Fritinancy

Long Reads for a Long Weekend

We have a three-day weekend here in California, in honor of the holiday called Columbus Day (traditionally), Indigenous People’s Day (in Berkeley and elsewhere), and Exploration Day (according to a group of scientists who are petitioning the government for an official name-change). It’s a good opportunity to catch up on some long-form reading. Here are three pieces I recommend.

“Villager and Me” is Andrea Lee’s reminiscence—sparked by an encounter with an ad in a 1969 issue of The New Yorker—of the “proto-preppie” women’s fashion brands Villager and Ladybug. “Up and down the East Coast,” Lee writes, “in that American provincial period before the invasion of international brands, before ‘Love Story’ had graven the word ‘preppie’ into the national consciousness, boarding-school girls and country-club wives swathed themselves in Ladybug and Villager. Until, of course, the zeitgeist swept them off to become hippies.”

A typical Villager dress—which I remember well from my own West Coast girlhood—looked like this:

“Rustling softly downwards, like the quality of mercy…”

The clothes were demure, but the ad copy and color names could cause an impressionable girl to swoon with desire. The real story here, though, is about the man behind Villager and Ladybug, Max Raab, “a brilliant mercurial Jewish Philadelphian, son of a garment manufacturer whose ambition was to make the cheapest blouse in town.” Here’s Lee on Raab:

A lifetime maverick with a passion for jazz and movies, Raab flunked out of high school, fought in the Korean war, pumped gas, delivered mail, and sold televisions and Fuller brushes before coming up with the idea that made his—first—fortune. I like to imagine that he built the Villager and Ladybug concept on his wistful outsider’s view of the style Philadelphia débutantes were after when they borrowed their boyfriends’ Oxford cloth shirts. By the time I was mooning over the ads, there were over a hundred Villager shops with rustic wooden floors nationwide, and his line of upscale feminine sportswear had earned a hundred and forty million dollars. “I know women better than they know themselves ” Raab said in a New York Times interview. “The Waspy girls all want that country look, and the Jewish girls want to look like the Wasps. I knew I had a winner.”

Raab enjoyed “a long, sublimely quirky career” that included producing out-of-the-mainstream movies such as A Clockwork Orange. (Lee: “When I read that, I just sat for a minute imagining Shetland cardigans and A-line skirts mingling in his brain with Malcolm McDowell and his droogs.”) When he died, in 2008, Raab was working on a film about Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

Andrea Lee used to contribute regularly to The New Yorker; this article—online only—is the first writing of hers I’ve seen in quite a while. More, please!

*

In a very different elegiac vein is this interview in The Awl with the writer Fran Lebowitz, who achieved meteoric success in the late 1970s and has been famously afflicted with writer’s block—but not talker’s block—ever since. If you’ve seen the 2010 HBO documentary about her, Public Speaking, you’ll be familiar with some of the territory covered in the Q&A—in particular, the gay culture of the 1970s and the effect of the AIDS epidemic on the New York arts audience. Lebowitz is so quotable that it’s hard to pick just one excerpt, but I’ll try: “The memories of people are very short. As we know, because otherwise we certainly wouldn't still have Republicans in office.”

*

The British author and journalist Steven Poole is fed up with the cult of foodism. Poole’s excellent rant in the Guardian (UK), “Let’s Start the Foodie Backlash,” is an excerpt from his new book, You Aren’t What You Eat; in it, he takes on “food raves,” “feastivals,” cooking shows, and the language of menus: 

It is an interesting question, meanwhile, why the word “baby” in menu descriptions does not disgust us. Surely the last things we want to eat are babies. But perhaps once we are lulled into an imaginative world where a “baby” lamb or the “baby” queen scallop can be “resting” (in the scallop’s case, resting itself on another baby, this time a “baby gem”, since vegetables too – baby carrots, baby greens – can share in the general babyhood of all nice things, and participate in tottering towers of babies all stacked up for our gastric enjoyment), we are cocooned in such a euphemistic dream that the incipient act of putting these “baby” organisms into our mouths doesn’t register as the horrific dissonance it otherwise might.

Poole traces the word “foodie” back to 1982 and “foodist” to the late 19th century—for hucksters selling fad diets, “which is quite apt,” he tartly observes.

Happy exploring!

Word of the Week: Hooliganism

Hooliganism: Rioting; bullying; rough horseplay; “the characteristic behavior of hooligans” (OED). (For an alternate meaning, keep reading.) Hooliganism first appeared in print in 1898, in a police report in the Daily Telegraph (UK); hooligan also first appeared in print in 1898 in the UK, in the Daily News. When Arthur Conan Doyle used “hooliganism” in his 1904 Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, he capitalized it.

