"In newsrooms there is little patience for the use of a difficult word where a simpler one will do."

"'Good prose is like a windowpane,' wrote George Orwell in his famous essay 'Why I Write,' a rule that would seem to counsel against ever stopping a reader with an unfamiliar word. It’s good advice for beginners, but serious readers are also lovers of language. I find that the occasional obscure word, used correctly, spices prose."

From an essay in The Atlantic by Mark Bowden, titled "In Praise of Fancy Words: The pleasures of reading with a dictionary by one's side."

I usually read on a computer or iPad screen, so the dictionary is built in, but in simpler times, I liked the exercise of getting up and walking over to the dictionary stand to look up any unfamiliar word. I keep a picture of my grandfather on the wall just above that dictionary:



He was a newspaper editor, and in his spare time, he enjoyed reading a dictionary.

And here's the full text of Orwell's "Why I Write."

Nancy Pelosi explains her "pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," accepts your "hoop-di-doo and ado," and flips the old "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" on us.

On "Meet the Press" this morning, David Gregory confronted Pelosi with her old statement, "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy." He asked:

And hasn't that idea, that you have to pass it before you know what's in it, isn't that really the problem, as you look back on it? That the-- there was such a rush to get this done, no Republicans voting for it, and now there are unintended effects of this that were foreseen at the time that you couldn't know the impact of it. And now this is coming home to roost.

Unintended, yet foreseen. Foreseen, and yet with unknown impact. As one might say: the known unknowns.

Pelosi answered:

No. What I was saying there is we are House and the Senate. We get a bill. We go to conference or we ping-pong it, and then you see what the final product is. 

That is, the contents of the bill will change in the process of getting it through, but whatever it would be, it would be good:

However, I stand by what I said there. When people see what is in the bill, they will like it. And they will. And so, while there's a lot of hoop-di-doo and ado about what's happening now -- very appropriate. I'm not criticizing. I'm saying it took a great deal for us to pass this bill. I said if we go up to the gate and the gate is locked, we'll unlock the gate. If we can't do that, we'll climb the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole vault in. If we can't do that, we'll helicopter in, but we'll get it done.

So when the people have finished with this hoop-di-doo and ado, they'll find they like what Pelosi got done.

But, again, this is never thought to be easy. And the fact is, it doesn't matter what we're saying here: What matters? What happens at the kitchen table of the American people. And how they will have more affordability, more accessibility, better quality care, prevention, wellness, a healthier nation honoring the vows of our founders of life, a healthier life. Liberty to pursue their happiness, not be chained by a policy.

That last bit is a corruption of the words of the Declaration of Independence, the statement of belief that "all men are... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Look closely at how she flipped that idea about limited government into a basis for vastly expanded government.

***

This calls for a 2-part reading from George Orwell's "1984":

The heirs of the French, English and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian....

[T]he Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.

"We have no relation to Mr. Snowden, his relations with the American justice or his travel around the world."

"He chooses his route himself, and we have learned about it from the media," said Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

"We consider the attempts to accuse Russia of violation of U.S. laws and even some sort of conspiracy, which on top of all that are accompanied by threats, as absolutely ungrounded and unacceptable," Lavrov said. "There are no legal grounds for such conduct of U.S. officials, and we proceed from that."

I think back to what Michael Haz wrote in the comments to yesterday's Edward Snowden post:

Mr. Snowden, his computers and everything stored in his brain are now in possession of the KGB. He will now fully understand the meaning of the word 'disappeared'.

The press, the Department of State and Barack Obama have all been played for the rubes they are by Vladimir Putin. And there is nothing any of them can do about it. The amateurs have met the pro, and the pro won, then erased all tracks.

