Creative Use of the English Language

I have been reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. If you think you have a pretty good vocabulary, give it a try -- good old Billy Shakespeare would probably have a run for the money with those books - I love 'em.

On the street, in the office, at home, people are insulted every day. Today, it's all guttural and obscene language that shows little, if any, class - back in the old days, it seemed to have even been possible to curse with class. Now, with all the swear words roaming around, I got this from a friend showing:

THE RIGHT WAY TO INSULT PEOPLE USING REAL ENGLISH!!

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.


Pay attention for Churchill and his wonderful dryness.
Too, you always have to admire Mae West's way with words:
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

*************"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the
gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or
your mistress."

************"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -
Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure." Clarence Darrow

*************"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time
reading it." - Moses Hadas

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved
of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar
Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second.... if there is
one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -
Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." -
Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." -
Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on
it?" - Mark Twain

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -
Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts -- for support
rather than illumination. " - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho
Marx

Time to Get my Kit Together

Truly, "back in the day", as we are now wont to say, rather than "when I was a kid", or "in the roaring 60's",  the phrase was

GET YOUR KIT TOGETHER

That's when guys carried "kit" bags, because kit became an easier word to use than "dunnage". This is a great historical explanation of my title and has nothing to do otherwise with today's blog, which is really about getting it together, picking it up and doing the right thing with it.


I try to listen to my favorite TV preacher (also is Alice Cooper's favorite, for a good trivia question), Charles Stanley from First Baptist Atlanta. Of course it is going to be Baptist flavored - he has been a Baptist pastor for over 50 years. My Bible does not tell me what denomination Christ is, though, so I figure after you know that he died for you everything else is rather optional and immaterial in many ways.

BUT

Every now and then Chuck will throw out a "squirmer", as my Dad used to refer to some sermons. This is akin to the Holy Spirit hitting you upside the head with a 2x4 or equally significant wakeup call. Dr. Stanley throws this kind of a squirmer about what God wants us to do about once a year; seems like I always catch it and it rattles in my head for weeks thereafter. I suppose that's why they call it the word of God.

ANYWAY

do not bother to watch this video if you already know what your purpose is in the world, what God has asked you to do, how He is supporting you and exactly where to start and how to go about it. {God told me that, today, He wanted me to send this to you, so here it is}.

http://www.intouch.org/broadcast/this-week-on-tv
 

As always, we appreciate your support and welcome comments. Take 45 minutes to let yourself review, or learn for the first time, some fundamental truths that we tend to overlook in a world, today, that needs them desperately.

And, remember a few fundamentals:

Custom, Routine or Faith?

Thought for the day:
We must be careful when our Christian disciplines become routines. They no longer exist as a part of our faith, but another thing to check off our list of Christian things to do.

We do a lot of things, even the rituals we go through at holidays, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, that we do not consider "Christian disciplines", without really thinking of the why and wherefor. Faith is, among all else, peculiar.

Most Christians are familiar with, or at least have heard, Hebrews 11:
1 ¶  The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. 2  The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd. 3  By faith, we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see.



This is likely in the same category as Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." And, as Geddy Lee sings, "if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice." So, we believe in something - that is faith - regardless of if we do so consciously and actively, in fact despite our conscious and active attempts to have faith.

We don't make faith. Faith is, like it or not, ask for it or not. It is solely accomplished by the Holy Spirit; for non-Christians who don't believe in the Holy Spirit, any faith you have is accomplished by Him, still, although you think of and refer to him as something else.

 As you go about your "normal" activities of Christmas, then, remind yourself that you do this for reasons other than that you have just always done it this way. Tradition is fine, and remember what family faith originated and sustained that tradition, remember how God brings all these good things to us.

Back just 3 and a half decades ago or so, I was an aspiring graduate student at Virginia Tech. My advisor was Larry Adler; he had started at Columbia University with a degree in math and went on for his master's and then a PhD in Rock Mechanics at the University of Illinois.

His mentor was Steve Boshkov from Columbia. [ http://www.aimehq.org/programs/award/bio/stefan-h-boshkov ] . Larry invited Steve to Blacksburg for a seminar presentation to the graduate and undergraduate mining students. That evening he invited me over for dinner and brandy, so there we were, student, mentor and übermentor. Being young and brash enough to get away with it, I dared ask Steve what was the most important thing in life.

Without flinching he spent 10 minutes holding my fascination and that of Larry as we both just sat listening to the anecdotes that came following this simple statement:

"In life, you do well if you can get along with people, and you do well if you can get along with money. If you can get along with both you do very well. If you can influence either one you are quite successful, and if you can influence both you are phenomenal. That's all there is to it, purely and simply."

Engineers do incredibly well with numbers, and good engineers are the ones who relate those numbers to money and the wealth of their company. Very seldom, though, do you find an engineer who is really good with people. If you do, you make him a manager. But, the engineer who is skilled with money and with people makes himself your manager and proceeds far beyond any expected level. That's why Steve stayed at Columbia, because he could influence the engineering curricula heavily inserting humanities and arts to give engineers what they really needed much more than another course in mechanics or mathematics.