Officially, the origins of hooligan and hooliganism are “uncertain.” There are theories, though, the most plausible being the one summarized in the Online Etymology Dictionary: “almost certainly from the variant form of the Irish surname Houlihan, which figured as a characteristic comic Irish name in music hall songs and newspapers of the 1880s and ’90s.”

In the English-speaking world, hooliganism is mostly seen in the UK and Commonwealth countries, where it’s frequently modified by football (i.e., soccer). “Football hooliganism” is associated with unruly, brawling, destructive behavior. But in the early 20th century hooligan and hooliganism found an adopted home—and a different interpretation—in czarist Russia and, later, the Soviet Union. The words had pointedly political meanings: In the Soviet justice system “khuliganism” was a catch-all description for offensive behavior. The words stayed in the Russian lexicon and penal code after the fall of the Soviet regime, and remain there today.

Which explains news reports like this one from CNN, published on Saturday:

Three members of Russian female punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison Friday after they were found guilty of hooliganism for performing a song critical of President Vladimir Putin in a church.

Malynne Stevenson, an associate professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Chicago, provided some context for this “hooliganism” in an interview published August 17 in Global Post:

In the Soviet Union and Russia today, hooliganism is legally defined this way: “In the Soviet Union ‘hooliganism’ (хулиганство, khuliganstvo) was made a criminal offence under the penal codes of the Soviet republics. In the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), article 216 of the penal code defined ‘hooliganism’ as ‘any deliberate behavior that violates public order and expresses explicit disrespect toward society.’ This article was used to cover a wide range of behaviors such as vagrancy, stalking, foul language, etc.” …

Lenin once declared that “hooligans” should be shot on the spot, along with murderers and tsarists.

“Hooliganism” is also used as a criminal charge in China and Iran, Stevenson said.

According to reporter Ben Johnson, who wrote about Pussy Riot earlier this month for Slate, most Russian antigovernment protestors aren’t charged with hooliganism but rather with “administrative violations.” The Pussy Riot case was different, Johnson says:

Members of Pussy Riot opened themselves up to the more severe accusation of hooliganism by choosing a church as their venue, and performing in front of the iconostasis (part of the church’s sanctuary, where women and other regular parishioners are not permitted), a choice that many members of the country’s largest religious group, Russian Orthodox Christians, have found offensive. Hooliganism charges can also be more serious if committed in a group, which in Russia’s court system is defined as two people or more.

“There’s only one punishment for hooliganism,” Johnson writes, “and that is ‘deprivation of freedom,’ which usually means imprisonment.”

Details about the Pussy Riot sentence, plus video and international reactions, here. For more about the Pussy Riot name and how it’s rendered in Russian, see Ben Zimmer’s post on Language Log. For more about the English-language media have handled Pussy—e.g., “a feminist punk group with a profane name”—see Arnold Zwicky’s “The Pussy Patrol.”

Solutionism

A version of this message from Dow Chemical has been appearing all over my version of the Web:

 

 

“Solutionism. The New Optimism” is the name of a Dow multimedia campaign that launched in March of this year. (Draftfcb Chicago did the work.) According to B2BOnline, “The campaign illustrates how Dow provides solutions to help solve some of the world's most pressing global challenges, such as efficient energy and feeding the planet.”

New Yorkers got a preview of the campaign last September, when a giant chalkboard was erected at the corner of Crosby and Broome. Over several days, the chalkboard was filled with a mathematical equation, and on Day 5 a Dow banner was unfurled.

 

Photo from Right Brain, Left Brain blog.

Dow is now selling the “Solutionism” campaign in ads that run during the Olympics broadcasts. Those ads depict a featureless, leaf-covered creature called—I’m not making this up—“Hopeiary.” AdWeek called the “hedge man” the worst mascot of the 2012 Games.

Sorry. Where were we? Right: “solutionism.”

“Solutionism. The new optimism” is a variation on the very popular snowclone “X is the new Y.” (See “Bacon is the new chocolate,” “Green is the new black,” “Safe is the new sexy,” “Big is the new small,” et al.) According to the Snowclones Database, the origin of the saying was Vogue editor Diana Vreeland’s proclamation in the early 1960s that “Pink is the navy blue of India.”

