A female Assistant District Attorney from my town of Santa Cruz is brutally murdered during a vacation in Hawaii. The murderer is the man with whom she was on vacation. (No, I don’t need to say, “the alleged murderer.” The presumption of innocence is a wise convention adopted because the government can do so much harm to a private person without even trying. Me, I am just a lone, practically unknown blogger. I wish I could influence public opinion in Hawaii, but it’s probably not a fact that I do.) Everyone eulogized the victim, locally. She was a good colleague and a caring person. Apparently, she was also somewhat of an academic star when she went to school locally.
The question no one wants to ask, an obvious question: What was a 33 -year old woman, a well- educated woman, one with a professionally-induced good awareness of crime doing sleeping with a violent man? How do I know she was sleeping with him? Well, that’s what people do when they vacation together; they have lots of sex. Otherwise, it’s not a vacation. How do I know he is a violent man? Well again. The man is 38. These things don’t develop suddenly. There are forerunners to the act of throwing a woman out of a moving car. I am certain there were warning signs. I suspect he has a rap-sheet she could have found.
Why are the perverse tastes of many women regarding sexual partners off limits? Does political correctness make us fear what we will find if we lift that cover?
As I write, a handful of Ghadafi’s faithful are holding out in a small town called Bani Walid. They know they are surrounded. They know their leader, wherever he is, will not regain power, that he will probably die soon or be hanged later. Almost certainly, they have access to TV, including Al Jazeera. I am curious about what’s motivating them to die for a lost cause. Our journalists are too lazy to ask.
Some pronounced mistakes a of vocabulary unaccountably become fashionable, including among those who should know better, such as broadcasters and journalists. When I was first learning English, in the 18th century, I was taught that you say, ” A large amount of potato soup but many potatoes.” That was one of these things that make English a good language. It has plenty of words that instruct you on how to look at what follows them.
Starting a couple of years ago and with undergraduates, “many” and “few” disappeared. I think it was not just laziness. Somewhere in the corner of the older teenagers’ mind there grew the idea that “amount” was a better word than the plain “many,” that “amount” is cool. This morning, I heard a reporter on NPR refer to “the amount of people” due to attend the 9/11 commemorations. I know I sound like a curmudgeon but is this another side of the infantilization of the culture flowing from political correctness?
