| Viewing Single Post From: Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Sep 3 2008, 07:54 PM |
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I HAVE A DREAM A well-informed insider tells me that the big “October surprise” that’s been the stuff of rumor these past few days at several influential blogs will shake the political establishment to its foundations. Apparently the campaign of our own Joan Foster, attack poetess and Blog Hooligan extraordinaire, has reached escape velocity. By the first week of next month, my source tells me, the polls will show Joan overtaking both Obama and McCain. I’d like to remind Joan that I stand firm on my offer to serve as Secretary of the Treasury in her new administration. (See http://s1.zetaboards.com/Liestoppers_meeting/single/?p=54725&t=579715.) If lucky enough to get the nod, I’ll promptly do what any self-respecting bureaucrat with a budget and a mandate would do: I’ll create a new agency within Treasury—namely, the Department of Rectifying Kooky Solecisms (D.O.R.K.S.), and I’ll appoint myself temporary director. Because everything is somehow connected to money, I see no reason why Treasury shouldn’t take the lead in safeguarding the language, which like the currency itself has been wantonly debased these past few decades. D.O.R.K.S. will, of course, be charged with fining professional writers who insult the English language. (Let’s get that boring objection of the strict constructionists out of the way—you know, that business about the federal government’s overstepping its bounds. Both of the courageous professors at the Duke Law School have assured me that the Constitution’s interstate-commerce clause—“old reliable” to the cognoscenti--will once again legitimize federal authority in this matter.) Enabling legislation will broadly define a professional writer as anyone who gets paid for putting his thoughts before the public. Writing subject to departmental review will include articles, notes, and letters posted on the Internet. With few exceptions, posters at Liestoppers will not come under the dominion of D.O.R.K.S. By contrast, oodles of professors and administrators at research universities will find themselves in the cross hairs. My authorized biographer insists on my getting out of the blocks very quickly after I take the oath; those first one-hundred days make all the difference. So expect the usual barbarisms to be targeted early in my directorship. Here are just a few examples of the many infelicities that D.O.R.K.S. will censure: “Disinterested” mistakenly used for “uninterested.” “General consensus” inflating “consensus.” (Can a consensus be other than general?) “To beg the question,” a notion in logic, confused with “to invite the question.” “Diversity” doing duty for “racial heterogeneity.” “Underrepresented minorities” inserted for “unqualified aspirants.” Enough for now. Stay tuned, for next January D.O.R.K.S. will start cranking out bulletins that will give writers at least a week’s notice of solecisms to be added to the Index. If you’ve read this far, you deserve a preview of the first bulletin. Because I cannot think of a better way to jump-start D.O.R.K.S. than to go after a word that has caused more mischief of late than just about any other, a word whose misuse has contributed mightily to the need for Liestoppers itself, that first bulletin will devote itself to the use and abuse of “expertise.” Where would we be, after all, if Tara Levicy hadn’t pushed an expertise she laughably lacked? And what about Mike Nifong’s pretensions to prosecutorial and even investigatory expertise? Can we do justice to the politburo of the Group of 88 without weighing its self-proclaimed expertise in matters of race, class, and gender? Didn’t Comrade Lubiano somewhere chastise the unwashed for daring to enter a domain in which only credentialed academic “experts” were fit to dispute—as if our talking about fairness, decency, and the presumption of innocence were akin to interrupting physicists arguing the merits of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? Although “expertise” doesn’t even please the ear, we’ll leave the question of euphony open for now. But we’ll not walk away from the very important matter of spelling. So until the larger question is resolved, until, that is, D.O.R.K.S. issues final regulations on the proper uses of “expertise,” the January bulletin will include a preliminary injunction against using the current spelling. (If “task force” were not itself long overdue for a spanking, I’d appoint one to study the issue.) To protect an otherwise unsuspecting and vulnerable public during the interregnum, and to give everyone an obvious indicator of the trap that is that loaded word, I shall announce on January 25 that, henceforth, professional scribblers will buy grace only as long as they adopt the spelling “expertease.” January 25, 2009: Book it, Danno.  |
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
12:22 AM Nov 28
