Musings on Life in Our World
 Occasional readers, here is the first rant of 2024, taking aim at the mistakes, 
massacres, and misuses of the American tongue. Please do not take offense if you find entries below that befoul your own speech. It is not your fault, up to this point in time. After you read this post, though, any such repeated use of any of these annoying constructions will be scored against you.
So read at your own risk. Continue reading “Language Habits V (A series of occasional rants)”
The last of four parts
[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here]
Soon after our return to Madison, we began a series of performances there, along with a few around the state. In Madison we played three shows a weekend for three weeks in October, all of them in the large hall at the Eagles Club. We also did a live, in-studio two-hour radio interview and demonstration for the Madison affiliate of NPR. I thought the radio show was going well until the host asked which one of us had never acted before. He knew damn well, and I hesitated to answer, instead preferring to avoid the subject. My castmates interrupted the brief silence by whispering loudly and in unison, “Peter.”  I don’t recall the host’s follow-up questions or my answers.
But I did pass that doctoral qualifying exam despite all.
Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 4: Performing, Professing, Posterity”
A Series in Four Parts
[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here]
We left Madison August 28, 1976, nine people in a white van pulling a trailer with our props, costumes, clothing and camping gear. We would average almost 500 miles a day over four days, and camp in tents three nights along the way at such locations as Billings, MT, and Coeur d’Alene, ID. Our technical director, John Miller, did most of the driving. In the rows of seats sat Joel and six of the actors: Kelly Henderson, Max(ine) Fleckner, Melanie Sax, Frank Furillo, Gary Aylesworth, and Adrienne Rabinowitz. I resided mostly on the platform behind the seats, at the very back of the van.
I hadn’t been consigned to that space. I had asked for it. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 3: Road Trip!”
A Series in Four Parts
[See Part 1 here]
In addition to our cast-in-waiting for a play to do, we had one of American experimental theater’s magicians. Of course I had no sense of this as we gathered for those first meetings. Truth be told, I knew very little about theater at all, let alone this new experimental form that had bloomed around the country as part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s that had shaken many of our institutions, from art to politics to religion. But given that we needed a finished play in a little over two months, I thought that we were dithering in those first meetings. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play”
The first of four parts.
One sun-filled day in June 1976, near the beach and sailboats of beautiful Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, I suggested to a friend that we walk over to watch auditions scheduled that day for the city’s prominent experimental theater group, Broom Street Theatre. I had never seen one of its plays, but I had read and heard that it was a gonzo outfit producing plays ranging from wild adaptations of classical scripts to outrageous original satires of the human condition. I was not aiming to audition myself. Instead, I simply wanted an inside look at this operation during its audition process. At age 26, I had just completed my third year of doctoral studies in sociology at the University and, after having colored for so long between the lines, I was hoping to have a look at some measure of creativity, even if only briefly. Continue reading “My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet”
Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language. The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that
conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population. Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.  Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.
Does any of this sound familiar today? Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule. We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level. Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation: the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.
This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S. Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born. Continue reading “GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it”
Well, here we go again. More complaints about the tics, tactics and tired in our
use of words and phrases. Below are the latest that we should excise from the language. Continue reading “Language Habits IV (A series of occasional rants)”
The first indictment of Donald Trump has landed. Certainly there are more to
come. In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president. What to make of it all? These thoughts come to mind.
The Media
In our digital age, the mainstream (traditional) media are also all about attracting eyeballs, most especially our television news programs. Thus, the coverage to this point–before the indictment charges are even revealed–has been, well, hysterical. It’s odd, isn’t it? Trump refers to them as the “Fake News” media, and yet he is able to play them to his advantage like a fiddle. They cannot get enough of him, his antics and his predicaments. He is addicted to their attention, and they are happy to provide it. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Indictment”
Language evolves over time. It can also be trendy. Here’s the difference: Water carves mountains out of stone over millennia. Many generations pass by the same local mountain, noticing none of these tiny developments. This is a mountain evolving.
Water carves out snow lickety split.  Relative to the evolution of language, this is more like word or phrase trendiness. It comes and goes. And my gripe is with much of this trendiness. So here goes Round III. Continue reading “Language Habits III (A series of occasional rants)”
Alright, I am going to make a point of this one last time. Then I am going to bury my revered high school Latin textbook in the backyard, in the sacred ground deep beneath my cat’s ashes. DATA IS PLURAL!
And that sentence is the only way to say correctly “Data is”!
My former colleagues in the press seem to have long ago given up on the correct usage of “data.” Even television doctors commenting on the pandemic
data, people trained in a science that has long drawn heavily on Latin words and roots, routinely mess up the use of “data.” You know what the singular word for “data” is? It is datum which, I agree, does not roll easily off the tongue. But we don’t need a single datum. We need an “are.”
So goodbye to “Data are . . .” RIP with the language of the ancients–and my beloved cat. Continue reading “Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)”