Meanwhile, 20 or so reporters were thrown way off the track as they happily enclosed themselves in a Snowdenless, Cuba-bound metal tube for 12 hours. What newsless meditations did they hammer out for publication? The New Yorker's John Cassidy lambasted the on-the-tube, not-in-the-tube newsmediafolk like David Gregory who, he asserts, have demonized Edward Snowden:

Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public. The puzzle is why so many media commentators continue to toe the official line. About the best explanation I’ve seen came from Josh Marshall, the founder of T.P.M., who has been one of Snowden’s critics. In a post that followed the first wave of stories, Marshall wrote, “At the end of the day, for all its faults, the U.S. military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does.”

In the end, for all its faults... Marshall's going all last-paragraph-of-"1984." ("O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.") Except... Marshall never resisted.

Back to Cassidy:

I suspect that many Washington journalists, especially the types who go on Sunday talk shows, feel the way Marshall does, but perhaps don’t have his level of self-awareness. It’s not just a matter of defending the Obama Administration, although there’s probably a bit of that. 

Oh, just a tad. Probably! But...

It’s something deeper, which has to do with attitudes toward authority. Proud of their craft and good at what they do, successful journalists like to think of themselves as fiercely independent. 

Like to... but trapped on Aeroflot flight to Cuba, you start noticing your lack of independence. And those journalists who didn't get bamboozled into your lamentable predicament look so enragingly smug.

It’s not surprising that some of them share Marshall’s view of Snowden as “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law.”

A political philosophy I don’t agree with.... What is that? Resistance to big government? Cassidy — who says — he's "with Snowden" because he's "the underdog" — ends with "Which side are you on?" which is the title of an old union song. Here's Pete Seeger singing it. Bob Dylan repurposed it in "Desolation Row":

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”

Unlike the Titanic, the Aeroflot flight reached its destination uneventfully.

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name

"National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls."

"That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too."

ADDED: Just because they can doesn't mean they do. You only have to trust thousands of analysts. Janet Napolitano says:

"I think people have gotten the idea that there’s an Orwellian state out there that somehow we’re operating in. That’s far from the case"....

"[T]here are lots of protections built into the system,” Ms. Napolitano said, pointing to a privacy office embedded in her own department that is “constantly reviewing our policies and procedures.” She further stressed the court review system.

“No one should believe that we are simply going willy-nilly and using any kind of data that we can gather,” she said...

So it's not simply going willy-nilly and using any kind of data and it's far from Orwellian. That is, it's something less than the ultimate extreme. That's not reassuring at all. Even if I take Napolitano at her word: She's not saying much. It's just not utter and complete abuse.

And what are the protections? There's a "privacy office." You know, in "1984," if there were something called the "Privacy Office," its job would be to invade our privacy.  (Recall "The Ministry of Truth.")

Who could possibly feel protected by Napolitano's own privacy office "constantly reviewing our policies and procedures"? That sounds — even as she puts it — like it's about seeing what they can get away with. She brings up judicial review, but we know that those courts have no power/inclination to stop anything the government says it needs to do.

ADDED: They can see you naked. 

What does it mean to say that one case is a "far cry" from another?

Here's the unanimous opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Metrish v. Lancaster, released yesterday, which dealt with a principle of due process that I won't try to summarize. (There's a summary here, at SCOTUSblog.) I only want to talk about the expression "a far cry," used in Metrish to say something lawyers and judges often have reason to say: one thing is very different from another.

[W]e consider first two of this Court’s key decisions: Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U. S. 347 (1964), and Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U. S. 451 (2001)...

This case is a far cry from Bouie, where, unlike Rogers, the Court held that the retroactive application of a judicial decision violated due process....

This made me curious about the expression "a far cry." This is one of these expressions that we use because it has a metaphorical feeling, even though we don't think too concretely about what the metaphor is. (This is what George Orwell called a "dying metaphor" in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language.") What is the image in "far cry"? I picture Lancaster, Bouie, and Rogers standing on hilltops in a landscape and see Lancaster — it's Burt Lancaster, by the way — hollering over to Rogers and Bouie on their respective hilltops, and Rogers can easily hear him but Bouie can barely hear him. That's a colorful alternative to saying Lancaster is much closer to Rogers than to Bouie.