Dow Chemical didn’t coin “solutionism.”* There’s a Wiktionary entry dated August 29, 2010, with two definitions (but no citations):

1. An aspect of technology or collection of products or services; a complex or nebulous collection of concepts.
2. The providing of a solution or solutions to a customer or client.

A 2009 web page on Coggins Marketing urges entrepreneurs to “Be a Solutionist.” And I found several firms that use “Solutionist” in their names, including Solutionist.biz, The Solutionist Group (whose business is “solutioneering”), and The Solutionist, Inc.

There’s also a line of Matrix hair products—possibly discontinued—called Solutionist.

 

“Solutionism” can have negative implications. In his 2006 book Prisoners: A Tale of Friendship and Terror, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg called solutionism “the American national religion, which holds that for every intractable problem there is a logical and available answer.” Writing in 2008 for Jewish Current Issues, Rick Richman observed that “[n]owhere has solutionism been applied with more fervor and fewer results than the Middle East, with a succession of logical ‘plans’ and ‘processes’ to ‘solve’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last 15 years[.]”

Solutionism, wrote Saad Hafiz in 2001 in the news site CounterPunch, “means that for every intractable problem there is logical and available answer. H.L. Mencken, the American journalist and humorist[,] said ‘for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong’.”

Clearly, Dow Chemical—forever linked in many people’s memories to the 1984 Bhopal disaster—is counting on Americans’ amnesia about that particular Mencken observation. Not to mention this one, from Mencken’s “Notes on Journalism” (1926): “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

UPDATE, March 16, 2013: More on solutionism in World Wide Words, which uses as a news peg a new book by Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: “By solutionism,[Morozov] means the mistaken belief that technology can benignly and efficiently solve all our problems and produce a world that is trouble-free.”

__

* And it certainly didn’t coin “solution,” which is one of the most overused words in company names, taglines, and mission statements.

__

Isms previously on Fritinancy: quotationalism, endism, completism, presentism, declinism, triumphalism, Austerianism, resistentialism, Chewdaism.

Word of the Week: Chewdaism

Chewdaism: The theory that chewing food slowly and thoroughly delivers health benefits. A portmanteau of chew and (probably) Judaism.

In a new book, Drop Dead Healthy, A.J. Jacobs includes chewdaism among the various diets and techniques he tried during a two-year experiment to improve his health. (Other practices included calorie restriction, the paleolithic diet, and pole dancing.) In a progress report published in the March 2010 issue of Food & Wine, Jacobs wrote:

We are a nation of underchewers. And while that may seem like a pretty minor food sin—along the lines of drinking brandy from a wineglass instead of a snifter—it actually has real health implications. If we all started using our molars more, it would improve both our waistlines and our digestion. Chewing a lot would make us eat more slowly—which, some studies show, means we would eat less. And we would get more nutrition out of every bite: A recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that when people chewed almonds at least 25 times, they absorbed more unsaturated fat (the good kind of fat) than those who chewed only 10 times.

Jacobs claims that the chewing movement has a strong presence on the Internet, and that “one wag”—not he—coined “Chewdaism.” I found little evidence to support his claim; most of the citations for chewdaism are connected with Jacobs and his book. I did learn that actress Alicia Silverstone, known for her vegan lifestyle, is an advocate of chewing every mouthful 30 times. I also discovered a video tutorial from September 2009—the earliest “chewdaism” reference I found.

“Chewdaism” may be new, but the concept of chewing for health goes back to the late 19th century. Back then it was called Fletcherism (or Fletcherizing), after its founder, the self-taught American nutritionist Horace Fletcher (1849–1919). Known as “The Great Masticator,” Fletcher advocated chewing food deliberately and at great length, until it “swallowed itself.” According to Fletcher, “prolonged chewing precluded overeating, led to better systemic and dental health, helped to reduce food intake, and consequently, conserved money.” (Source.) He died in Copenhagen of bronchitis “after a long illness,” according to his New York Times obituary.

Other isms previously discussed here: quotationalism, resistentialism, endism, presentism, triumphalism, declinism, austerianism.

See also: shtick lit.

Word of the Week: Resistentialism

Resistentialism: “The theory that inanimate objects demonstrate hostile behavior toward us.” – Anu Garg, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words. 

Photo source: You’ll Eat It & Like It!

From Garg’s entry in the book:

If you ever get a feeling that the photocopy machine can sense when you’re tense, short of time, need a document copied before an important meeting, and then it breaks down on purpose, you’re not alone. Now you know the word for it. As if to prove the point, my normally robust DSL Internet connection went down for two hours just as I was writing this. I’m not making this up!

