speaker. The schools determination to punish the demonstrators can only be described as spiteful and obsessive.

The Notre Dame 88, which included a nun and an elderly priest, face penalties of up to a year in prison and fines of $5,000. The Chicago-based Thomas More Society, a pro-life law firm, is defending the protestors without charge. The university technically can claim that calling off the prosecution is out of their hands, but at the same time, it has not used its so-called prestige to seek Christian charity for the protestors.

“What in hell is going on?” Byrne asks. So do I.

Leave the assault to us, they say, following up on it not a whit. But those protesters must pay. Why not the other way around?

What about those Illinois ballots?

IMG_7419
Military ballots, anyone?

Has this turned up in Chi newspapers etc.?

Republican gains in state legislatures were . . . impressive. They will control the redistricting process in four of the five states in this region. The exception is Illinois, where Rod Blagojevich’s successor as governor, Pat Quinn, held on by a few thousand votes — helped perhaps by the refusal of some Democratic county clerks not to send out military ballots in the time required by federal law. They did manage to send unrequested ballots to inmates of the Cook County Jail, though.

It’s from Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner.

Look here and see who’s got this. No Chi or Chi-area coverage, except for Sun-Times of Oct. 13 saying most ballots had been sent. Fox has it, locally and nationally. So does Breitbart’s Big Government blog and several downstate outlets. But here it’s a snoozer.

On paper, a constitution

TEHRAN. With the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ah...
Mullahs like him

Big difference between them and us:

The move to remove the president from office marks the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic that parliament has discussed impeachment of a president. Though the legislature is backed by the Iranian constitution, lawmakers can’t drive Mr. Ahmadinejad from office without the supreme leader’s agreement.

We got a constitution that works. Not automatically, of course. Constant struggle required.

This is from Wall St. Journal, by the way, has yet to rate coverage by any Chicago newspaper etc.

Hanging crepe in RC leftville

The Daily Politics
Do bishops do it?

It kills RC libs that one of their own, of the Joe Bernardin camp, got voted out of his heir apparency the other day by U.S. bishops, and no one says it better than NC Reporter’s Thomas C.  Fox, who lays it on thickly.

I find myself thinking about Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz., and how he must feel at this time. Whats going on inside him, really going on despite the good face he has put on to the world in the wake of the surprise, historic, and unprecedented rejection by his fellow U.S. bishops.

They “broke with four decades of precedent and essentially threw [him] out,” leaving Fox in a funk:

I cannot help but feel that the bishops hurt a good man along the way, and in the process revealed some things about themselves – at least the majority in their ranks did – that is less than admirable.

The rats!  They “walked over a fellow bishop, by most accounts a decent man. . . . their vote . . . lacked a sense of civility and even perhaps charity.”

“Some on the right” are to blame, but so is the new man, Timothy Dolan of NYC, whom Fox skewers with deft thrusts:

Ive been reading that Dolan has a good wit and keen ability and will probably make a good president. But he arrives with a tarnished garment. I wish he [had] told his fellow bishops . . . that he was not available, that he was willing to wait his turn, that he could learn in the next three years, just like all his predecessors. He would have been a fine vice-president.

Well Fox did not see his wish fulfilled. C’est la vie. In any case, if Dolan had done as Fox wishes he did, he

would have taught us all a lesson in thoughtfulness and civility. It was a teachable moment. Instead we learned our bishops act [like] most other ends-oriented men in other political organizations.

If Fox learned that much, the teachable moment was not entirely lost.

Meanwhile, Kicanas demonstrated a “strong upper lip” in his concession statement:

[Dolan] has been a long time friend . . . [possesses] great wit, jovial spirit, keen ability to relate to people in a deeply personal way . . . exceptional leadership qualities. . . .

Good. I look forward to his leadership. But it doesn’t mean there is joy in Catholic leftism, which has lost a friend in a high place, it thinks. Sob.