Archive for November, 2003
Grammar
Languagehat has a post about Berlusconi’s bad grammar in Italian. He quotes from a recent New Yorker article:
His grammar is dreadful. He gets the subjunctive wrong. Give him three seconds on television and he makes four mistakes. But you discover that everybody loves his mistakes. That’s his power.
Now, since Berlusconi has passed laws making all […]
McJobs
Am I allowed to title today’s entry “McJobs”? Not according to McDonalds.
What interests me about this story is that although McDonalds raises legal issues in their letter to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, they clearly understand that they have a weak case (the word was coined in 1991 and is already in the American Heritage Dictionary), so […]
Lynch
Anyone riding the subway in NY city noticed the difference in how papers covered the announcement of Jessica Lynch’s new book about her rescue from Iraq. I couldn’t find images of the actual cover pages of the local papers, but here are screen captures of the NY Times and Daily News coverage of the announcement:
Now, […]
Re-regulation
A recent article in The Nation starts with an account of the grass-roots mobilization (from both the right and the left) against further deregulation by the FCC. This was old news for anyone reading the blogsphere, but what interested me came at the end of the article: a concrete list of proposals for what needs […]
Train
Sometimes you stumble upon a character from history who seems like they must have been made up - then you realize that is because they are probably the model for numerous fictional characters that you already know. One such man is George Francis Train. I first came upon Train while reading Foner’s book on the […]
Spin
There has been a lot of discussion of late about the Lakoff interview on how the left needs to learn how to better “frame” issues, in order to combat the right’s extraordinary success in doing so. Take the example of the environment, a recently leaked document written by the corporate “public opinion researcher” Frank Luntz […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
