bvs@biblevs.net

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?”

Answer: When you make the acquaintance of Fat Charley’s Grocery, next door to the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
You must go on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish Year, the day that requires you to fast for 24 hours. You must then eat a very large Fat Charley Sandwich containing no kosher food, loaded with plenty of ham. I promise you that after that you will meet with God.

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P.S. I presume you are Christian, not Jewish, and therefore not likely to be educated well enough to know that your sentence, “When…” needs “to” where you wrote “and.” No need to tell you to keep up the bad work; you will.

Jacques Barzun is dead. He died late last year at age 104 and his family’s loss is barely greater than our loss. Barzun is one of my heroes and has been that since about 1970 when I first heard of him. His was a gigantic intellect and no one can fail to appreciate his writings if one takes the trouble. His grandson Charles has found a perfect way to communicate with Barzun even now. The letter is both a touching tribute and a profound wisdom essay. Please read it all. I am very grateful to BARRY FISH for forwarding it to me.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Letter-to-My-Grandfather/139117/

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I am filing this post in the archives under “education,” “everything,” “language,” “love,” “personalities,” and “philosophy.”

I just don’t know whether I will publish anything else this year of equal importance.

For the third time I revisit the great Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) of 2001. The signatories to the Initiative wrote, By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

A great beginning that went haywire in its end. I reject the need to acknowledge and cite my sources. So long as the person who uses the material of others
a. does not profit commercially from his “plagiarism”
b. does not interfere with the promotion of the original sources or inhibit them in any way
c. does not misrepresent the viewpoint of those sources and intends them no harm
d. is too small an operation relative to those from whom he borrows to have serious impact on the world
e. is greatly inconvenienced by the need to gain clearance for his use of “purloined” material or is, in his opinion, overcharged for its use

then he may take what he wishes and even, if it serves his vanity, represent the work as his own. Vanity and its revelation are minor character defects. Copyright and patents are evils and we need not respect them even when we may be forced to bow down before them under threat of great harm coming to us for defying them.

The genetic fallacy is committed whenever a person thinks he can prove or disprove a point by pointing to its origin and then disparaging the one who makes that point. For example, some people think belief in God is easily shown to be false by saying that the believer holds his view only because his parents told him there was a God. This attack on the believer is entirely irrelevant to God’s existence or nonexistence. Sometimes, in an interesting twist, a person boasts of his belief by saying “I was brought up to believe in God.” In the latter case, if the only reason a person has for believing in God is that he was taught to believe in God then he undermines his belief without help from any skeptic. Instead of calling this an example of a genetic fallacy, we may call this an example of self-imposed genetic revenge.

Try this one: Accused on the 6 o’clock news of corruption and taking bribes, the senator said that we should all be very wary of the things we hear in the media, because we all know how very unreliable the media can be. He is right, but he may be a crook anyway. Being called a crook on the 6 o’clock news is not a guarantee that you are not a crook. For me, the most depressing example of the genetic fallacy imposed on oneself occurs whenever people brag that their parents brought them up to know right from wrong.

Now, in my own case, several people have charged me with insane envy of those they like to call “doctors.” They point out that my frequent criticisms of those in the medical profession derive from the fact that I resent the respect that amounts to reverence that the public shows to physicians and surgeons, that I wish I had this same degree of adoration, that I lust for the same degree of veneration. In this way, having proved the origin of my criticism they think they have undermined it. Usually, I reply, “You are absolutely right. I am mad with envy. Now, then, can we get on to the correctness or incorrectness of my criticisms?”

Is it possible that smart people can actually suppose that because I am wild with envy that my claims of widespread incompetence (and even corruption) are wrong? Sad to say, not only is it possible, it is a common blunder, a true instance of the genetic fallacy.

People can argue until Doomsday, and they do, as to whether medicine is, on the whole, a good thing or an outrageous scam. Obviously, it is an outrageous scam but so is religion and where does rationality get us there? Everyone can point to tens of thousands of instances where hospitals and physicians have saved our lives. Make that millions. However, we are addicted to the Fallacy of Dramatic Instances and victims of a fabulously successful promotional scheme by the Health Care INDUSTRY. [Please forswear the term "profession."] Sometimes, we do see well beyond the end of our noses — all the way to our fingertips. What are the facts about medicalization? Try these:

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Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study and treatment. Once a condition is classified as medical, a medical model of disability tends to be used in place of a social model.

