half-baked translation

     Perhaps an example of half-baked translation will get the idea across better than an explanation. "Bat"--as in a small furry creature that flies by night-- is chauve-souris in French. Chauve-souris literally means "bald mouse". But this is not properly translated as "bald mouse". It is properly translated as "bat", since this is the equivalent English word or expression. The German expression for the above-mentioned bat is "fledermaus", or "flying mouse", but we translate this into "bat", and not into "flying mouse"--unless we are translating old "Mighty Mouse" cartoons.

Suggestion--learn enough about translation to know how many ways it can be wrong.

more-enlightened-than-thou

    Proselytizing.  Can it claim to be anything but more-enlightened-than-thou?  A proselytizer sees a perfect stranger on the street, and begins to hold forth on the subject of how to be saved, or how to be happy, or of how to avoid an eternity in hell. The proselytizer does this with the blessed assurance that he/she has answers that the perfect stranger lacks. How does the proselytizer know this, or pretend to know it? Why not stop all of the happy-looking people and ask them the secret of the meaning of life, instead of presuming to tell it to them?

Suggestion--Next time a proselytizer tries to stop you on the street, tell him or her how to be happy--like you are.

everybody wants to argue about God

     Everybody seems to want to argue about the existence of God--a fruitless waste of time. What I would like to see them arguing about is responsibility--as in does it matter what you do?  Some people who believe in God also believe that it matters what you do. Other people who believe in God also believe that it does not matter what you do.
      Some people who do not believe in God also believe that it matters what you do. Others who do not believe in God also believe that it does not matter what you do.
     If there is a philosophical battle line, this is it--does it matter whether or not we do the right thing? Or the wrong thing?


Suggestion--give up discussing God for a discussion of human behavior--"the proper study of mankind is man".

creative ignorance

     I'd like to add something to the seemingly endless discussion of helping children to be more imaginative and creative. What too many young people need is not more creativity and imagination, but a  thorough enough grounding in reality (facts, if you will) to be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.  I have been told, at various times, that no one eats anything that comes from a farm except for a few survivalist extremists. I have been told (by a standard burger-eating American) that people don't eat cows. I have been told that when movies show people riding horses, living in log cabins, wearing armor, wearing long dresses, or using candles and fireplaces that this is all pretend--because everything in the movies is pretend, even in historical epics. If a teacher stands in front of a classroom and tells the students that people once used candles for light, at least a few of them will think that the teacher is ignorant, and doesn't know that movies are pretend. Their attitude is that the teacher is trying to teach them that there are space aliens about to invade--including eye-rolling and smirks. They have apparently also been taught that it would be hopeless to argue with such a person, so there is little discussion.


Suggestion--find out where students are learning this and intervene--even if it's their parents.

anything goes

     I recently overheard someone say that anyone who does not use profanity is unsophisticated.  @#$%!*&#!  We must have different definitions of sophistication. A sophisticated person can go anywhere and be at ease. He or she can mix easily with all kinds of people without giving offense or making anyone uncomfortable. It goes without saying that he or she would not annoy people just to seek attention. What kind of a sorry person would do that? Hello--are you listening?
       The commenters who cannot refrain from typing in @#$$% under pictures of cute kitty cats are not sophisticated, they are mindlessly spewing, in a fashion a psychoanalyst would label anal expulsive. Sorry to have to miss the sparkling wit and brilliant repartee, but if that is sophistication, I think I want to be a farm girl.

Suggestion-- Next time you see a foul-mouthed person eating--stop and tell a long story about vomit.

circumcision

   I have tried  before to write about circumcision, but it's hard to tell if people understand when you can't be present to answer questions--or when they don't seem to know how to ask them.  Once more, the fact--nearly every man in America is circumcised--Christians, Jews, atheists and everyone else. Circumcision has been standard medical practice in American hospitals for generations. It's one of the things many people thought would come to an end, thirty or forty years ago--and yet not a dent seems to have been made in the all-too-common ignorance on the subject.
    For those of you who believe that you are sure that there is no difference between an uncircumcised male and a circumcised male--you have been comparing circumcised males with circumcised males--not circumcised males with uncircumcised males. If you have been, shall we say, scientific enough to try to compare a gentile ( non-Jew)  and a Jew in this way, your mistake was in assuming that the gentile was uncircumcised. 
     This discussion began with a young man I thought must be outrageously ignorant--who thought himself quite knowledgeable about sex, psychology, and so on--and yet it seems to be the typical mindset. He didn't know that he was circumcised, and had to show himself to a man who could tell him.

