I certainly did not mean to suggest with my recent etymological reflections on 'seminal' that I am at all interested in restarting the political-correctness wars of the early 1990s. That is an old and boring topic, and by now it is only the most dithering and out-of-the-loop callers on AM talk-radio, along with the very most impotent and alienated of bloggers, who continue to find menacing the basic proposals for language reform that came out of these wars. I am a strong advocate of a prescriptive approach to language that actively molds it to better fit the ideas we wish to express, and if we are committed to the idea of gender equality then we should certainly try to speak in a way that does not, e.g., presuppose that all doctors are male. But what I do not like is when we, on the side of gender equality, help the talk-radio callers to make their inarticulate point for them by being stupid ourselves, and I take the mistaken belief that 'seminal' refers only to male semen to be one such instance of stupidity.
There are numerous other ones, and most of them seem to arise from the belief that we can identify, isolate, and eliminate a definite set of lexical items, rather than recognizing that different words and expressions might be appropriate at different registers. Yes, we should signal our commitment to gender equality in the way we use direct, declarative speech, but we should not presume that the new rules of direct declarative speech excuse us from mastering all the different ways of speaking and writing of fellow language users who do not or did not share our sensibilities.
Some people have it rough. Born into the East Coast cultural aristocracy in 1913, Mercedes Matter began life as a beloved and privileged artistic prodigy. Her father was Arthur B. Carles, a pioneer American abstract painter who studied with Matisse, showed at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and exhibited work in the legendary Armory Show. He was also an unrepentant bohemian: long-haired and bearded, a lifelong alcoholic and womanizer. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a Parisian correspondent for Vogue and a favorite model of photographer Edward Steichen. Her uncle Pedro was a star of Broadway and early Hollywood, and her aunt Sara was a famous fashion photographer and illustrator. Her father started her painting at the age of 6, and she spent her early teens touring the art capitals of Europe. After attending the progressive girls’ school Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, she moved to Manhattan and began studying with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students’ League.
The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health is housed in a former Jesuit seminary built in the 1950s, on a rise with broad views of the Berkshires. The long hallways have the institutional feel of a high school, except that everyone is speaking in respectful tones, and rolled yoga mats are everywhere, like baguettes in Doisneau’s Paris. On the walls are limited-edition photographs of lean people doing yoga in front of moss-dappled Indian shrines. At the gift shop on an early February weekend, visitors could have their tarot read, or a photographic portrait taken of their aura. And one of the featured speakers, offering a weekend-long seminar, was a senior professor at Harvard University, Ellen Langer. Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness – the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot – and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier. She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.
Malcolm X has been described as one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. He is credited with raising the self-esteem of black Americans and reconnecting them with their African heritage. He is largely responsible for the spread of Islam in the black community in the United States.
Many African Americans, especially those who lived in cities in the Northern and Western United States, felt that Malcolm X articulated their complaints concerning inequality better than the mainstream civil rights movement did. One biographer says that by giving expression to their frustration, Malcolm X “made clear the price that white America would have to pay if it did not accede to black America's legitimate demands.”
In the late 1960s, as black activists became more radical, Malcolm X and his teachings were part of the foundation on which they built their movements. The Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement,and the widespread adoption of the slogan “Black is beautiful“can all trace their roots to Malcolm X.
Since the birth of the first “test tube baby” in 1978, more than three million children have been born with the help of reproductive technology. Most of them are healthy. But as a group they're at a higher risk for low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes later in life.
Carmen Sapienza, a geneticist at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, is studying two groups of children—one comprising those conceived naturally, the other made up of children conceived via assisted reproductive technology—to identify epigenetic (changes in gene expression caused by molecular mechanisms other than mutations in the DNA sequence itself) differences among them. He is particularly interested in a chromosomal modification called “DNA methylation,” research he presented February 22 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We found that 5 to 10 percent of these chromosome modifications were different in children born through assisted reproduction, and this altered the expression of nearby genes,” Sapienza says. Several of the genes whose expression differed between the two groups have been implicated in chronic metabolic disorders, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
In a recent dissent that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia argued, astonishingly, that the Constitution does not forbid executing a demonstrably innocent man, so long as he has been given a fair trial first. (Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior liberal on the Court, responded in a concurring opinion that putting to death an innocent person would “be an atrocious violation of our Constitution.”) In his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, from 2003, in which the Supreme Court struck down Texas's anti-sodomy law, Scalia compared laws outlawing gay sex with those prohibiting bigamy, incest and bestiality. Having cleared his throat, Scalia then declared,
Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as “discrimination” which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously “mainstream” [and] that in most States what the Court calls “discrimination” against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal.
