Author: johncla

All of the words listed here are ones I encountered ‘in the wild’ – while reading. Not flinty or harsh words, but difficult words; words I trip on. I’m not scanning the dictionary, that would be cheating.
Spellcheck in Word objects to many of these words (anocracy, defeasible), even though the words are recognized without complaint using internet search. Note that spellcheck doesn’t like the word “spellcheck”.
I try to avoid scientific terms, even if they occur in a novel like “Under the Volcano” (for example: tabid, tabes, sprue). Many of the words in this list are from recent reading in novels (Return of the Native, Bleak House), some from the news magazine The Economist.

• Adumbrate: indicate faintly.
• Aeromancy: divination conducted by interpreting atmospheric conditions.
• Alembic: a distilling apparatus, now obsolete, consisting of a rounded, necked flask and a cap with a long beak for condensing and conveying the products to a receiver. See also, Grateful Dead.
• Anacoluthon: a sentence or construction in which the expected grammatical sequence is absent, for example ‘while in the garden, the door banged shut’.
• Anocracy: a form of government loosely defined as part democracy and part dictatorship, or as a “regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features”.
• Apposite: apt in the circumstances, or in relation to something.
• Chrism: a mixture of oil and balsam, consecrated and used for anointing at baptism and in other rites of Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches.
• Crepitate: make a crackling sound.
• Defeasible: open in principle to revision, valid objection, forfeiture, or annulment.
• Ebriety: intoxication or inebriation, whether regarded as the condition, the process, or the habit.
• Ecomancy: the style of magic practiced by druids, witches, and ecomancers. Its philosophy emphasizes a connection with nature.
• Ecopoesis: the “fabrication of a sustainable ecosystem on a currently lifeless, sterile planet”.
• Emesis: an act or instance of vomiting.
• Epistemic: relating to knowledge or the study of knowledge.
• Evergetism: the ancient practice of high-status and wealthy individuals in society distributing part of their wealth to the community.
• Fulgent: shining brightly.
• Geomancy: the art of placing or arranging buildings or other sites auspiciously.
• Jalousie: a blind or shutter made of a row of angled slats.
• Jugate: paired, for example “jugate busts on a coin”.
• McGuffin: an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot. A poor man’s deus ex machina?
• Nutant: drooping, nodding.
• Oneiric: relating to dreams or dreaming.
• Plangent: having a loud reverberating sound.
• Reboant: resounding or reverberating loudly.
• Reductive: tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.
• Sempiternal: eternal and unchanging; everlasting.
• Sui generis: constituting a class alone – unique, peculiar.
• Thaumaturgy: the working of wonders or miracles; magic.
• Thrasonical: bragging, boastful.

The Bottom Line
I read an interesting history of the English language recently, I think it was in CS Lewis’ novel “That Hideous Strength”. English has a Saxon (Germanic) foundation with a layer of French/Latin over the top. Single-syllable words (house) are often Saxon in origin. These single-syllable words often have multi-syllable synonyms (domicile) which are usually French/Latin in origin.

The other-worldliness seems to grow on a daily basis. Yesterday’s heroes are villains today. A word meant one thing when I was in college, now that word means something quite different. Yes I know it’s just a sign that I passed my seventieth birthday, but this is my experience. Other worldly.

Try this: using Google search, enter ‘war on merit’ as a search string. It’s a search term I used myself when researching my previous blog post: “War on Merit”. Google responds with page after page of links to articles about Nazi war medals. Note that there is a non-Nazi version of this medal, awarded by the state of Brunswick in WW1. Google however, is careful to step around that and link to Nazi medals, making it very clear what they think of “war on merit”.

This is not a one-off with Google. Try also searching in turn, separately, for images of black men, white men, straight couples, and gay couples. Your searches for black men and gay couples will be played straight. Google returns row after row of appropriate, happy smiling images that match your search term.

However, in the results for ‘white men’, the 1st row contains images of one woman and four black men. The further results contain a mixed bag of races and genders, and hostile tag lines: “white men are bad”, “white men killed more American”, and “3 white men charged with killing Black”. Google’s engineers even manage to resurrect Tawanna Brawley with the tagline “biracial woman claims attack by four white”.

In the Google results for ‘straight couples’ starting with the left hand images in the first two rows you see rainbow flags and then more hostile tag lines: “Alaska Airlines apologizes to Gay”, “Gay man and straight woman can form a…”, and “Bisexuality: ‘A straight couple raped…”.

OK, maybe you’re not sold yet. These things happen, right? No, they don’t. Try the same searches on Bing or Lycos. On the other search engines you get normal results; not twisted, angry commentaries on what your search terms say about your values.

See the table below for a summary of my experiment. Green is good, red is bad.

Query	Google	Bing & Lycos
war on merit
white men
black men
straight couple
gay couple

The Bottom Line
The engineers in Google’s search division have joined the Thought Police, right out of George Orwell’s ‘1984’. Google knows when we search for terms that indicate libertarian leanings, and responds by telling us we are fascist. Google responds to searches for images of straight couples and white men, by telling us that straight couples and white men are bad and rapists.

