Dowd gets stranger—and less limpid
Maureen Dowd’s latest on the Democratic Convention has two especially odd and ignorant moments, even for her.
The first is this:
[Hillary] offered the electrifying fight that the limpid Obama has not….
liquid: clear and bright; “the liquid air of a spring morning”; “eyes shining with a liquid luster”; “limpid blue eyes”
crystalline: transmitting light; able to be seen through with clarity; “the cold crystalline water of melted snow”; “crystal clear skies”; “could see the sand on the bottom of the limpid pool”; “lucid air”; “a pellucid brook”; “transparent crystal”
(of language) transparently clear; easily understandable; “writes in a limpid style”; “lucid directions”; “a luculent oration”- Robert Burton; “pellucid prose”; “a crystal clear explanation”; “a perspicuous argument”
What did Dowd think she was saying? And although I know columnists are given a huge amount of discretion in what they write, isn’t anybody going over her columns at all before they’re published?
The answer to the second question is probably “no.” The answer to the first is that Dowd most likely thought the word meant “limp, energyless” or even the more evocative “flaccid.” Clearly (limpidly), it doesn’t.
And then there’s this, the closing sentence of her piece. Why did Dowd choose to showcase this especially inane remark? It occurs after a paragraph mentioning that there’s a been a great deal of trivial faultfinding going on at the convention:
“I’m telling you, man,” said one top Democrat, “it’s something about our party, the shtetl mentality.”
Now, one can say a lot of things about the Democratic Party, but I hadn’t noticed that its viewpoint resembles that of the small, impoverished, beleaguered but devout Jewish towns of Eastern Europe. Here’s more about that shtetl mentality:
The shtetl was the incubator and fortress of Ashkenazi culture. The residents were poor folk, fundamentalist in faith, earthy, superstitious, stubbornly resisting secularism or change. They wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish, shunning foreign tongues among themselves. They were dairymen, draymen, cobblers, tailors, butchers, fishmongers, shopkeepers, peddlers. They considered their exile temporary and dreamed of the Messianic miracle that would—any day—return them, and their brethren around the world, to the shining glory of a restored Israel in the Holy Land…
They could not move without approval from the police. Entire local populations could be abruptly “resettled,” forced out of their homes, with no more legality then the arbitrary impulse of an often besotted governor.
Jews were forbidden to own land. They were barred (with exceptions) from colleges and universities and from the humblest government jobs. They were not allowed to practice certain crafts, skills, and trades.
Life in the shtetl was very hard. (in some years, thousands literally starved to death.) Jews were spat upon, beaten, killed, their synagogues and cemeteries desecrated—either in “minor incidents” shrugged off by the authorities, or in full-scale pogroms instigated by successive regimes…
Come to think of it, there is one—and only one—similarity. To paraphrase, the Democrats “consider their exile [from the Presidency] temporary and dream…of the…miracle that would—any day—return them, and their brethren around the world, to the shining glory of a restored” Presidency in Washington DC. But I doubt that’s what the gentleman was referring to.
Huh? It’s really getting hard to follow what most Democrats and Liberals are saying any more. So, like they are saying they are persecuted, or are they endorsing shtettls be established here?
I think the “shtetl mentality” referred to here is the tendency to ask, “What will the Gentiles think?” The Democratic convention version is, I guess, “What will the Republicans think?” Thus all the second-guessing about the color of Mrs. Obama’s dress, and so on….
maybe its a typo that makes a word, so isnt caught.
maybe she meant limpet? which has little to do with a fish (the incredible mr limpet), but is: any of various marine gastropods with a low conical shell open beneath, often browsing on rocks at the shoreline and adhering when disturbed.
i think she meant limped…
Lacking or having lost rigidity, as of structure or substance / To move or proceed haltingly or unsteadily
Wonderful! Malapropisms are great fun, such as one made by a friend, another old geezer who also likes a drink, and got carried away about the stupidity of “Global Warning!”
Neo’s helpful suggestions of what Dowd might have intended, i.e., “limp,” or “flaccid,” only added to my enjoyment. In this post-Modern world, “limp” associates with “wrist,” and “flaccid” with . . . . Nothing wrong with those, of course!
I think the answer to such Dowd-mistakes is not that the NYT doesn’t have copy editors, it’s that they are recent Harvard graduates.
neo:
“isn’t anybody going over her columns at all before they’re published?”
Oh, I think they’ve abandoned standards long before this.
Dowd is an institution there by deference to seniority and notoriety (mistakenly thought to sell the brand), so by definition she is beyond being corrected or edited, even in a formative alzeimers condition; Much like Jimmy Carter is to the Dimocratic Potty, though of course such behaviour in the pursuit of serious business is tantamount to self-destruction. If the dims fail to win this election do you suppose they will stop acting like total idiots and swing back to the center?
It’s perfectly within the democrats world view to describe themselves as a persecuted minority. The culture of the victim has been a democrat staple for a long time. Even though Obama has come from a perfectly middle class background, his membership in the victim class is going to be a familiar theme of the campaign. As many (including plenty on the Clinton team) have pointed out, a white candidate with his credentials would never have gotten as far as he has.