Scalia's expression of base sentiments in fluid, vigorous prose is a strange blending of the high and the low–like a Catholic Mass in which the liturgy is led by a bearded hippie strumming a guitar and singing in Latin. Scalia attempted to qualify these ugly lines in the next paragraph of his dissent by insisting, “I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts–or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them–than I would forbid it to do so.” Scalia seems genuinely baffled at the widespread incredulity that increasingly greets such protestations. His trademark busy italics might convey a spirit of apolitical rectitude, but they can't conceal the striking overlap of his judicial opinions with socially conservative policy preferences.
If there is nothing more admirable than a judge forgoing personal beliefs to uphold legal principles, there is nothing more distasteful than a judge who claims to do so against strong evidence to the contrary. Scalia's purportedly neutral, apolitical jurisprudence has moved him to vote against affirmative action, protection for abortion, rights for gays and lesbians, and equal treatment of women, and in favor of practically unfettered capital punishment, gun ownership and the open embrace of Christianity by the state.
Alexandar Hemon discusses 5 books on the topic, in The Browser:
Tell me about The Known World.
It’s a novel about slavery, but specifically the few recorded instances of black slave-owners, and it’s a masterful, masterful work, the most complete work of literary imagination in recent American fiction. Edward P Jones could be one of the greatest living American writers. Again it blocks the simple emotional reading that provides redemption, and teaches you that slavery was bad. It shows how dehumanising the whole system was, not only to the slaves, but to everyone involved; it is quite literally soul-emptying. It is of course, again, in some ways like the Holocaust: it was not madness, it was a rational system, an economic system in which all participated in various ways. Even among the slaves there were differences and hierarchies, and degrees of ethical involvement with the issue of slavery. Jones narrates, or manages, dozens of characters. They’re all individually defined, but there’s no central consciousness the way there might be in a straight up psychological novel that you follow as it progresses through some sort of sociological landscape, and so it’s like he’s conducting an orchestra of characters. He shifts from one to the other and has this particular narrative device in which he goes beyond the knowledge of his characters to tell the reader what will happen to them in the years after slavery. The suffering is not simply the physical suffering of individuals; it goes well beyond that. It goes to the heart of the system.
What Jones does is very important, I believe, when we’re talking about war and violence and suffering: not to reduce the understanding to a mere emotional response. Of course the Holocaust is horrifying, of course slavery is horrifying, but if you just see emotional release and redemption then you never understand it and never experience it as a reader.
Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate—one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide Web. Titles will also be posted on authors' and publishers' own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper.
This future is a predictable inference from digitization in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat.
Digitization will encourage an unprecedented diversity of new specialized content in many languages. The more adaptable of today's general publishers will survive the redundancy of their traditional infrastructure but digitization has already begun to spawn specialized publishers occupying a variety of niches staffed by small groups of like-minded editors, perhaps not in the same office or even the same country, much as software firms themselves are decentralized with staff in California collaborating online with colleagues in Bangalore and Barcelona.
The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer's work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.
There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms. Many of the founders, especially the Southerners, were rebelling simultaneously against state-church oppression and English rule. The Connecticut Baptists saw Jefferson — an anti-Federalist who was bitterly opposed to the idea of establishment churches — as a friend. “Our constitution of government,” they wrote, “is not specific” with regard to a guarantee of religious freedoms that would protect them. Might the president offer some thoughts that, “like the radiant beams of the sun,” would shed light on the intent of the framers? In his reply, Jefferson said it was not the place of the president to involve himself in religion, and he expressed his belief that the First Amendment’s clauses — that the government must not establish a state religion (the so-called establishment clause) but also that it must ensure the free exercise of religion (what became known as the free-exercise clause) — meant, as far as he was concerned, that there was “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
This little episode, culminating in the famous “wall of separation” metaphor, highlights a number of points about teaching religion in American history. For one, it suggests — as the Christian activists maintain — how thoroughly the colonies were shot through with religion and how basic religion was to the cause of the revolutionaries.
Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, and AL Kennedy in The Guardian:
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac�ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look�ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be �annoying, especially a prologue �following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”
3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
He was a bridge not only between surrealism and abstract expressionism, old Europe and a new American culture, but also between a vanished eastern world and the west. Like the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under a series of heteronyms, Arshile Gorky's tragic past led him to reinvent himself according to the poet's dictum that: “Life is whatever we conceive it to be.” Indeed, there are few painters for whom autobiography and artistic output are so intimately linked.