I was surprised that resistentialism had never been a Word of the Week, because it’s a word I have found invaluable ever since I first heard it, some 15 years ago. Just last week I encountered it again in an enlightening and often amusing book I’ve been reading, Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err Is Human, by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan*. The Kaplans write at the beginning of Chapter IV:

Life calls us out of the private fastnesses of our heads into a world of things, things we valiantly attempt to steer, start, or stop—and this opens a whole new playground for error. The English humorist Paul Jennings once proposed an alternative to the existentialist nausee that was then washing across from Paris: resistentialism. This “somber, post-atomic philosophy of pagan, despairing nobility” held that “things are against us.” And it seems they still are: rather than the masters of the physical world, we remain mere “no-things,” doomed to be pushed around by scornful and uncooperative objects—pianos that mock our sausage fingers; computers that develop transient but alarming hypochondria; keys, socks, and teaspoons that scurry off to their secret covens and never return.

Word Spy (Paul McFedries) tells us that resistentialism first appeared in print in 1963 “[o]r possibly earlier; I saw conflicting dates, which were probably just resistential computer errors.” The passage in question appeared in “Report on Resistentialism,” which was published in The Jenguin Pennings:

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’

McFedries offers a corollary:

A related term that makes the occasional appearance is FOBIO —- Frequently Outwitted By Inanimate Objects. I hereby propose what I humbly suggest is a better term: FOILED — Frequently Outwitted by Inanimate, Lame Electronic Devices.

For examples of resistentialism in action, see the blog Things Are Against Us. See also The Case of the Disappearing Teaspoons, a summary of a study by two Australian scientists, published in 2005, that concludes:

People have no control over teaspoon migration; escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism are equally plausible explanations.

More isms (austerianism, declinism, endism, et al.) here.

__

* The Kaplans are mother and son; she’s a historian who has also co-authored two books about mathematics; he’s a writer and filmmaker. Michael Kaplan also writes a blog called Bozo Sapiens.

Word of the Week: Austerianism

Austerianism: An theory of economics that advocates slashing government spending and cutting deficits during a time of economic weakness or recession.

Austerianism was coined from “austerity” with a possible hint of “hysteria” and a linguistic wink to the Austrian School of economics, whose 19th-century founders—notably Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises—were born in the Habsburg Empire. The Austrians’ theories about the subjective nature of economic value and diminishing marginal utility were further developed in the 20th century, notably by Friedrich Hayek, who, together with the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics. Austrian economics also holds that business cycles are “caused by distortion in interest rates due to the government's attempt to control money.” (Source: Investopedia.) Today, followers of the Austrian School are often associated with libertarian political philosophies.

Credit for coining Austeria and Austerian has been claimed by Rob Parenteau, who blogs about economics at Naked Capitalism and edits the monthly Richebächer Letter. (Kurt Richebächer was a member of the Austrian School.) Parenteau used Austeria in a June 10, 2010, interview with Business News Network (Canada). “I think they’ve renamed the Eurozone to Austeria now,” Parenteau quipped (at 3:17). He used Austeria and Austerian economics the following day in a Richebächer Letter article (link unavailable).

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (himself a Nobelist in economics—and an anti-Austrian who advocated strongly for a much larger economic stimulus than the Obama government delivered) began using Austerian  in his blog, Conscience of a Liberal, in August 2010. In an August 3 post he imagined a dialogue between an Austerian and a Stimulist. More recently he’s called Austerianism “a failed doctrine.” On July 7, 2011, in a post titled “More Anti-Austerianism,” he cited a report about “four famous alleged cases of expansionary austerity”:

The expansionary austerity thing has, in short, been about as thoroughly refuted as one could imagine. Naturally, then, the Obama administration has taken to full-fledged embrace of the confidence fairy.

I found an earlier use of austerianism with a more microeconomic meaning, something close to plain old “thriftiness.” Shlomo Maital, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Technion Institute of Management, wrote in March 2008 about the resurgence of fixed-gear bicycles in cities from Dubai to San Francisco:

Fixed-gear 60’s bikes are part of what is known as the ‘austerian’ movement – austere is good, less is more, and do with cheap and simple rather than expensive, showy and conspicuous. Austerianism, in turn, is part of the new pro-environment green movement. 

