Required Reading – “The Reign of Terror”

Tomis Kapitan of the New York Times writes, When President Barack Obama spoke to the public in September about his decision to use American military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria he used familiar language. ISIS (or ISIL as the White House and others refer to the group), the president said, “is … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Richard Nixon was Jay Gatsby

“The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption – and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ***  John Aloysius Farrell writes: IIn April 1974, Richard Nixon went to the movies. His presidency was collapsing, a … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Some Americans Say They Support the Affordable Care Act but Not Obamacare

“What’s in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Or maybe not. James Hamblin writes, “So you disagree with Obamacare?” “Yes, I do.” “Do you think insurance companies should be able to exclude people with preexisting conditions?” “No.” “Do you agree that young people should be able to stay on … Continue reading →

21st Century Buchanans

Even though it is merely mentioned in passing, Maureen Dowd’s article contains one of the most thought-provoking allusions I’ve seen in awhile.  Dowd compares the Clintons to the Buchanans of The Great Gatsby.  The two couples don’t strike me as having very similar personas (Hillary Clinton, especially, does not exude the same naivete or even … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Words Appearing in Newspapers Controversially

This article in The Economist summarizes the Associated Press’s recent move to eliminate “illegal immigrant” from its usage to ward against “[reducing] well-rounded human beings to avatars of lawlessness.”  It continues with the reactions of the group Americans for Legal Immigration, which announced it would now adopt the phrase “illegal invaders:” This line of thinking is … Continue reading →

Required Reading – AP dumps ‘illegal immigrant’ but not neutrality

Roy Peter Clark’s article reinforces that banning a certain term or phrase does not make it apolitical.  As I wrote earlier this week, The use of “undocumented” changes the conversation.  By replacing the more offensive word with a less offensive one portrays the noun (person) it identifies – whether covertly or overtly – in a … Continue reading →

Banning the Term “Illegal Immigrant”

The Associated Press no longer tolerates the phrase “illegal immigrant.”  Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll argues that “illegal” should refer to an action and not a person because these types of words end up “pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone’s life to become … Continue reading →

Required Reading – The War over “Balanced”

Last week I posted an article by Emma Green about how participants at the Economy Summit with completely different viewpoints used the same language to argue their positions.  Politicians use abstract words like “balance,” which merely disguises differences and ignores more concrete language that would actually define what “balance” means to them. Jonathan Allen’s recent … Continue reading →

There’s a war? And other information students don’t know

The recent trend in education and standardized testing is to focus on skills and not content or knowledge.  I am supposed to teach my students, for example, how to recognize figures of speech and not merely have them memorize the dates or titles of Emily Dickinson poems. This makes sense to me.  Students can apply … Continue reading →

Required Reading – Let’s Talk about Debt: The Language of the Deficit Debate

Emma Green details the debt debate at The Atlantic’s Economy Summit.  She writes, While the terms [the Washington elites] used often sounded safe and unobjectionable – who could be against the concept of “balance”? or “de-leveraging”? or “long-term investments”? — these safe-sounding words disguised deep differences among the speakers. […] Here’s a case where language … Continue reading →