Suggestion--better biology classes--we didn't have sex education when I was in school, but we did have biology, including human reproduction--circumcision wasn't mentioned., and it should have been.
  

drug and alcohol testing in children

     A famous psychological experiment was done years ago, in which the brains of alcoholic men and their eleven-year-old sons were scanned to see if they had similar brain patterns.  They did, and the researchers concluded from this that alcoholism is hereditary-passed down from father to son as if it were a mere physical trait--predestined to make an alcoholic of the sons. I believe these researchers were wrong, and that this can be proved particularly in what they didn't test for. They didn't test for the presence of alcohol in the eleven-year-old subjects--or the article never mentioned it. What if the parents had been feeding alcohol to their children?  I believe this is common, and it is rarely mentioned--no on looks for it, they simply assume that the children behave oddly because alcoholics make bad parents. But no one will know until it is routinely tested for. Perhaps alcoholism is being passed down by being taught, and not through inherited genes.

Suggestion--Test children, no matter how young, who become part of the legal system for alcohol and drugs.

minority, what does this mean?

     I had someone remark to me recently that since Obama was elected president, the blacks are no longer a minority in the United States. I do not know how widespread this bit of confusion is, but it is to be found in more than one person, especially among the young. Well, since Obama has been elected, there are not any more blacks than there were before the election--there are still the same number, which is what the word "minority" means.  There are not as many blacks as there are whites, hence the term "minority". What there are more of is termed a "majority".  Minority may mean, in numbers, anything from 1 in every hundred, to 49 in every hundred--which would leave 51 as the majority. We use these terms to talk about election results in this way--"the majority of voters", for instance. 
     You may have read about minorities in other countries--religious, racial, ethnic, or cultural--like the Tibetans in China, for instance. There are very few of them compared to the rest of the Chinese population.
      These two words are also used as legal terms--minority meaning while someone is under the age of 18 or 21 ( a minor)--majority reached at the age of 18 or 21 ( an adult).
     The term minority used to refer to blacks means an ethnic or racial minority--a group or set of people who are fewer in number than the whites, which is still true, no matter who is president.

Suggestion--Define these words in school, until everyone understands the literal meaning of them, not merely their use in a certain instance

probation

     I ought to ask for help from the "wiki" on this one, but here goes--I have been told that many major employers like to hire people who are on probation, because their wages are paid by the bureau of probation, and cost the employer nothing. I have been told that some employers don't like to keep people on after their probation has been served, because the bureau of probation will no longer pay their salaries.  You do the math--yes, I have also been told that getting back on probation is one way to get one's job back.

Suggestion--"A speedy and a public trial" ought to mean just that.

spare the rod and spoil the child

     "Spare the rod and spoil the child" is still standard educational philosophy in more than 20 states. That is, corporal (meaning physical or bodily punishment) is still legal. In some states where corporal punishment is legal, individual school districts have banned it. That's right, you can beat schoolchildren, but not prisoners. Not that I'm for beating prisoners. I'm against beating schoolchildren.
     This subject came up on a blog for teachers, and neither the pros nor cons had a clear majority. This, to me, was surprising. Surely when people find out that schools get to beat kids, they'll object, was what I had been thinking--since my own school days, 40 years ago. Not so. A lot of the comments that were in favor of  corporal punishment explained why--that they believed that their own children--or in some cases other people's children--would not behave if the schools didn't beat them. Schools would be taking their carefully beaten little children and spoiling them--sending them home ill-behaved and undisciplined--because they knew that in school, no one would beat them.
    

Suggestion: When children become a real behavior problem in schools, their parents show up for some parenting classes--to include all the ways commonly used to get children to behave as you would like--and how likely each of them is to work, or not work (compassion aside, beating doesn't work).

Suggestion: No corporal punishment in schools--in no school,  no day care, no private school--the prohibition to include things like standing in corners or sitting on stools--let's leave the 19th century in the history books.

who, or what, is a Gypsy?

     The Gypsies, or gypsies, were an ethnic or cultural group from various parts of Europe, whose actual origins are supposedly still unknown. Most of what is written about them is spurious at best, going back to the self-proclaimed "experts" on Gypsies, who had penetrated their "closed" culture  more than a hundred years ago.  Not only the writing about Gypsies is spurious, but so are many of the Gypsies--especially those who have become famous for being just that. Gypsy Rose Lee wasn't a Gypsy, for instance--neither was Little Egypt--two strippers who became so famous their names were household words.  Real Gypsies were something more like Amish people, including the tendency to marry people who were part of the same culture--the only sense in which their society was closed. Real Gypsies were forbidden to tell fortunes, so chances are that a fortune-teller claiming to be a Gypsy, isn't. The  "reticence" of Gypsies to talk about their "secret" culture has never existed. A Gypsy being interviewed by someone who wanted to know the secret of telling fortunes, and who refused to divulge this  "secret", has come down to us as someone who was protecting the secrets of Gypsydom from prying outsiders.
     This should all be history by now, especially as there are so few Gypsies left--but it isn't. Police departments in the United States still use the term "Gypsy" to mean anything from vagrant to con artist. Many criminals of this kind insist on referring to themselves as Gypsies, so the police are not entirely to blame. When told that "Gypsy" means a particular ethnic group, those who style themselves Gypsies refuse to believe it. I have watched this on TV within the past few months--on two different popular crime dramas. Each used the term Gypsy to refer to a family of particularly sordid people--neither of which, in all probability, were Gypsies, although they might have been from Eastern Europe. The ruse of claiming to be a Gypsy, or even dressing as one, was popular in Europe. Anyone who went looking for the con artist would have to look among Gypsies, who were thought to be so clever ( perhaps even with magic) that the suspects were not found.  A few hundred years of this supposedly didn't do the Gypsies any harm--until you consider that they are actually a nearly extinct people.

