I was talking about the word ‘shemozzle’ and the word ‘carillon’ on today’s “Talk the Talk” podcast. I shall never look at Perth’s Carillon City shopping centre in quite the same way again.
I forgot to include a shoutout to Laverne and Shirley, which is the first place most of us ever heard the word ‘shemozzle’ (or more probably, ‘shlemazel’).
Also: my computer doesn’t seem to recognise ‘shemozzle’, which is too bad. And when I type ‘shlemazel’, it suggests ‘schlemiel’. These computers don’t know from Yiddish!
I’m a bit of a G-dropper. I have a habit of dropping my participial g’s sometimes. If I say “doing” and “working”, it can come out as “doin'” and “workin'”. (Although really, there’s no /g/ there in the first place. It’s alveolarisation of the velar /ŋ/. But I’m going to call it G-dropping anyway.)
This is a pretty common pattern that shows up in many dialects of English, be they British, Australia, or USAian. For me, it seems to get more pronounced the closer I am to the USA.
Although he didn’t mention grits or his growing like of the word “y’all,” Romney’s awkward bid to connect to Southern voters was still evident. He wished the crowd a “fine Alabama good mornin’’” — dropping the letter “g” at the end of some words.
So is Romney doing some linguistic pandering with the locals? I thought I’d check by watching stump speeches — one in the North, one in the South — and compare the number of dropped g’s.
This meant watching videos of Romney on the stump, which is not entirely without risk.
When my boys have asked about Romney, I’ve said that although I don’t want him to be president of the USA, he’s not one of the crazy ones, and that there were loads of people in the race who were more stupid (Santorum, Perry, Bachmann, Cain) or evil (Gingrich, um… Cain) than Romney. But the weird thing about Romney is that he is capable of saying stupid, evil things while seeming perfectly sensible. Call it his gift.
So I’ve watched a bit of Romney doing the usual Republican schtick: bashing Europe, vowing to repeal health care, hammering away at unions, and claiming that the free market will fix everything. While watching these speeches, I was left with one over-arching impression: If you want to know what Romney’s stump speeches are like, just picture a giant penis in a suit, saying “I believe in freedom!” I’m sorry for that mental image, but tell me if you don’t find it accurate.
Well, just from these two speeches, it seems like Romney doesn’t do a lot of G-dropping in either place. I have no doubt that he tried it out in Mobile, but it doesn’t seem to be a feature he uses often, no matter where.
I realise this is a small sample. I tried to watch more, but there’s only so much moral vacuity that one can stand.
This always seems to come up in discussions with Christians: What motivation do you have to be ethical if you’re an atheist? They never seem to realise that having a god telling you what to do doesn’t make you moral, especially not with that terrible Bible.
I got a nuanced response from this Christian — then his brain stopped. What a shame.
Lots of people say that sexual orientation is pretty much determined from birth, and you can’t chose it or change it. I’m willing to accept that there’s an element of choice and circumstance in who we’re attracted to, and nobody’s 100% hetero or homo, but I think I can say I’ve always known that I’m a straight guy. My moment of realisation occurred in first grade.
My Year 1 class was a tough place. I had a really sadistic teacher, and this was poison for a “pleaser” child like me. I wanted to do well in school, escape the wrath of Mrs Allen, avoid this one kid named Chad who hated me and wanted to pound me, and try not to feel powerless.
There were lots of kids in my class, but this one girl Paula was a newcomer. I noticed her appearance in class matter-of-factly, as just another kid. I distinctly remember one day working at my desk (probably with crayons, a brand new box of Binney-Smith Crayolas with 64 colours and the electric sharpener in the box). All the other kids were doing their thing, too, working in groups, or moving about the room. And then Paula walked past my desk, and said off-handedly, “Hey, Lover-boy.” And kept on walking.
What made her say that? She couldn’t have meant anything by it; it was probably one of those crazy things kids say all day long. Yet its effect on me was crystallising. It was as if a droplet of boiling hot oil had been dropped into the pool of water in my deepest self, spattered and swam, and made me dizzy. I felt confusing desires and weird attractions. I felt drawn. In that moment, I knew: I liked girls and I wanted their attention.