Let's whip out the out the old (and unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary:

within cry of: within calling distance. a far cry  : a long way, a very long distance.

1632   W. Lithgow Totall Disc. Trav. (1682) ix. 396   Villages and Houses..each one was within cry of another.
1819   Scott Legend of Montrose iv, in Tales of my Landlord 3rd Ser. IV. 72   One of the Campbells replied, ‘It is a far cry to Lochow’; a proverbial expression of the tribe, meaning that their ancient hereditary domains lay beyond the reach of an invading enemy.
1850   Tait's Edinb. Mag. Feb. 75/1   In those days, it was a ‘far cry’ from Orkney to Holyrood; nevertheless the ‘cry’ at length penetrated the royal ear.
1885   Athenæum 18 Apr. 498/3   It is a far cry from the ascidian to bookbinding and blue china, yet it is a cry that can be achieved by Mr. Lang.

The ascidian — I had to look it up — is a sea squirt, and it's not yelling out to bookbinding and blue china, so this metaphor has been dying since at least 1885.

How to read a book a day for a year.

Choose short/easy/audio books.

Actually, I read a book a day and have for years — but it's an audiobook, and most of this reading is done while asleep.

Do you have an reading-related New Year's resolutions? Let's think up some reading projects for the new year. We don't necessarily have to do them. Let's just contemplate them. I've already thought of 2, one of which I plan to do. First:

Maybe a good project would be those "History of..." pages, not just for their most common words — WAR! — but to have had it run through your head, at least once, what happened in all of those places. Do you know how many pages we are talking about? The number of members in the United Nations is not the right answer, but do you know that number? It's 193. Wikipedia lists 206 sovereign states (including those with disputed sovereignty).

Let's make a New Year's resolution: Each day, read one Wikipedia "History of..." page. Will you join me? We'll go in alphabetical order, and I'll prompt you with blog posts.

That will start on New Year's day. Don't worry, I'll make it amusing. Second:

What I like [about "The Great Gatsby"] is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration....

I feel like starting a blog devoted to individual sentences in "The Great Gatsby," chosen randomly, and continuing until all the sentences have been used up.

With commentary, of course. For example, here's my commentary on the hot-whistle-simmering-hush sentence (responding to a commenter who complained that "trains do not 'emerge' from tunnels. They blast, speed, rip, explode, hurtle. E.B. White and Orwell would have hated the verb 'emerge'):

Now, one reason the train can't "blast" or "explode" from the tunnel — and by the way, oh, you men, with your cocks — is that the "only" sound was the "hot whistle." Otherwise, there was a "hush." That's all very surreal, no? Why didn't the train make any noise? It emerged, because it wasn't a screaming cock blasting through a vagina tunnel, as happens in your (presumably) E.B. White-approved works of fiction. Why was the train silent, why were the whistles hot, why was the hush simmering, why was it noon, why were the whistles biscuit whistles, and why wasn't it the biscuit, rather than the whistle, that was hot?

"Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism."

"It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that."

So writes Firmin DeBrabander, who is a philosophy prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the corner of the NYT called "The Stone," which calls itself "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."

I'm not familiar with Firmin DeBrabander but I would like to know if he extends his principle generally to all of the individual rights currently protected in the various interpretations that have emanated from the Supreme Court.

Does our abortion culture/free speech culture promote a fatal slide into extreme individualism? Do abortion rights/free speech rights foster a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another. Would Professor DeBrabander say that abortion rights and free speech rights are not freedom but the opposite?

Let me offer a bonus literary reading to sharpen the question. It's from a famous book. I've added some boldface to stress things relevant to DeBrabander's philosophy:

"You are thinking... that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?...

"We are the priests of power.... God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone— free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body— but, above all, over the mind....

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation— anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to...."