Grammar

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

— B. R. Myers

On a Facebook group dedicated to the prize-winning writer Shelby Foote (a fav of mine), a civil war broke out after I corrected someone who used "hung" to mean "executed." (If a man or woman was executed by hanging, as grammarians know, he or she was "hanged.")

Some group members backed me, but many went apoplectic over my comment, insisting grammar was irrelevant to communicating.

Facebook even banned me for 24 hours, saying "your comment didn't follow our Community Standards."

The irony of advocating sloppy grammar in a group dedicated to Shelby Foote escapes them, as, I'm afraid, do most subtleties.

B.R. Myers is right: sloppy grammar signals a sloppy thinker—or at least a poorly read one.

No, sloppy grammar doesn't prohibit communication.

But it does reflect a pitiable sort of poverty.

The Gnadenhütten Massacre

The news of the atrocities in Ukraine are heartbreaking.

Russians are barbarous, we say.

It can't happen here, we say.

Wrong.

In March 1782, a year before the end of the American Revolution, a band of Pennsylvanians murdered 96 Lenape Indians by smashing their skulls with mallets as they knelt and prayed to Jesus.

In what became known as the "Gnadenhütten Massacre," the Pennsylvanians then piled the bodies of the men, women and children inside a Moravian mission and burned it to the ground.

The murderers claimed they wanted revenge for Lenape raids on their homes.

But the Lenapes they bludgeoned were innocent.

Like Quakers, Moravians were pacifists; so were their Indian converts.

Ironically, the Moravians and the Lenape converts had been helping the Patriots all through the war, working as guides and spies—acts that often got them arrested and tried by the British.

The incident spurred reprisals.

The Lenapes resurrected their practice of ritualized torture—discontinued during the French and Indian War 20 years earlier—and targeted the men who had participated in the atrocities.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, "To the war of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there."

Many a Slip

There's many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip.

— English proverb

I've always loved this 2nd-century proverb.

We 21st-century folks—quick to shun responsibility—like to say instead, "Shit happens."

But the ancient proverb puts the onus on the individual, not the universe. 

The individual is where the slip so often begins.

Business people are always slipping up: dropping the ball, laying an egg, spoiling the party.

It seems to worsen every day.

Of course, a lot of us have too much to do. 

But a whole lot of us are just plain sloppy and unprofessional.

As my parents would say, "You can't get good service anymore."

Please don't contribute to the problem. 

Instead, today, try to:

• Show up
• Call back
• Keep the appointment
• Follow through
• Pay attention
• Speak plainly
• Be honest
• Offer to help 
• Find an answer
• Keep your promise

And, for god's sake:

• Don't send me a survey every time I interact with you.

Chances are, it will reach me when I'm in a foul mood.

I am a Member of the Chain Gang

I've plunged into Web3 by arranging to buy my first NFT.

So you might say I am a member of the chain gang.

As in "blockchain."

It feels like a fad, but so did Web1, at least for a month or two.

If it is a fad, soon I'll be a fugitive from the chain gang.

Which reminds me...

If you've never seen the 1932 film Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, check it out.

It won the Academy Award as Best Picture that year.

And, no, Edward G. Robinson didn't slap Groucho Marx at the award ceremony.

Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was "pre-Code," meaning it's raw for its day.

The script came out of the pages of True Detective, and was as racy and hard-boiled as that pulp.

And better still, it was based on a true story.

In 1991, the Library of Congress chose Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang for preservation in the National Film Registry along with the likes of Vertigo, The Godfather, and Airplane!

It doesn't get better than that.

Loving Projects

Old age is life's parody.

— Simone de Beauvoir  

Bruce Willis' family's announcement that the wisecracking actor has succumbed to aphasia is yet another reminder of old age's cruel sense of humor.

Old age "crushes" people, said existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, turning them into parodies of their younger selves.

"There is only one solution," she wrote in The Coming of Age, the philosopher's sweeping essay on elderhood. "That is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning. 

"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves."

The specific passions de Beauvoir had in mind were ones that today's emotion scientists would classify as cathected (other-directed); namely, love, friendship, and compassion.

The old can stave off mental, emotional and spiritual decline through "devotion to individuals, to groups or causes, or to creative work," de Beauvoir wrote.

But interests and intentions alone aren't enough. 

The old must have projects: purposeful ventures that "people their world with goals, values and reasons for existence."

Projects, after all, are the things that consume our youth, when we're little more than walking, talking, wage-earning commodities—"human resources." 

Objectified cogs in the global economy.

As soon as we reach adolescence, we're forced to devote all our waking hours to learning, earning, networking and caring—if we're lucky—for a family and a home.

There's barely a second to stop and smell the coffee.

Those projects by default are loving—purposeful and other-directed—even if mandatory.

Purposeful projects in our dotage, on the other hand, are voluntary. They have to be discovered, crafted and tended; otherwise, we acquiesce to sloth and idleness, sleeping the first half the of day, sleepwalking the rest.

De Beauvoir didn't pull any punches when it came to old age.

She described it as surreal, a "double alienation."

We're stigmatized, twice: cut off from youth and from any role in the economy.

Young folks question our worth—and so do we.

A retired newspaper editor told me yesterday that a twenty-something corporate IT trainer once said to him, "You old people are a waste of time." He didn't disagree.

That sums up old age's predicament succinctly: it's decrepit and nonproductive.

"America is the country of young men," Emerson said.

That's truer than true.

The only way out, as de Beauvoir saw things, is to be-for-others, just as we were before we grew old. 

To tackle a passel of loving projects.

If we don't dive into a lot of loving projects, she wrote, we face the very cruelest of fates: "abandonment, segregation, decay, dementia, death.”

We need loving projects—several—just to stay in the game.

Freud, whose influence on de Beauvoir was profound, said it best.

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

NOTE: Read more about the renewed interest in Simone de Beauvoir's 1970 book The Coming of Age and watch A Walk through the Land of Old Age, a 1974 film featuring the French philosopher.

Above: Priscilla, My Mother by Anne Gifford. Watercolor on paper. Spring Corn by Rose Frantzen. Oil on canvas.