 

A Bin Laden Lexicon

Some of the words and phrases that caught my attention in coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death:

*

Abbottabad:  The city in northern Pakistan where bin Laden was found and killed is named for a British army officer, Major James Abbott (1807-1896), who founded the town in 1853. It’s pronounced with the stress on the second syllable: ah-BAHT-ah-bahd. The –abad suffix, also found in place names such as Islamabad and Hyderabad, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling” or “town.” 

New York Times

 

James Abbott dressed as an Indian nobleman, 1847. (Hat tip: @johmcquaid)

*

Double tap: “After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured,” writes Marc Ambinder in “The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden” (National Journal). “One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face.” (Via @stevesilberman.) GunTec Dictionary defines “double tap” as a “colloquial term for the firing of two shots one immediately after the other at the same target.” UPDATE: As I note in a comment, below, the double tap technique is credited to two British police chiefs in 1930s Shanghai. They devised the method to overcome the limits of full-metal-jacketed ammunition. 

*

SEAL: The bin Laden mission was carried out by “the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group” (Ambinder). SEAL is a navy acronym for “sea, air, and land.”

*

DevGru: A compression of “development group.” Ambinder writes that SEAL Team Six “was known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.” DevGru is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, “an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units” (Ambinder).

*

Kinetic: Military euphemism meaning “lethal.” From the Ambinder article:

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the National Counterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active “kinetic” -- or lethal – counterterrorism missions abroad.

Related: Read my April 2008 post on “post-kinetic development.”

*

“Killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan”: Department of Defense code for “died in a JSOC operation that went bad” (Ambinder).

*

Triumphalism: An attitude or feeling of victory or superiority. From the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog:

I’m not sorry to see bin Laden dead, but I can’t share in the triumphalism currently flooding the airwaves, nor do I feel any sense of relief, since I don’t expect this to change anything.

Related: Read my April 2011 post on triumphalism’s opposite, declinism.

*

Honorific: “A title, phrase, or grammatical form conveying respect, used especially when addressing a social superior.” (American Heritage Dictionary) Media blogger Jim Romenesko reported this morning that the New York Times would no longer use the “Mr.” honorific in front of Osama bin Laden’s name, at the request of News Managing Editor Jill Abramson and Executive Editor Bill Keller. From the associate managing editor’s memo: “Without a ‘Mr.’ in front of his name, it was decided that we should capitalize the ‘B’ in Bin Laden on second references.”

*

Halo effect: “How Big Will the Osama Halo Effect Be for Obama?” reads the headline on a post by Stephen J. Dubner on the Freakonomics blog. Dubner writes: “The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?” The halo effect is “an effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole” (American Heritage Dictionary). It was first described in a 1920 paper by the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.”

*

Also see this Visual Thesaurus compilation of notable words from President Obama’s May 1 announcement of bin Laden’s death.

Word of the Week: Declinism

Declinism: “The belief that something, particularly a country or a political or economic system, is undergoing a significant and possibly irreversible decline.” (Word Spy)

“Declinism” also describes an outlook on language, as Robert Lane Greene explains in his new book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the politics of Identity. Writing about the punctuation grouch Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves)*, Greene says:

[N]ear the beginning of her furious little volume, she says that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught in the majority of English schools.” if that was true wed expect that nearly everything written by people educated in england in the last few decades too look like this but it doesnt seem to be so Mistakes may be more common than Truss would like, but to say that grammar and punctuation are “simply not taught” in most schools beggars belief.

Language grouches have been singing that song for centuries, writes Greene, and it’s just as unwarranted as it was “when Swift said the same thing in 1712”:

Not only is declinism not new, as hundreds of years of examples show. It is not particular to the Anglophone world, either. Not only have English and American schoolmarms worried about “kids these days” for centuries. Similar concerns have nagged speakers of languages around the world throughout recorded history.

Cicero, for example, griped that standards of knowledge of Latin were “disgraceful.” And in the 19th century Jacob Grimm—one half of the Brothers Grimm, and a philologist as well as a fairy-tale collector—complained that “six hundred years ago every rustic knew, that is to say practiced daily, perfections and niceties in the German language of which the best grammarians nowadays do not even dream.”

 

 

According to Paul McFedries of Word Spy, “declinism” was coined in 1988 by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington for an essay in Foreign Affairs. Huntington wrote:

In 1988 the United States reached the zenith of its fifth wave of declinism since the 1950s. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the political economy literature of the early 1980s that analyzed the fading American economic hegemony and attempted to identify the consequences of its disappearance.