His adoption of the pseudonym “Gorky” was an attempt to link himself to his celebrated contemporary Maxim Gorky, and to disguise his Armenian origins. He was born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan in 1904 in a rural part of what was then the Turkish Ottoman empire. An attack on the city of Van by the Turks in 1915 had prompted virtually the whole of the population of western Armenia to walk a hundred miles to the east, in a desperate evacuation over the mountains.
Gorky's father had already left in 1908 to work in Rhode Island, leaving mother and children behind (until the money could be raised for their passage). During the winter of 1919, as the Russian civil war raged, Gorky's mother died of starvation before he and his sister, Vartoosh, finally began the long journey to join his father in New York. This tragedy was to colour Gorky's relationship to his art. Issues of loss, nostalgia and belonging haunt these edgy, intense paintings.
Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books Blog:
A strange little book came in the mail the other day. It’s called transcript and is published by the admirable Dalkey Archive Press. Translated from the German by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling, its author, Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003), was unknown to me. He was an Austrian book editor, photographer and concrete poet who as a teenager joined the Nazi party and became an active member in the regional leadership of the Hitler Youth. At a first glance, his book looks like a collection of verbal scraps of uncertain origin, some of which have the appearance of avant-garde poetry, but on examination it turns out to be something entirely different. Bäcker’s “poems” consist of excerpts from documents by Holocaust planners, perpetrators, and victims.
There are quotes from concentration camp files, arrest reports, instructions for operating gas chambers and hanging prisoners, comments by executioners and witnesses, notes on medical experiments and other such material found in the vast files of a regime that was not only busy exterminating millions of people, but striving to micromanage its degrading acts down to the smallest detail:
you are requested to leave the keys in the locks of all furniture, chests etc. as well as the keys in the locks of all interior doors. if the keys are on a separate key ring, they are to be taken off and placed in the lock of the receptacle to which they belong. to the building and hallway keys should be attached a ribbon and a piece of cardboard on which you are to write your names and apartment number and identification number. these keys are to be given to the authorized official. before leaving your residence, the list of assets that was issued to you is to be
In 1985, an astonishing time-motion study compared badminton with tennis. That year, Boris Becker defeated Kevin Curran in four sets for the Wimbledon tennis championship, and, amid far less fanfare, Han Jian of China bested Denmark’s Morten Frost in three sets of badminton at Calgary. The Wimbledon match lasted three hours and 18 minutes; the badminton contest took only one hour, 16 minutes. During the matches, the tennis ball was actually in play for a mere 18 minutes, as compared with 37 minutes for the badminton shuttlecock. Becker and Curran had 299 rallies and struck 1,004 shots; Jian and Frost had only 146 rallies but hit 1,972 shots, for an average of 13.5 per rally, about four times as many as the 3.4-shot average tennis point. And the distance covered by the players? Two miles in tennis, four miles in badminton.
This isn’t science; it’s a comparison of two matches that took place more than two decades ago, at the highest levels of competition. One reason badminton rallies last longer is that the court is smaller—a tennis doubles court covers roughly triple the area of its badminton counterpart. But these data should put to rest any notion that badminton is no more than an amusing game played at summer cookouts with a beer in one hand and a racquet in the other.
Charles Arthur in the Technology Blog of The Guardian:
The problem: how do you figure out who the people to recruit for your project are, when you're not familiar with the people in the area but need to get going?
Well, one option is to analyse submissions to Github, the open source code repository used by dozens of companies and individual programmers.
Biddulph explains:
“When I'm hiring, one of the things I always want to see is evidence of personal projects. Over the last two years, GitHub has become an amazing treasure trove of code, with the best social infrastructure I've ever seen on a developer site. GitHub profiles let the user set their location, so I started with a few web searches for Berlin developers. This finds hundreds of interesting people, but how do I prioritise them?”
Good question. Of course, another question would be “how do you know if they're any good?” For that, Biddulph moves to the next step:
“Another thing that I look for when building a good team is someone's personal network. I've always believed strongly in spending lots of time at conferences meeting passionate people who are smarter than me. A good developer can make themselves even more productive by knowing who to email, IM or DM to answer a question when they're stuck.”
From there it's a pretty short hop, skip and JMP to his solution…
She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not to anthropomorphize her — he speaks of Emmy wistfully, as if she were a deceased child.
Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?
Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.
This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew.