That's about as far as my tired old brain wants to go this morning, especially with my cluster headache meds kicking in, but it should be food for thought for anyone who wants to bother researching the topic even casually. Think about it.
That is all.
Word.

 http://www.redstate.com/dloesch/2013/08/07/wife-of-ft-hood-survivor-dod-is-gagging-us/

Call me crazy, but it seems to me like this would-be king is letting the power go to his head more every day. I can understand the legal discussion behind why he wanted to throw a gag order on the victims of the Ft. Hood heretic treasonal seditionist jihadist, Hassan, but the last time I read the Constitution it still said that the Congress shall pass no law restricting the right to assemble and speak; and, to me that points out fairly succinctly that it is, indeed, the Congress that makes laws, not the President. A king, on the other hand, is different, I suppose, in that what he says from the throne goes no matter how absurd it may be.

In related news:

 I see that The President's city, Chicago, is rapidly taking a lead from Detroit. And, they are leading the league in dead African Americans (black people, persons of color? I never know any more how we are to refer to certain groups). I see that 3 black kids beat up a white kid on the schoolbus, but that the driver did not intervene and the mainstream media didn't report it. Notice that I did not say I was surprised by this happening. Things like this happen every day, more than once, and the only thing I see on TV is "pastor arrested for sexual assault on teenagers" which is about a guy, an assistant youth pastor (general flunky on the staff) that was fired from his position as a youth pastor and later was stupid enough to fool around with a couple of girls to whom he had "ministered" in days of yore. Our friends on TV can sensationalize anything they want to, or subdue everything they want to.

I see Brian Williams is getting a new knee. I see that every night. They certainly did not do 10 minutes with Dr. Nancy Snyderman when I got my new knee. Perhaps that was because it was my left knee and it's Brian's right knee, maybe it's because I am so old that it would not be newsworth, but Brian is so young (!) that we should feel sorry for him.

I could keep going all day. I won't. I'll sign off for now; but, I shall probably be back soon. 

The POTUS decides what?

The evening news made me think of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth":

What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

The court made two decisions. Neither one of them "legalized gay marriage", despite what the thousands of people in the street are saying. 

One was on Proposition 8 in California. What the court decided was that they could not make a decision because the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to sue. So, the ruling of the inferior court negating Proposition 8 still stands until someone brings the matter to the Supreme Court who has standing to do so. The court made no decision on the merit of Proposition 8 itself.

The other was on DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. The Court did not negate the act, again as the media and the demonstrators would have you believe. What the court decided was that one provision of DOMA, the which stated that the Federal Government did not have to recognize same sex unions, was found unconstitutional if the union is recognized by the couple's state. That did not mean that the Federal Government legalized or illegalized gay marriage, it just meant that people who have a legitimate marriage license need to be treated as marriage when the Feds apply the Federal laws and regulations.

I am pretty tired of all of this stuff. The Constitution is silent about marriage; that means it is left to the states. And, if you get right down to it, the only reason the states have ever had anything to do with it is to make money by charging for marriage licenses. Historically, marriages belonged in a church, and men (yes, men) would register a marriage to show they owned the spouse as chattel property. Not a really fulfilling and rewarding approach, I say.

Why doesn't the government just get out marriage altogether? We the people are not going to be collectively satisfied with anything they do. Why should they do anything? Why should they even discriminate between married and not married people? 

Oh, I could roll on this forever ...

Hey, guys! I haven't been here for a while. I've been preoccupied with ... well with all kinds of stuff. Politically and religiously so many things are happening that make me want to puke and yet nothing I say is going to change the minds of those whos eminds I think need to be changed. I cannot stand lies, either from the government or from the people/sheeple in response to the government or to their church.

Today I realized something. I was considering one of my pet projects, crusading against human trafficking. I thought:
Sure this is right. A woman is put to work as a prostitute so other people make money off of her, and the traffickers never get caught, the Johns get maybe 5 days or a fine, and the girls, who really don't willingly choose that lifestyle as far as I can tell, get a felony conviction.

People abuse women so punish the women. Hey, why not, because
People use guns to kill other people - ban guns
People eat Big Macs and get fat - ban Big Macs
People drink Big Gulps and get fat and get high blood pressure - ban Big Gulps
People use drugs and hurt themselves and others - ban drugs [may be partially appropriate]
People abuse alcohol and hurt themselves and others - ban alcohol
People drive too fast and kill people - put speed restrictions in car computers.
People use Sudafed to make meth - ban Sudafed
People use pitbulls for dog fights - ban pit bulls

Hey, I think I see a pattern here. There is a common denominator. Actually it's a common parameter, a common factor in each function and it is

PEOPLE

Just when I was about to throw away my women, guns, Big Macs, Big Gulps, drugs, alcohol, car, Sudafed and dog because I am an honest law-abiding person and will do what Senator Feinstein asks. Of course. 

Hey, here's a concept. If people do bad things, punish or rehabilitate the people, not what they used to do those bad things.

Too easy, I guess.