McFedries calls declinism “the ‘apocalypse soon’ school of international relations”; its opposite is “triumphalism,” coined in 1964. “Declinism” appears to be a back-formation from the much earlier “declinist.” An 1831 citation for “declinist” appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, which (says McFedries) “mentions the ‘doctrine of the decline of science’ and labels one of its proponents as ‘the leader of the Declinists.’”

“Declinism” is used much less frequently in connection with language. Robert Lane Greene may have imported it from the language of political science; he is, after all, not a linguist but rather a journalist and expert in international affairs. He’s also a contributor to The Economist’s excellent language blog, Johnson.

Elsewhere in the world of isms: presentism, quotationalism, completism, and endism,

__

* From Geoffrey Nunberg’s review of You Are What You Speak in the New York Times Book Review: “We’ve passed from the thoughtful homilies of Fowler to the pithy dictums of Strunk and White to the operatic curmudgeonry of modern sticklers like Lynne Truss, whose gasps of horror at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe are a campy cover for self-congratulation.”

___

LOLcats image from Master Marf.

Word of the Week: Presentism

Presentism: “The application of current ideals and moral standards to interpret historical figures and their actions.” (Source: Wordsmith.org.) Accent is on the first syllable.

This definition, used in literary and historical contexts, first appeared in print in 1916, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The dictionary provides a citation from the American Journal of Sociology: “Equal respect . . . for conservatism, presentism, and futurism.”

A new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from NewSouth Books, in which “nigger”—used 219 times in the original—is replaced with “slave” and “injun” with “Indian” has prompted a lot of discussion about presentism. Here’s the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article titled “Censoring Twain”:

So, is this political correctness run amok? Another example of how easily we destroy our cultural heritage and fictionalize our collective history in service to presentist hyper-sensitivities?

In an essay about the new Huckleberry Finn in The New Republic, Hillary Kelly argues that “to reach into the past with a contemporary mindset can be a dangerous game to play. Presentism can only lead to a severely distorted perception of history, as differences are erased and anachronisms abound.”

Read a discussion in the New York Times about the new Huckleberry Finn and the decision to change the book’s original language.

For a more sardonic take, I refer you to this Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Corrected to Reflect Modern Sensibilities!” Be sure to read the “study questions” at the bottom. (Via Maud Newton.)

“Presentism” is used primarily by critics of the revisionist approach, who sometimes slam it as “abandonment of history.” Advocates are more likely to call it “sensitivity” or “reaching a wider audience.”

Presentism also crops up in discussions of how history should be taught. The Boston 1775 blog, which looks at New England before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, reviewed a children’s history of the 1787 constitutional convention under the title “A Presentist Picture Book.” And in Perspectives, the journal of the American Historical Association, UCLA history professor Lynn Hunt argued in 2002 that “[p]resentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation.”

There’s a completely different definition of presentism in ethics and philosophy, where the term refers to “an attitude that since the present is the only thing that really exists . . . ethical judgments need to weigh actual present good on a different scale than hypothetical past good or future good.” (Source: Wikipedia.)

Note: Presentism is not to be confused with another recent coinage, presenteeism, which is defined as the opposite of absenteeism: “when employees come to work despite illness or injury that should have kept them home.” (Source: Nolo’s Plain-English Law Dictionary.)

Word of the Week: Completist

Completist: Someone who wants to make something, such as a collection of books or records, complete. The OED puts it more strongly: “An obsessive (and often indiscriminate) collector.” And Encyclopedia Dramatica is even more judgmental:

A completist is a fanboy or fangirl that must prove their devotion to a band, television show, movie or comic book by collecting every piece of Chinese made crap sold at Wal-Mart that relates to said media. Symptoms include lining up at midnight to buy a new record, DVD, or toy, constantly searching eBay for imports of the same exact crap from Japan and camping in line for years just so they can get tickets to a show before you. There is a significant overlap between completists and fans of Pokémon and similar franchises, and this is expected given Pokémon's catch phrase “Gotta catch ’em all”.

Completism is sometimes called an “affliction” or a “pathology.”

Completist appeared in the first sentence in an article in last Friday’s New York Times holiday gift guide: “Completists with deep pockets can revel in the 2010 bounty of boxed sets.”

Merriam-Webster online gives 1951 as the date of the first known use of completist, but doesn’t provide a citation. The OED moves the date to 1955, citing an article in the New York Times Book Review: “Perhaps the one point of interest here, even for the Holmesian completist, is the effort in the introduction to identify Watson as Doyle’s secretary, Maj. Alfred Wood.”