Chamblee54

From patriarchy to snowflake: five keywords you need to know Those naughty naysayers at the BBC had a five part series about trendy words. The fabulous five are Snowflake, The Nanny State, Patriarchy, Safe Space, Sovereignty. We learn that snowflake used to mean someone in Missouri who was opposed to abolition. Words do not always mean the same thing. This is a repost.
The Nanny State was the segment that sent PG scurrying to google. TNS was coined by Iain Macleod, who seems to have been quite the nuisance. Mr. Macleod wrote an article in The Spectator where he gifted us with the phrase. BBC says the article was about having speed limits on British roadways. Unfortunately, the article is behind a strict paywall, and you cannot tell for yourself. The paywall is a capitalist twist on TNS concept.
BBC also referenced an article by George Orwell. This is a splendid piece, where the former Eric Blair complains about what he calls “Pamphletese.” This is the style of writing used by communists in 1944. What does this have to do with TNS? Maybe the state’s nanny is big brother in drag.
The Orwell column is a splendid bit of writing. There is a list of words he would like to see banned: “Achilles’ heel, jackboot, hydra-headed, ride roughshod over, stab in the back, petty-bourgeois, stinking corpse, liquidate, iron heel, blood-stained oppressor, cynical betrayal, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, jackal, hyena, blood-bath.” Many of these are little used today. English cliches have a Darwinist quality, and only the strong survive. Unfortunately, the language is perpetually littered with questionable phrases. Anybody reading can think of a few dozen. These things too shall pass away.
“Yet they and other equally inappropriate words are dug up for pamphleteering purposes. The result is a style of writing that bears the same relation to writing real English as doing a jigsaw puzzle bears to painting a picture. It is just a question of fitting together a number of ready-made pieces. Just talk about hydra-headed jack-boots riding roughshod over blood-stained hyenas, and you are all right. For confirmation of which, see almost any pamphlet issued by the Communist Party—or by any other political party, for that matter.” Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.

PG came across a link. The post was: What comes to mind when you see her headscarf? Let’s look at what your mind is seeing. (This post is no longer available online.) Technically, this is about the hijab, pronounced eeJOB. If you google hijab, you will have the opportunity to buy one.
The article talked about the unspoken assumptions people have about a woman with a hijab. For PG, these are going to be mostly positive. Most of the Muslims PG has known are great people. The turmoil caused by aggressive Jesus worshipers is absent when dealing with Muslims.
Much of the article deals with “unconscious bias.” You are given the chance to take a “test your unconscious bias and find the areas of your perspective that need a little extra TLC.” PG is not sure that he trusts “Psychologists from Harvard, UW, and UVA.” Still, the only cost for taking this test will probably be damage to his mental health.
Before you start, there is a disclaimer. “IP addresses are routinely recorded, but are completely confidential.” There is a difference between confidential and anonymous. Big brother knows about PG anyway, so this test probably won’t make much difference. You are asked to agree to the following statement: “I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed.” Fasten your digital seat belt.
Next, you choose a test. The first page has 15 options: Sexuality, Native American, Weapons, Arab-Muslim, etc. PG chooses “Weapons (‘Weapons – Harmless Objects’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Black faces, and images of weapons or harmless objects.)
The first thing to do is answer a questionnaire. You are asked how warm or cold you feel towards white people, and black people. There is a list of statements that you agree or disagree, slightly, moderately, or strongly. Some of these statements are: I think of myself as someone who has an assertive personality, I have considered being an entertainer.
The heart of the test uses photographs. There are pictures of black people, and pictures of white people. There are pictures of weapons, like a bayonet, a historic pistol, a hand grenade, and a battle ax. There are pictures of harmless objects, like a water bottle, tape recorder, camera, and can of Coca Cola. Many of these could be used a weapons; a can of Coca Cola could be thrown at someone. Many Police consider a camera a weapon.
The pictures are flashed on the screen. You hit the e key for the left side, and the i key for the right side. At first the two choices are kept separate, i.e. you choose black or white, weapon or harmless. Then the two groups are combined. The choice is left side black weapons, and right side white harmless. Then they shift sides, to black harmless and white weapons. You are shown a picture, and choose which category to put it in.
The last questionnaire is the demographics. Annual family income is not considered. Ethnicity refers to hispanic/latin, or non hispanic/latin. Religion, age, “political identity,” gender (only male or female,) and education are considered, among other factors.
The result: “Your data suggest a strong association of Black Americans with Weapons compared to White Americans. … The interpretation is described as ‘automatic association between weapons and White Americans’ if you responded faster when weapons and White American images were classified with the same key than when weapons and Black Americans were classified with the same key.”
Whatever. Maybe PG should take another test for comparison. Maybe this time, choose a subject where hateful judgement is not in your face everyday. Since the seminal article is about the hijab, maybe … “You have opted to complete the Arab Muslim – Other People IAT.”
The opening questionnaire is different.”I attempt to appear nonprejudiced toward Arab Muslims in order to avoid disapproval from others, NO spontaneous prejudiced thoughts come into my mind when I encounter an unfamiliar Arab Muslim.”