I don’t remember seeing her again — the tape cuts out at that point. But when people say they “always knew” they were gay, I believe them. My girl-likingness was always in me in supersaturated form, waiting for some kind of seed around which to coalesce. I don’t think I chose to be a straight guy.
There’s this phrase that I’m hearing that’s heading for my bin. Every time I hear it, the speaker is bullshitting. No, it’s not “states’ rights”. It’s “public square”. As in “religion has a role in the“.
‘Religion has a role in public square’, says Rick Santorum
“I think that it’s… it’s… it’s unnatural. I think that it’s… it’s detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”
Okay, so he has the right to that opinion. And other people have the right to their opinion of his opinion.
In response to the comments by Cameron, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) issued the following statement:
“In this interview, Kirk Cameron sounds even more dated than his 1980s TV character. Cameron is out of step with a growing majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation.”
Christopher Rice, novelist
“Kirk Cameron says marriage was defined by God in the Garden of Eden. No response from Cameron on why the world isn’t full of talking snakes.”
Roseanne Barr, actress-comedian
“Kirk or Kurt or whatever Cameron is an accomplice to murder with his hate speech. so is Rick Warren. Their peers r killing gays in Uganda.”
Josh Charles, actor
“I know Growing Pains was only a TV show, but I have to think both Alan Thicke & Joanna Kerns must feel they failed as parents tonight.”
Zach Braff, actor
“If Kirk Cameron hates gay people, why was he best friends with Boner?”
Jesse Tyler Ferguson, actor
“The only unnatural thing about me being gay is that I had a crush on Kirk Cameron until about 24 hours ago.”
Alan Thicke, actor
“I’m getting him some new books. The Old Testament simply can’t be expected to explain everything.”
Cameron, for his part, is appealing to his right to speak in the good old P.S..
“I should be able to express moral views on social issues,” he said, “especially those that have been the underpinning of Western civilization for 2,000 years — without being slandered, accused of hate speech, and told from those who preach ‘tolerance’ that I need to either bend my beliefs to their moral standards or be silent when I’m in the public square.”
What he means, of course, is that he should be able to say whatever he wants with no consequences. No one should be allowed to criticise his viewpoint. We’re silencing him because he’s frightened of our disapproval, poor petal.
He concluded, “I believe we need to learn how to debate these things with greater love and respect,”
Keep in mind, it was he who referred to people’s lives and relationships as “detrimental, and ultimately destructive”. Reminds me of this cartoon.
And now I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever heard the phrase “public square” by anyone other than a smarmy religionist who was trying to explain why their superstition and irrationality should be taken seriously in civic discourse. Nope, don’t think so.
A fun episode of the Talk the Talk podcast today. I slapped some headphones on Joe, and had him speak into my iPhone, which was set to play back everything he said, but about 200 ms later. It’s all part of a discussion about a speech-jamming gun invented by Japanese researchers.
We also revisit “slut”, thanks (or no thanks) to Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” comment last week.
There’s an amazingly clueless blog post on the Millennial Star about Mormon proxy baptism, in which author Geoff B. helpfully instructs people on
How to respond when a church says it is baptizing your dead
His response is: What’s the harm? If we think that it’s just a silly ceremony, then no harm done. Why, we should be glad that they took the time to do something nice for our ancestors. What a thoughtful gesture! We should send flowers and a nice note.
The whole post (and subsequent comments) show the signs of having been written by someone who thinks their church is wonderful, that eveything they do in the service of their church is an unalloyed good, and that they are therefore incapable of overreach.
Let’s back up a bit. What’s the deal with Mormon proxy ordinances? If you haven’t heard about it from Bill Maher or Stephen Colbert, read on.
There’s a tough problem in Christianity: Everybody who has ever lived needs to accept Jeebus through baptism, but what about people who lived before him? Do they go to hell? Does god give them a pass if they were nice? Or what? Mormons have resolved this problem in a very creative and time-consuming way: they collect names from genealogical records, dunk each other while thinking of a person’s name, and then pretend that the person gets to choose to accept the ordinance in the afterlife. I think this is a terribly creative solution to a knotty problem in Christianity, and the fact that it’s such an elaborate work-around to a problem that god should have really thought of before is a testament to
a) the theological difficulty of the problem
b) the creative genius of Joseph Smith, and
c) the lengths people will go to in the service of their silly religions.
