What’s wrong with PowerPoint?

• Focus on screen instead of presenter
• Dark room induces sleep
• Bullet points instead of prose
• Pretty much everything

What to do about it:

• Find a presenter capable of engaging an audience
• Cut the cord
• Outlaw it

Consider this:

Let’s not forget the power of the complete sentence and the humble predicate verb – the “motor” of a good sentence. However much firepower “bullet points” seem to contain, they are often just lists of phrases. They’re inert, like munitions stored in an arsenal. They haven’t been bolted together into actual complete sentences.

This argument is effective because:

• It is vivid
• It uses military imagery
• It is made using complete sentences

H/T: Paco

University of Iowa Professor Ellen Lewin is offended that a student referred to her as “Ellen” rather than “Professor Lewin.”

“She referred to me as Ellen, not Professor Lewin, which is the correct way for a student to address a faculty member, or indeed, for anyone to refer to an adult with whom they are not acquainted,” she wrote.

The deterioration of manners is much to be lamented.  I would have never called a professor by his first name.  As a child, I was taught not to call any adult by his first name.  So what changed?

Maybe this:

“F— you, Republicans” was professor Ellen Lewin’s response Monday to the recruiting pitch from UI College Republicans. She sent the email from her school account, drawing outrage from conservative students and one Republican lawmaker.

And it was at this point of the conversation that Natalie Ginty, 21-year-old student chairwoman of the College Republicans, had the temerity to use Ellen’s first name.  That works for me.  Ginty qualifies as an adult, if only barely, and Ellen qualifies as a spoiled child.

UI President Sally Mason responded to the incident Wednesday by condemning intolerant political speech.

I didn’t know “F— you” was political speech.  I’m hoping President Mason is so confused that she thinks “F— you, Republicans” is political speech.  Because otherwise it looks as though Sally is firmly backing Ellen’s childish vulgarity.

The folks at SPOGG, who sponsor National Grammar Day, have their priorities straight up: their site includes the “Grammartini.”

Being the careful people that they are, they have the recipe almost right. On the positive side, they use actual gin (no cheap substitutes). Vodka must be among the “Things that Make Us [Sic].”

I would quibble with their slightly high quotient of vermouth and suggestion than you shake rather than stir.

But grammarians, I’m sure, can handle a little quibbling.

Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons

National Grammar Day is something you should take note of. The affect of National Grammar Day is to hopefully insure than you make less mistakes in writing, e.g. that everyone will write good enough to be understood by people like you and I. And read their blog which can be found here to see the “Top 10 Grammar Tips.”

I covered National Grammar Day a little late last year.  Language Log had made a suggestion:

Paul Kiparsky has noted on several occasions that while in some European countries the prescribing of language forms for certain public purposes is the job of official bodies, which normally include language scholars (as well as literary figures), this sort of regulation has been PRIVATIZED in English-speaking countries: it’s managed by commercial publishers, newspaper and magazine editors, and a whole industry of free-lance advisers, only a few of whom know much about either the nature of language or the structure and history of English. Such an arrangement resonates with American free-enterprise ideals and also with the widespread American disdain for “experts” and “intellectuals”. . . .

This year, while the public sector is swallowing the private sector whole, a proposal to create a government-controlled language authority could easily be inserted into some omnibus bill.  It’s still a bad idea.  But it might have one redeeming feature if it required the U.S. Department of Grammar to read proposed legislation before passage, since our representatives don’t have the time.

Image by Chubby Bat – Creative Commons

Frederic Koeppel writes literately about eating and drinking. He also debunks the idea that anything in a martini glass is a martini, including – and maybe especially – vodka. He even debunks the idea that a martini glass is a martini glass:

Notice that I wrote “cocktail glass.” That shallow, inverted cone-shaped vessel resting on a medium-length stem on a fairly wide base — don’t want the thing to tump over — is now almost universally and mistaken referred to as a “martini glass;” even bartenders commit this error, certainly because of the wide popularity of “martinis” and “martini bars” in the 1990s and early 2000s. By what linguists call “back-formation” — “the creation by analogy of a new word in the false assumption that the existing word is a derivation of the new word, i.e., ‘to burgle’ from ‘burglar’” — the glass once known as cocktail, because cocktails were served in it, became tagged by its ubiquitous and multiplying contents. And in a further eroding of authenticity and integrity, all the drinks served in a “martini” glass are now, at least in some quarters, called “martinis.”

Woe is me.

Kids, language counts. In the beginning was the word, and if we don’t take care of words they will get all rubbed together, and jumbled together, and what we use them to name — the most important function of language — will be lost in the mists of far-off last year, poured out like dregs by marketers and flacks whose sole employ is altering what we name and what we know for commercial purposes. (Governments do this too; have you noticed?)

Yes, I did notice, and it’s enough to drive you to drink. You can’t do much about the misuse of language by politicians and governments, but you can vote with your feet when you encounter a bartender who doesn’t understand “martini.”

So when someone tells you that a martini is anything served in a martini glass, he really means that a martini is anything served in a cocktail glass. Which raises the question “what is a cocktail”? And if you persist in this line of illogic, people may begin to suggest that you run for office.

Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons

Camille Paglia enjoys a special status among cultural observers.  Although she is unapologetically liberal, she skewers her comrades on the left for being irrational and infantile.  She claims to enjoy right-wing talk radio, and many conservatives look forward to her columns.