This test is different from the race test. Instead of photographs, words were used. For the two groups of people, we have names (seemingly all male.) Examples: Arab Muslim – Akbar, Ashraf, Habib – – Other People – Benoit, Philippe, Guillame. The other categories are Good and Bad. Examples: Good – Joy, Love, Peace – – Bad – Agony, Terrible, Horrible.
PG made more mistakes in the fancy part of the Arab test. He took a couple of breaks to take screen shots, one of which is included in this report. At times, he felt himself automatically blaming the Arabs for bad things. This did not happen, consciously, in the race/weapons test.
The result: Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Other People and Arab Muslims. … This new test was prompted by the events of September 11, 2001. Suicide pilots, identified as Arab Muslims, crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. killing about 4,000 people.
While this may have some value to the ivory tower crowd, it does not tell PG much about himself. Arguably, IAT says more about the researchers than it does the respondents. It is doubtful that these tests will “find the areas of your perspective that need a little extra TLC.” This is a repost. Pictures from The Library of Congress. These pictures were not used in the IAT studied today.

Transgress was the center of attention in a curious facebook meme. The ten letters were displayed in a festive font. Topside magenta fades into pink dust, inside a thin blue shell. These tasteful letters were displayed on a white-as-snow background. PG saw the T-meme, and felt moved to make a one word comment: cisgress. Using all lower case was intentional.
For those who are new here, cis is the opposite of trans. The contemporary usage generally refers to gender. Cis people live with the gender assigned at birth. Trans people make adjustments. There are a lot of options. Gender non-conformance is a sensitive, emotional issue. PG expressed concerns about the c-prefix at least twice. Once, he was told “Butch up Mary.”
Getting back to facebook, there was a bit of conversation. Someone said “Cisgreassing = privilege=oppression.” To which PG replied “actually, it was a joke. I took the word transgress. I substituted cis for trans. I came up with the nonsense word cisgress.” There was only one thing left to do: Google cisgress. There were 115 results for cisgress.
Linguistically correct “Simon Hoggart (Changing the gender agenda) asks who decides whether words like “cisgender” should enter the language. I do! English is scandalously lacking in politically and linguistically correct antonyms of this sort. The Queen can create the Duchess of Cambridge, so surely I can create the much-needed expressions “cisgress” (be a good boy), “cisvestite” (bloke wearing trousers), and “cisaction” (no deal). Anyone who doesn’t disagree is a transsy.” UPDATE: This letter was removed from a facebook thread. The note: “kindy do not use trans slurs in your posts”
CIS-GReS is the second google result. It is one s short of cisgress, but will have to do. “CIS-GReS is the official group supported by the School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne. It is also affiliated with the Graduate Student Association. … If you are a graduate research student with a supervisor from CIS, this is your group.”
Pictures for today are from The Library of Congress. Russel Lee was the photographer. Tenant farmers in Oklahoma. June-July, 1939. Living conditions of tenant farmers in Oklahoma This is a repost from 2019. Cis is now considered a slur.

These author insults were borrowed from flavorwire. HT to Andrew Sullivan The pictures are from The Library of Congress This is a repost.
25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley “All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence “Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820) “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling “Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen “Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864) “I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972) “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876) “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
09. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
08. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger “I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
07. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923) “Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’…. One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
06. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning “I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
05. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948) “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
04. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898) “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
03. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce “the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
02. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922) “A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
01. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928) “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
Bonus. Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”
Bonus two, a comment to the original post.: RomanHans Re “The Cardinal’s Mistress” by Benito Mussolini, Dorothy Parker wrote one of my favorite bon mots: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Bonus Three, from Flannery O’Connor “I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”