Confessions of a semicolon lover

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times salutes a subway notice demonstrating the proper use of the semicolon. Apparently it’s all too rare a sight nowadays; this bit of punctuation is generally considered an archaic has-been.

Well, I protest; I must confess right here and now that I love the semicolon. Also, I might add, the liberal—did I just say liberal?—use of the dash. And I’m utterly addicted to parenthetical observations (they’re so very useful when one has the sort of ideaphoria for which bloggers are famous).

No, the semicolon is king; how else to separate those related-but-connected thoughts (note that I’m rather fond of the hyphen, as well)? Or that string of objects that follow each other but are bunched in groups: spices such as pepper, cinnamon, and cloves; herbs such as parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (and by the way, are you going to Scarborough Fair?).

So, my friends, revive that semicolon! Let it not die; use it well and use it often.

[ADDENDUM: And while we’re at it, let’s stamp out the creeping use of the apostrophe before the s in “its” when used as a possessive; it’s clear that the apostrophe has its proper place in the contraction for “it is.”]

Whatever happened to those benchmarks?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Iraqi Parliament has passed some new and potentially significant laws.

This particular event should have been the lead article on the front page of every newspaper. It should have been the big subject of all the talk shows. It ought to have been acknowledged by every critic of the surge—you know, the ones who initially said the surge wouldn’t work before it even began. The ones who then said Petraeus was lying about the drop in casualties. The ones who then said that it didn’t mean anything anyway because after all, the Iraqi legislature hadn’t met the proper benchmarks that would indicate political progress and reconciliation.

However, here’s how it played on the network news programs. Continue reading →

A spate of killings (Illinois Tech and NY): liberty vs. safety

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as the recent horrific killings at Northern Illinois University go, I’ve said most of what I want to say before, here. As I wrote earlier in connection with the shootings Virginia Tech:

Yes, a gun was involved here, and would that the shooter had never had access to it. But he did, either legally or illegally [in Illinois, it was legally]. And, given that, it stands to reason it would have been a good thing had someone in that crowd of students been armed and trained, as well.

I am often reminded, of all things, of the story of Sleeping Beauty. Whatever am I talking about? Just this: you can burn all the spindles in the land, but you can never get them all. And rest assured, the ones that remain will fall into the hands of those eager to do evil.

Speaking of doing evil, there’s of course this story, as well. A man (a patient? an ex-patient? the friend/husband/lover of a patient?) stabs and hacks a NY psychologist to death, and seriously wounds her colleague. Continue reading →

Obama’s the one

The New Neo Posted on by

It appears that Obama is starting to pull away from Clinton.

I’ve made no secret of my preference for Hillary over Obama: I think she’d mount less of a challenge to McCain, but if elected I also think she would be less likely to abandon Iraq as precipitously as Obama would.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that Obama will be the nominee, of course. But it’s looking more and more like it. Just read the pundits; the consensus seems to be that Hillary is toast.

This means that the media may (may) finally begin to subject Obama to more careful scrutiny. Continue reading →

Third anniversary: if you blog long enough….

The New Neo Posted on by

…you find you’ve written about almost everything.

Now that I’m somewhere around my third anniversary of active blogging (yikes! gadzooks! arghhh!) I have to say I never expected to still be doing this at this point. But I continue to enjoy it, and as long as that’s true, I plan to keep on keeping on.

One of the added benefits of lengthy and daily blogging is that, after so long a time, I find I’ve blogged on an amazing number of topics. Often, even I forget how many. I’ve probably duplicated myself more than a few times without even realizing it, since certain themes keep popping up with great insistence.

Sometimes, though, I find myself writing about something—or thinking of writing about something—and it begins to ring a faint and distant bell. Continue reading →

A sonnet in praise of sonnets

The New Neo Posted on by

I write some poetry from time to time,
And gravitate to forms, I must confess.
I crave some meter and a bit of rhyme.
Free verse can be illusory progress.
The sonnet with its prescribed fourteen lines
Presents a special challenge to be met,
A game that Frost, my hero, thus defines:
No point in playing tennis with no net.

Ah, freedom! It’s a lofty modern goal.
And rules? Meant to be broken, don’t you see?
Let’s shed the last vestige of stiff control
And revel in a life and art that’s free!
But rules are guides, not just constraints or chains.
Throw all out, and mere anarchy remains.

For those of you not familiar with what it’s like to try to write a sonnet (and I’d guess most of you aren’t), please take my word for it when I say that it is really a very demanding form of poetry.

But fun, like a game with rules. If you like to solve double-crostics or crossword puzzles you might have a taste of what I’m talking about. Continue reading →

Obama: too young at heart

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no accident that Obama does well with young voters. There’s something about his rhetoric that especially appeals to the idealism of youth. As Betsy Newmark points out, the young are often “too ignorant of history to realize that change just doesn’t happen no matter how attractive the politician arguing for change seems to be.”

Obama is certainly an attractive politician. But there’s nothing about him that indicates an ability to do what he says he will do. That isn’t meant as a slap at Obama in particular; no one could, even if elected President. It’s a promise that cannot be kept, and those who are older and more experienced ought to know that.

Candidates always promise more than they can deliver. Continue reading →

Ten most famous Americans: the changing American educational scene

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been some hoo-ha in the blogopsphere about a poll asking 2000 high school students to name the ten most famous Americans.

Here was their list:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%

2. Rosa Parks: 60%

3. Harriet Tubman: 44%

4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%

5.Benjamin Franklin: 29%

6. Amelia Earhart: 25%

7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%

8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%

9. Thomas Edison: 18%

10. Albert Einstein: 16%

The fact that Harriet Tubman (a minor figure at best) and Rosa Parks (an influential and courageous person but hardly one of the giants of history) are way up there is no doubt a reflection of diversity education gone amok. And what’s up with the inclusion of Oprah Winfrey?

But in certain respects the students are merely repeating what they’ve learned—look at some history texts and you might think Harriet Tubman was among the ten most famous Americans, based on the amount of attention paid. Continue reading →