Suggestion--police departments find another term to use, instead of using the name of an ethnic group as a criminal charge, as the Nazis did.

rights of the accused?

    I had someone tell me that since it says "the rights of the accused" in the U.S. Constitution, that the Constitution only applies to those accused of crimes--that it has no meaning to anyone else. This same person could go on in some detail about what "our" rights are--but by "our" she meant the people who shared with her the experience of having been tried for a crime. In her view, only these people have a legal guarantee of freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the rest. I do not know if she learned this in prison, or whether she merely "read it into" something she was taught elsewhere. By the way, nowhere in the Constitution does it say "rights of the accused". That is merely the way we refer to the due process amendments--the amendments that spell out how a trial is to be conducted, and under what circumstances a person may be tried for a crime.

    The U. S. Constitution is for all Americans. It is, in fact, the supreme law of the United States. No law can be passed by the federal government ( the U.S. Congress and Senate, also called the legislature) or by any state government that conflicts with the Constitution. That is what is called "unconstitutional".  

Suggestion--no one gets out of prison without passing a citizenship test.

The worst criminal in the world

     Who is the worst criminal in the world? Bernie Madoff, I suppose, since he has been sentenced to 150 years in prison, and he never left a bruise on anyone, other than a financial one.  Apparently you can do anything but crush people's pipe dreams and get sympathy.  How demonized Madoff has been by the public and the press is really beside the point--the point being that a 150 year sentence makes an ass of the law and with it the people, whose purpose the law supposedly serves.
     No one can serve a 150 year sentence. Or two consecutive life terms. These sentences, and others like them, are  the equivalent of sentencing someone to life imprisonment with the added proviso "and we really don't like you".  No one can serve two consecutive life terms, unless we resurrect them from the dead and imprison them again. The lifespan of a human is now about 80 , or fourscore, years, up from threescore and ten (70). This is the maximum sentence any court can actually impose. Anything else is ridiculous.
     Suggestion--can crimes against persons have the longest sentences--80 years being the limit?  Or do we have to pity the poor murderers for their psychological problems, which thieves apparently don't have? Can we just divide up this eighty years into reasonable segments, with multiple murder getting the longest sentence?  And petty crimes getting 30 days, and a sure 30 days, as they used to? Everything else, including investment scams, to be somewhere in between?  Enough said--the "courts as casinos" is a topic for another day.

Cinderella story

      It is so common now for a child to have both a stepmother and a stepfather, along with a mother and father, that it seems ridiculous that a step-parent has no official role, or specific legal obligations--other than to refrain from harming the child. Many children live with one parent and a stepparent, and visit the other parent and stepparent on weekends.  Most people are familiar with tales of how much conflict can be involved in these relationships, even if they are not stepparents themselves. It seems fair to state that I am not a stepparent, and my only child never had a stepparent.
     Suggestion--we need a new set of laws. When a divorced person with a child or children decides to remarry,  both of the parents would have to appear in court, along with the fiance or intended spouse. The custodial and care arrangements would be signed by all three parties. If the other parent also decides to marry again, all four would have to go to court again, and each would sign a new set of custodial and care arrangements. These formal legal documents could be used to work out much of the conflict that troubles complex families--conflict that often spills over into schools, extended families, and courts. Children deserve better than "my mom and the guy she married"--legally.

Scarlet woman

     Some thoughts about Scarlett O’Hara, in whose defense I have wanted to write something,  somewhere,  for some time.  Scarlett was 17 years old at the beginning of  Gone With the Wind,  and yet this bit of female fluff  may have been the only person in the novel to actually object to the war–supposedly because she missed the fun she used to have.  She had enough determination to escape from the burning city of Atlanta with a woman who had just given birth.  Scarlett,  usually portrayed as a heartless hussy, took pity on a thirsty wounded soldier and stayed to help nurse the wounded and the dying.  She held on to her family’s farm through hard work–her own, and whatever she could get out of her unwilling sisters.  She shot a marauding enemy soldier, and figured out how to bury him so he wouldn’t be found.  She ran a successful business, buried two husbands, her parents, and one of her children.  All this by the time she was twenty-five–not forgetting that she could make a good-looking dress out of the curtains.  And yet Scarlett remains in the popular imagination a useless belle of the ball–a silly, vain little hussy, albeit with a bit of spunk.  What would a woman have to do to be a person?  If the nearly universally known and remembered heroine of  America’s most popular novel and movie can’t do any better than this, how can a real woman?
     Suggestion--read the book or watch the movie--then decide who you think Scarlett is.