Mormons think this work is incredibly important, even quoting Malachi:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
Ponder for a second. The earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, serving as the habitat for trillions of creatures who have lived and died on it. And Mormons think that if they don’t sit in the dark and extract names from squeaky microfilm readers and then necrodunk each other, it’s all for naught, and Jeebus will smite us all with a curse. What a horrible lack of perspective.
One nice effect of proxy work (from the point of view of head office in Salt Lake City) is that it keeps Mormons coming back to the temples (and paying tithing) as often as possible. Perhaps this is why there doesn’t seem to be much attention paid to dunking everyone only once. Anne Frank, for instance, has been baptised at least nine times.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned enough in connection with all of this is that it isn’t just baptism. Mormons perform the full range of church ordinances on the deceased, including the ‘washing and anointing’, temple sealings, and something called the ‘endowment’, in which Mormons wear clothes that look like this:
All right, so what’s the harm in all this? As mundane as this sounds, I think it’s a boundary issue. Yes, Mormons make the audacious claim that everyone needs to be a Mormon, and yes, it’s annoying, but if people want to make the choice to be Mormons themselves, so be it. But to many people, monkeying around with someone else’s religious status post mortem seems just a mite invasive.
Some people like their faith tradition. They’ve had it for years. They might identify as X even though they never do anything X. These things seem to matter. So for a non-believer, the idea that unrelated peopole could hijack your ancestors, and aid them in becoming a part of some completely different faith tradition (and there’s not a thing you can do about it) is deeply unsettling. It rubs people the wrong way, and because it involves performing a symbolic act upon a deceased member of someone else’s family, it’s a particularly egregious way to rub someone the wrong way. That Mormons don’t seem to comprehend why anyone would object to this is indictive of their insularity and cluelessness, and perhaps they would benefit from pondering how they’d feel if someone tried to make their deceased relatives gay or something.
Back to Anne Frank. Mormons have copped flak for baptising Jews killed in the Holocaust. For Jews, there’s an extra layer of ouchiness. See, Mormons think that Israel is a chosen people, and by believing in Jesus (as they think the Jews should have done), they become a part of Israel — the Israel that god always intended. They take Paul at his word when he said that they would become “grafted in” to the olive tree. To show how seriously they take this, Mormons even assign themselves to one of the tribes of Israel. In a ritual called a “patriarchal blessing”, an older Mormon gentleman lays his hands on your head, does some free associating and cold reading, and makes predictions about the rest of your life. Mormons think it’s personal scripture, straight from god. And during the blessing, the partriarch names which specific tribe of Israel you’re from. I was from Ephraim, like every white guy, but I’ve known people allegedly from Dan, Manasseh, and even Levi. It’s all BS, but it shows just how much Mormons want to co-opt the whole Israelite thing, and claim it for their own. And therein lies the ouchiness. Mormons think they’re Israel in ways that Jews are not, not fully. And the only way Jews can be Israel-for-reals is to go through the Mormon Church. So converting Jews to make them Mormons — Israel in the latter days — seems like, if not ethnic cleansing, ethnic supplanting.
So if Mormons reading this could get one thing out of it, it would be that symbolism matters, and the posthumous Mormonising could be seen not as a nice gesture, but as a gesture of hostility and of religious and cultural imperialism. Does it do anything metaphysical? No. Is it an antagonising gesture? Yes.
UPDATE: Seriously, check out the unapologetic comments on the post. The commenters are unapologetic about carrying out what is, after all, one of the main aims of the church. To do otherwise would be disobedient to their god. It shows how people under the influence of religion don’t play well with others. And it explains why the Mormon Church can’t be honest when it gets caught at this kind of thing, and “promises” to knock it off.
It was Orientation Day on campus. People can sign up for clubs (including the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society), and there are always tons of church groups doing their schtick. So I like to see what’s out there.
Here’s a conversation I had. It went pretty much just like this.
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