Bing and Lycos don’t do that. Maybe we should stop using Google.

The searches on Google, Bing, and Lycos that I describe above were recorded, and are posted on YouTube here.

America was a society dedicated, among other things, to the idea that merit should win out. In America, the old idea of status based on who your parents were gave way to progress based on quality and effort. Now, that’s changing. Equality of opportunity (all men are created equal) is giving way to equality of results (all men are equal).

Schools
Basing teacher pay on performance? Teachers unions want higher salaries across the board, rather than performance-based (merit) incentives.
Selective admission to gifted programs? Critics say this is racist. Proposals surfaced recently in both San Francisco and New York to give up merit-based admission criteria like grades and test scores, in favor of a lottery.

Universities
Universities, broadly across the US, rather than base hiring and promotions on teaching quality and published research, now impose a political loyalty oath. “Only those candidates with a strong and compelling Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will move forward in the evaluation process.”
Universities now seek to deprecate grades as a factor in the admissions process. Both Harvard and Yale were recently involved in lawsuits alleging that Asian-Americans are systematically discriminated against because of their high grades: “[the suit] says Asian American applicants have the best academic records but the lowest admission rate among any race.”
Universities, in the belief that standardized tests like the SAT are racist, are choosing to end the use of testing in the admissions process.
Remember grades? Now we have grade inflation. I’m a former adjunct instructor at multiple local colleges, and I can tell you it’s hard to hold the line on grades. There is little interest in the integrity of grades. Students are customers and a revenue source, faculty are just employees. The terms “corruption” and “professional malfeasance” apply.

An article published by PBS summarized:

“A recent study revealed that 42 percent of four-year college grades are A’s, and 77 percent are either A’s or B’s. According to Inside Higher Ed, “At four-year schools, awarding of A’s has been going up five to six percentage points per decade and A’s are now three times more common than they were in 1960.” At Yale, 62 percent of grades were in the A range in the spring of 2012. That figure was only 10 percent in 1963.”

Universities are broadly opposed to basing admissions on standardized tests and grades, they select and promote faculty who agree to a political loyalty oath, and they fail to use rigorous grading standards.

Sports
In the US, pro sports led the way in integrating African Americans. Team owners saw that hiring black athletes was a way to win more games. Today the NFL is under constant pressure to hire more black coaches. First there was the Rooney Rule. That wasn’t enough, so in November 2020 the owners passed a new rule that gives extra draft picks to teams when their minority assistant coaches are hired away as head coaches or GMs.

Is there a business more ruthlessly Darwinian than professional sports? The metric is brutal and simple: wins and losses. Black athletes are successful, so why don’t NFL owners not hire more black coaches?

Over the years there have been enough black head coaches to provide a good base of performance data. Here’s the relevant number: 43%. That’s the average win/loss percentage for minority head coaches. Feel free to check my math, I averaged the win-loss records provided in this article. For a 16-game season 43% is a record of seven wins and nine losses. Typically you need a 10-6 record to make the playoffs. Should the NFL owners up the ante, and offer three extra wins when teams hire a minority coach?

Corporate Boards
California recently enacted legislation requiring corporations to make board membership racially and sexually diverse: “to have a minimum of one director from an underrepresented community … a corporation with more than 4 but fewer than 9 directors to have a minimum of 2 directors from underrepresented communities, and such a corporation with 9 or more directors to have a minimum of 3 directors from underrepresented communities.”.
The result? Rather than select directors based solely on their industry background and performance, California corporations now also need to evaluate candidates by gender and race.

The Goal
Progressives’ goal is not equal opportunity – it’s equal results, regardless of fairness and efficiency.
We’ve discovered that improving opportunity doesn’t provide equity. Why? Because equality is not a natural condition. Some of us are smarter, some are better athletes, some are more physically attractive or socially adept.

Why now? In her opinion on the key affirmative action case Grutter v Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary”. That was only seventeen years ago, but the left now realizes that all the preferences enacted in the civil rights era are insufficient if EQUITY is the goal. Fairness doesn’t cut it. Establishing preferences is also inadequate. The only solution is, wherever differences exist they must be erased through government power.

So, why not pursue equity as a goal? Because equity is unfair. It means distributing benefits based on a person’s birth (race and gender) rather than based on skills and hard work. Remember the old saying: “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”? Indeed.
Equity is counter to the 14th Amendment: “equal protection under the law “.
Equity is counter to long-held American values – we’re a society based on merit and hard work, rather than birth. We left that behind in Europe.
Achieving equity requires massive state intervention.
Pursuing equity casts doubt on the achievements of every minority person in the work force. “Is this person really competent, or are they a token hire?”
When we fly in an airplane, go into surgery, or take a college class, we have the right to expect that the person doing the work was chosen because of the quality of their work, rather than their gender, ethnicity, or political beliefs.

The Bottom Line
Today is Wednesday of the week following the Super Bowl. A letter to the editor in this morning’s newspaper ended with this sentence: “As we enjoyed the Super Bowl, we realized it was only enjoyable because the goal posts didn’t move, the refs called a fair game and the result was ‘unequal’.”
If you’re free, you’re not equal. If you’re equal, you’re not free.