In today’s column, she takes down the Clintons:

If she gets as little traction in world affairs as Condoleezza Rice has, Hillary will be flushed down the rabbit hole with her feckless husband and effectively neutralized as a future presidential contender. If that’s Obama’s clever plan, is it worth the gamble? The secretary of state should be a more reserved, unflappable character — not a drama queen who, even in her acceptance speech, morphed into three different personalities in the space of five minutes.

. . . gives Obama high marks for his attention to the infrastructure, with this caveat:

But then I gulped when Obama also pledged educational reform by putting state-of-the-art computers in every classroom. Groan. Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge.

. . . laments the supercilious elitism of Dick Cavett and his disdain for Sarah Palin:

How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

* * *

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don’t live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom!

. . . and distances herself from the thuggery of the gay movement:

Another hot-button issue: After California voters adopted Proposition 8, which amended the state Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, gay activists have launched a program of open confrontation with and intimidation of religious believers, mainly Mormons. I thought we’d gotten over the adolescent tantrum phase of gay activism, typified by ACT UP’s 1989 invasion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the communion host was thrown on the floor. Want to cause a nice long backlash to gay rights? That’s the way to do it.

So if Paglia listens to talk radio, and conservatives find value in reading Paglia, maybe there is more potential for dialogue than we think, but that potential will not be realized while the snarky left brands everything it disagrees with (talk radio being a prime example) as hate speech.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

Ah, the eloquence of The New York Times. Timothy Egan, of said Times, wrote said words – uh, the quote above, that is – referring to Joe the Plumber. Timothy has a publisher, and he’s concerned that Joe may also find one.

No, the world is not fair. Timothy is finding that out. And Timothy assures us that there are also some real writers who think the world is unfair.

This little diatribe against the First Amendment proves that The New York Times is developing a flair for comedy as it enters its death throes. Humor and death seem to be natural companions. For example, Paul Simms packed a lot of humor into this account of his near-death experience, and Allen Klein wrote a book on humor and death, noting that humor gives one the pleasure of taming Death and fraternizing with him.

If humor is a suitable response to the realization that death is imminent for humans, why shouldn’t that apply to newspapers as well? Egan and the Times are certainly fraternizing with a position that, if taken seriously, would mean death to writers – even real ones.

Tim Blair dissects the inanity of Egan in greater detail here.

Whew!  I passed.  I tried the gender analyzer site, and sure enough, it says this blog is written by a male type person.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  Did it just see “ammo” in the title and jump to a conclusion?  Did it factor in the “arts”?  Did it flip a coin?  Or did it analyze syntax and logic and determine that the left side of the author’s brain was functioning without contamination from the right?

Did it fail to recognize that more than one female has contributed her writing to the blog?

Of course, gender didn’t use to be so ambiguous that we needed a computer to identify it.  It was a fact, not an opinion.

H/T Are We Lumberjacks? (Those guys probably didn’t challenge the computer much.)

Two recent articles concerning the presidency caught my attention. One concerns presidential speeches, the other the electoral college, but both deal primarily with the problem of demagoguery.

John McWorther reviews Elvin Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency in First Things:

[The book] is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of “the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.”

* * *

Using logos (argument), ethos (credibility), and pathos (emotion)—the distinctions Aristotle made in rhetoric—Lim observes that logos has been all but eclipsed in modern presidential speeches.

* * *

Lim considers anti-intellectualism in presidential speeches an especially dire problem, constituting a threat to democracy because it infects public discourse with demagoguery.

James W. Ceaser writes about the electoral college in The Claremont Review of Books:

The principal objective was to choose a sound statesman, someone “pre-eminent for ability and virtue,” in the words of The Federalist, by a method that satisfied republican standards of legitimacy. (The system, with electors to be chosen by the state legislatures or the public, was a remarkably democratic arrangement for its day.) How to identify a person of “virtue” was the crux of the issue. The best way would be a judgment based largely on the individual’s record of public service, as determined finally by the electors. The founders’ intent was above all to prevent having the decision turn on a demonstration of skill in the “popular arts” as displayed in a campaign. They were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction; this would open the door to demagoguery, which, as the ancients had shown, was the greatest threat to the maintenance of moderate popular government. By demagoguery, the founders did not mean merely the fomenting of class envy, or harsh, angry appeals to regressive forces; they also had in mind the softer, more artful designs of a Pericles or a Caesar, who appealed to hopeful expectations, “those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism, which, like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle” (Federalist 68). The greatest demagogues would be those who escaped the label altogether.

Skill in the popular arts is an essential attribute for presidential candidates today. The current primary system for choosing nominees carries all the problems that the electoral college was designed to avoid, and the resulting degradation of campaign rhetoric and the absence of serious discussion of critical issues are entirely predictable.

Happy Victory in Iraq Day. In case you missed it.

Ten Politically Incorrect Propositions. It’s difficult to choose just one for an excerpt because Victor Davis Hanson puts a lot of meat on the table with this article. Number 6, however, is particularly interesting:

Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience. In the old days, I remember only that I first heard a variant of this accent with the old Paul Lynde character actor in one of the Flubber movies; now young men sound closer to his camp than to a Jack Palance or Alan Ladd.

Candy Asses. That’s Ann Althouse’s description of the anti Sarah Palin crowd hyperventilating over a dead turkey, and I can’t think of a better one. I guess the 52 percent will be eating bean sprouts for Thanksgiving.

Lesson for Candy Asses: “When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” – Daniel Webster