The concept of medicalization was devised by sociologists to explain how medical knowledge is applied to behaviors which are not self-evidently medical or biological. The term “medicalization” entered the sociology literature in the 1970s in the works of Irving Zola, Peter Conrad and Thomas Szasz. These sociologists viewed medicalization as a form of social control by medical authority, and they rejected medicalization in the name of liberation. This critique was embodied in works such as Conrad’s “The discovery of hyperkinesis: notes on medicalization of deviance”, published in 1973 (hyperkinesis was the term then used to describe what we might now call “attention deficit disorder” – ADHD).

IN SHORT, WE HAVE ENTERED INTO THE AGE OF DISEASE MONGERING.

In his 1975 book Limits to medicine: Medical nemesis, Ivan Illich argued that the medical profession harms people through iatrogenesis, a process in which illness increases due to medical intervention. Illich saw iatrogenesis occurring on three levels: the clinical, involving serious side effects worse than the original condition; the social, whereby the general public is made docile and reliant on the medical profession to cope with life in their society; and the structural, whereby the idea of aging and dying as medical illnesses effectively “medicalized” human life and left individuals and societies less able to deal with these “natural” processes.

Marxists such as Vicente Navarro (1980) linked medicalization to an oppressive capitalist society. They argued that medicine disguised the underlying causes of disease, such as social inequality and poverty, and instead presented health as an individual issue. Others examined the power and prestige of the medical profession, including use of terminology to mystify and of professional rules to exclude or subordinate others. A series of publications by Mens Sana Monographs have focused on medicine as a corporate capitalist enterprise.

Conversation between doctor and patient/consumer.
The physician’s role in this present-day notion of medicalization is similarly complex. On the one hand, the doctor is an authority figure who prescribes pharmaceuticals to patients. However, in some countries such as the US, ubiquitous direct-to-consumer advertising encourages patients to ask for particular drugs by name, thereby creating a conversation between consumer and drug company that threatens to cut the doctor out of the loop. There is also widespread concern regarding the extent of the pharmaceutical marketing direct to doctors and other healthcare “professionals,” for example through visits by sales people, funding of journals, training courses or conferences, incentives for prescribing, and the routine provision of “information” written by the pharmaceutical company.

According to Nicholas Kittrie, a number of phenomena considered “deviant”, such as alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness, were originally considered as moral, then legal, and now medical problems. Due to these perceptions, peculiar deviants were subjected to moral, then legal, and now medical modes of social control. According to Franco Basaglia and his followers, whose approach pointed out the role of psychiatric institutions in the control and medicalization of deviant behaviors and social problems, psychiatry is used as the provider of scientific support for social control to the existing establishment, and the ensuing standards of deviance and normality brought about repressive views of discrete social groups.

Medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances. According to Mike Fitzpatrick, resistance to medicalization was a common theme of the gay liberation, anti-psychiatry, and feminist movements of the 1970s, but now there is actually no resistance to the advance of government intrusion in lifestyle if it is thought to be justified in terms of public health. The crazed Michael Bloomberg, the man who crookedly got himself a third term as NY’s mayor, in defiance of the City’s laws, wants to stop people from drinking Coca Cola.

According to Thomas Szasz, “the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion.”

An editorial in the British Medical Journal warned of inappropriate medicalization where the boundaries of the definition of illnesses are expanded to include personal problems as medical problems or risks of diseases are emphasized to broaden the market for medications. The authors noted “Inappropriate medicalisation carries the dangers of unnecessary labelling, poor treatment decisions, iatrogenic illness, and economic waste, as well as the opportunity costs that result when resources are diverted away from treating or preventing more serious disease.”

Go to your favorite search engine and look up each of these AND WEEP.
(1) Iatrogenesis; (2) Interventionism (medicine)
(3) Sociology of health and illness; (4) Big Pharma

