Cuckoo Policies

Stanford University has published, to much-deserved derision, a kind of index of prohibited words, that is to say words that could possibly cause anyone, even animals, distress. Of course, if you treat people as eggshells, eggshells is what they will become, especially if they derive some kind of benefit, financial or other, from their fragility. The ...


Vespula vulgaris

An Ill-Defined Petition

Thirty thousand people—I was tempted to write harridans and harpies, but there must have been some emasculated men among them—have petitioned the Oxford University Press to remove words such as bitch, in the meaning of unpleasant ...

Choose Your Words Wisely

Is attention to the correct use of words mere pedantry or, as Confucius thought, the necessary foundation of a healthy state? I am with Confucius on this, which is why I was disturbed by President Trump’s words after the recent mass ...

To Err Is Human, to Detect Divine

The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th century in my possession. In them, the sole mark made by ...

Taking Out the Rubbish

Foolishness springs eternal. And this is just as well for us journalists, because it gives us such easy targets when we have deadlines to meet and no time to think, which is most of the time. In fact, the targets are becoming easier and ...

At a Loss for Words

It's official"€”words no longer have meaning. As a proud member of society's educated, progressive elite, I"€™m thrilled. Since Bill Clinton famously disputed the definition of the singular third-person present form of the verb ...

Your Dad Is Not Hitler

A few weeks ago I noticed the following slogan painted on the walls of a supermarket in France: Hitler, Sarko"€”même combat [Hitler, Sarkosy"€”same battle] One didn"€™t know whether to laugh, cry, be angry or even pitying: ...

The Money of Fools

People often claim to have cultivated their inner child as if this were a good thing to have done. They are proud of it, in fact. The "€œinner child"€ that each of us supposedly has somewhere deep within his being retains his ...

Who Gets to Name the Snow?

Here's the fastest, surest way to identify the subspecies hackus punditus"€”watch for them to display one particular behavior, especially when deadlines loom during summer months: They invariably begin one of their columns with the ...

In Defense of Neanderthals

The most stubbornly hypocritical glitch in the egalitarian mindset is that eugenics is roundly and vigorously dismissed as a dangerous and discredited pseudoscience...unless it can be wielded to portray ideological enemies as ...


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