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–
The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–
Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers to wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
At my elbow on the table it lies open as it has done for a good part of these thirty years since my father died and it passed into my hands this Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language of 1922 on India paper which I was always forbidden to touch for fear I would tear or somehow damage its delicate pages heavy in their binding this color of wet sand on which thin waves hover when it was printed he was twenty-six they had not been married four years he was a country preacher in a one-store town and I suppose a man came to the door one day peddling this new dictionary on fine paper like the Bible at an unrepeatable price and it seemed it would represent a distinction just to own it confirming something about him that he could not even name now its cover is worn as though it had been carried on journeys across the mountains and deserts of the earth but it has been here beside me this whole time what has frayed it like that lossening it gnawing at it all through these years I know I must have used it much more than he did but always with care and indeed affection turning the pages patiently in search of meanings
by W.S. Merwin from The Shadow of Sirius; Copper Canyon Press, 2009
In one of the biggest upsets in boxing history, Ali regained his title on October 30, 1974 by defeating champion George Foreman in their bout in Kinshasa, Zaire. Hyped as “The Rumble In The Jungle,” the fight was promoted by Don King. Almost no one, not even Ali's long-time supporter Howard Cosell, gave the former champion a chance of winning. Analysts pointed out that Joe Frazier and Ken Norton had given Ali four tough battles in the ring and won two of them, while Foreman had knocked out both of them in the second round. As a matter of fact, so total was the domination that, in their bout, Foreman had knocked down Frazier an incredible six times in only four minutes and 25 seconds.
During the bout, Ali employed an unexpected strategy. Leading up to the fight, he had declared he was going to “dance” and use his speed to keep away from Foreman and outbox him. However, in the first round, Ali headed straight for the champion and began scoring with a right hand lead, clearly surprising Foreman. Ali caught Foreman nine times in the first round with this technique but failed to knock him out. He then decided to take advantage of the young champion's weakness: staying power. Foreman had won 37 of his 40 bouts by knockout, mostly within three rounds. Eight of his previous bouts didn't go past the second round. Ali saw an opportunity to outlast Foreman, and capitalized on it.
In the second round, the challenger retreated to the ropes—inviting Foreman to hit him, while counterpunching and verbally taunting the younger man. Ali's plan was to enrage Foreman and absorb his best blows to exhaust him mentally and physically. While Foreman threw wide shots to Ali's body, Ali countered with stinging straight punches to Foreman's head. Foreman threw hundreds of punches in seven rounds, but with decreasing technique and potency. Ali's tactic of leaning on the ropes, covering up, and absorbing ineffective body shots was later termed “The Rope-A-Dope.” By the end of the seventh round, Foreman was exhausted. In the eighth round, Ali dropped Foreman with a combination at center ring and Foreman failed to make the count. Against the odds, Ali had regained the title. Many years later, Foreman would become champ again at age 45. Muhammad Ali (Foreman's best friend at the time) did not attend the title bout. When asked why, he said “I would deviate attention from George. It was his moment, not mine.”
I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world. At home I am a nice guy: but I don't want the world to know. Humble people, I've found, don't get very far.
I figure I'll be champ for about ten years and then I'll let my brother take over – like the Kennedys down in Washington.
Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wild Life.
Two years ago, several research vessels shipped out to the North and the South poles to assemble a census of creatures living under the ice. One of the most surprising results was a discovery that 235 identical species lived on opposite sides of the world but were undocumented anywhere else. It's easy to understand how massive humpbacks can swim from Arctic to Antarctic waters, but most of the miniature worms, snails and crustaceans on the researchers' list are no bigger than grains of rice. How could tiny creatures adapted for the frigid waters travel 9,500 kilometers through warmer climes to reach the opposite pole?
Under the microscope, these invertebrates sometimes look like shredded plastic bags or shrimp with bullhorns. It's unclear how they could cross a swimming pool, let alone the globe. So, their “bipolarity” poses a 160-year mystery of the ocean—one that has only grown with time. “If bipolar species are as common as our initial list suggests, it really means we don't appreciate the mechanisms that are important for connectivity in the ocean as well as we thought,” says Russ Hopcroft, project leader of the Arctic portion of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership's Census of Marine Life.
I certainly did not mean to suggest with my recent etymological reflections on 'seminal' that I am at all interested in restarting the political-correctness wars of the early 1990s. That is an old and boring topic, and by now it is only the most dithering and out-of-the-loop callers on AM talk-radio, along with the very most impotent and alienated of bloggers, who continue to find menacing the basic proposals for language reform that came out of these wars. I am a strong advocate of a prescriptive approach to language that actively molds it to better fit the ideas we wish to express, and if we are committed to the idea of gender equality then we should certainly try to speak in a way that does not, e.g., presuppose that all doctors are male. But what I do not like is when we, on the side of gender equality, help the talk-radio callers to make their inarticulate point for them by being stupid ourselves, and I take the mistaken belief that 'seminal' refers only to male semen to be one such instance of stupidity.