And, later, try some of these. First, do more groveling and boot licking. Let the man in the white gown pat you on the head when you ask him, “Doctor, will my son be all right?”
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^ White, Kevin (2002). An introduction to the sociology of health and illness. SAGE. p. 42.
^ Conrad P (October 1975). “The discovery of hyperkinesis: notes on the medicalization of deviant behavior”. Soc Probl 23 (1): 12–21.
^ Ajai R Singh, Shakuntala A Singh, 2005, “Medicine as a corporate enterprise, patient welfare centered profession, or patient welfare centered professional enterprise?” Mens Sana Monographs, 3(2), p19-51
^ Ajai R Singh, Shakuntala A Singh, 2005, “The connection between academia and industry”, Mens Sana Monographs, 3(1), p5-35
>^ Kittrie, Nicholas (1971). The right to be different: deviance and enforced therapy. Johns Hopkins Press.
^ Conrad, Peter; Schneider, Joseph (1992). Deviance and medicalization: from badness to sickness. Temple University Press. p. 36.
^ Szasz, Thomas (Spring 2001). “The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy”. The Independent Review V (4)
^ Offman A, Kleinplatz PJ (2004). Does PMDD Belong in the DSM? Challenging the Medicalization of Women’s Bodies. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, Vol. 13
^ Moynihan, Ray; Heath, Iona; Henry, David (13 April 2002). “Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering”. BMJ. 324(7342): 886–891.
Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Medical Disorders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry has Transformed Normal Sadness into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale University Press, 2007)
Illich, Ivan (July 1975). “The medicalization of life”. Journal of Medical Ethics 1 (2): 73–77.

Poetry is definitely not my métier but I am increasingly able to appreciate it, if only episodically. Recently, the work of the poet Edward Thomas has come to my attention, and that is a blessing of sorts. I have already written of the admiration Robert Frost and W.H. Auden had for the man. Here is a link to a wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)

After You Speak

After you speak
And what you meant
Is plain,
My eyes
Meet yours that mean,
With your cheeks and hair,
Something more wise,
More dark,
And far different.
Even so the lark
Loves dust
And nestles in it
The minute
Before he must
Soar in lone flight
So far,
Like a black star
He seems -
A mote
Of singing dust
Afloat
Above,
The dreams
And sheds no light.
I know your lust
Is love.

IN MEMORIAM

Ronald Dworkin

1931 – 2013

“Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But

if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something

more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our

lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.”</blockquote>

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Excerpted from Ronald Dworkin’s final masterpiece, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS

I’ll never believe language evolves rather than gradually degenerates but you can’t really fight the graft of Literary Hall.

Articles in Time magazine had 3,352 instances of “whom” during the 1930s. That dropped to 1,492 in the 1990s. Since 2000, the total has been 902. Oy vey! Language mavens are predicting its total disappearance by 2060. God will be kind enough to ensure I won’t be around. Ted Drange will be left to suffer with “who” in all contexts in which “whom” once flourished. William Safire advises, “Whenever ‘whom’ is required, recast the sentence.”

A pathetic retreat, Billy Boy. Billy overlooks the fact that the problem is not just with written language but with speech. With respect to oral utterances, you just can’t go home, again. Stan Carey, a miserable excuse for a language blogger, writes “Whom is out of place- where a conversational tone is sought.” Like hell it is! Of whom is Stan speaking? Life without “whom” is like linguistics without Henry Higgins – IMPOSSIBLE.

Where is it written in the heavens that if enough people are illiterate then the best thing the rest of us can do is meekly go along? Rise up, grammar lovers, you have nothing to lose but association with the scum, the riffraff of society.

…you are very serious about language. It definitely is not for all tastes. I include it because I just wrote a post titled SUMMER BRIGHT in which I wrote, “…only in the brilliance of summer days could the Lone Ranger have awoken each morning with enthusiasm to face the day and the evils he had to dispose of.” So, why did I choose to write “have awoken”? Here’s why. The answer comes from a website called ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND USAGE. Recommended for all nutcakes.

A query, “Which is better, conversationally speaking, between ‘awakened’ and ‘awoke’” submitted to the editor produced these two responses.

1. The short story is that the strong verb was (usually) transitive awake, awoke, with awoken rarer; the weak verb was (originally) intransitive awaken, awakened. But all those have come to be confused. The difference is not one of formality, so “casual conversation” does not apply. The archaic awaked is no longer used, however, because only the strong version has survived.

Note that both of these are derived from wake, woke, —–, a defective verb for many people, including me. The -en is a causative/inchoative derivational suffix, but -en is also a common strong past participle marking (criterial in German, occasional in English).

2. The answer is fairly complicated at the detail level, but the short story is that there were two different verbs, one strong (call this the alpha version: awake, awoke, and sometimes awoken) and the other weak (call this the beta version: awaken, awakened). Both are formed from the original verb, wake.

So people got to thinking that awaken when to awoken the way awake went to awoke, rather than having awaken stay weak and go awakened. They reanalysed awaken as a strong verb, the way awake had always been. Then they confused them all.

These two verbs have largely converged, but neither form won out over the other, so both enjoy an uneasy coëxistence such that different speakers at different epochs elect different versions, sometimes varying it by situation.

Using had awoken seems to have replaced the alternate strong form, had awoke, around 1929. The weak form was used by Shakespeare, and still dominates the strong form — although somewhat less so over the last 40 years. The archaic had awaked has been completely replaced by had awakened and its alternatives.

Conversationally Speaking: In casual and common conversation, I would probably use the phrasal verb to wake up, whether transitively or intransitively, instead of to awaken. Since I am using the wake form, I would use the strong-verb inflexions. I don’t think I use awaken at all.

That means that for “casual” conversation, I would myself use the same form there as I would in formal writing. So with wake up:

Tomorrow, I’ll wake up early.
Tomorrow, she’ll wake me up before she leaves.
Yesterday, I woke up early.
She woke me before the sun came up.
I’ve woken up early for a year now.
She hasn’t woken my up that early since we had our fire drill.

Or with awake:

Tomorrow, I’ll awake at dawn.
Yesterday, I awoke to the sound of a bear getting at my garbage again.
I’ve never awoken to an alarm in my life.

The only time I might use awaken would be intransitively, like:

Tomorrow, I’ll awaken at dawn.

But I bet I would switch to the other verb for past or past participle, and so use awoke/awoken. For some reason, at least for me, I find that awoken calls strongly to supplant awakened. I think I just don’t use awaken much.
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[SG] I would like to close with “There you have it” but the truth is that the answers are more than twice as long as the abbreviated versions I have just presented. It is extremely tough going but if you really want to suffer, I refer you to

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/91114/awoken-vs-awaked BUENA SUERTE!

Jews should not be angry or supercilious in their attitudes towards their Christian brethren merely because the latter have mistaken ideas about certain Yiddish words. These words have entered into general American diction and, in a legitimate sense, they are nobody’s private property. Yids should offer gentle pointers and leave it at that.

Consider the words schlemihl and schlimazel. Our goyishe cousins suppose they are simple, innocent alternatives to one another. Not so. A schlemihl is a bungler. He is forever getting in his own way and everybody else’s. The word may date to A. von Chamiisso’s Peter Schlemihis, the eponymous hero of Pete’s book, Geschicte (1814). Maybe not. What the flickendoodle do I know? Budd Schulberg, a man we should all dislike, wrote in What makes Sammy Run? “Don’t talk to me like a schlemiel, you schlemiel” but it isn’t clear what Budd meant and he may have helped engender the obfuscation between that word and schlimazel. Years later, good guy I.B.Singer wrote in Shosha, ’You should have taken the whole five hundred. To him that’s a trifle. He’ll think you’re a shlemiel.” That’s a little better. In any case, a schlimazel is a guy with bad luck. That’s different from being a clumsy oaf like a schlemiel. ["Schlim" -German for "bad" and "mazl" Yiddish for "luck." This will enlighten you: The schlemiel staggers clumsily under a bowl of soup he is carrying and spills it on the schlimazel.

My boy, Bobby Browning penned this nifty poem: "If I sold shrouds, no one would die. If I sold lamps, the sun for spite, would shine by night." Right on, Bobby. A schlimazl's luck. Let's move on.

Let's consider "Gentile." Nowadays. Jews use this word to refer to all people other than themselves. They seem oblivious of any people other than Jews and Christians. However, those two famous candy makers, Peter and Paul had arguments over whom they should try to convert to Christianity. One of them thought they should target only the Jews but the other guy said they should go after all the other guys - the Gentiles! I take it he meant they should try to convert the Romans, the heathens, the barbarians [use these three terms interchangeably, please]. Thus, the Gentiles were decidedly NOT Christians. Over the centuries, thanks to Constantine and the hoards that followed his teaching, all Gentiles became Christians so that, today, we don’t give a damn whether you use “Gentiles” and “Christians” as synonymous. The important thing to remember is that Jews who suppose the world divides into Jews and Gentiles are egomaniacal pricks because, if you think about it, thanks to Buddhists, Hindus, Islamists, Confucianists and dozens of others, only a small percentage of the world’s Guy In The Sky worshippers are either Jewish or Christian.

Goy is a clumsy designation for Gentile. But is a goy anybody other than a Jew or must he be a prick – i.e. a Christian? Growing up in nearly all-Jewish Brownsville, I didn’t know of non-Jews other than the Christians until I was twelve years old or thereabouts, so I didn’t face the question, “What do we call the Hindus?” Today, “goy” and “Christian” are ingrained in me as one and the same. Hindus, Buddhists and Islamic folk should be glad because it means that in at least one respect they are not all imbeciles.