Ted Cruz' Silicone Problem

At a campaign rally in Humble, Texas yesterday, Ted Cruz said of the Texans who support his challenger Beto O’ Rourke, "they want us to be just like California...right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair....not on our watch.” Ted’s wife might have some grumbling words for him about her own Olay stash, and Texas’ many soybean farmers might not appreciate tofu’s disparagement, but the word I’d like to focus on is “silicon.” 

I have watched the video and that’s what he said, though it is obvious he was aiming for “silicone.” Silicone is a synthetic polymer that has myriad uses in electronics, medicine, construction and other applications, but its popular familiarity in an easily titillated America lies in its use as breast implants. It is often confused with “silicon,” which is what Cruz has done here. Silicon is much harder and more brittle than silicone, and is a critical component in the manufacture of computer chips, hence the term “silicon valley,” a nickname for the southern San Francisco bay area where much of America’s high technology development occurs. There being no colloquial Texas pronunciation resembling "silicon," it is safe to say Cruz committed this common error. 

It being a common error, you might regard my pointing it out here as finicky, but Cruz is a Harvard-trained debate star and a professional communicator, so I think it fair. One literal way to interpret his utterance is this: “There is NO WAY Texas will invest in high tech…not on our watch.” If you are inclined to forgive it as mere mispronunciation, its redux is thus: “Why spend money on fake boobs when you can elect a real one?”

Ron DeSantis has a monkey on his back.

Not to comment on Ron DeSantis’ metaphorical monkey business would be ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. The Twittersphere and other platforms went bananas today when they heard DeSantis warn Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Andrew Gillum. I think his critics are up a tree with this one, as this usage has clearly thrown a monkey wrench into DeSantis’ campaign plans. It was a mistake, not a dog whistle. Dog whistles are usually precisely that—hard to hear, whereas “monkey this up” is about ten degrees south of the N-word. There is no phrase “to monkey up” in any kind of American slang. He was aiming for “muck up” and he misspoke. That said, malapropisms don’t often come from nowhere. It is easy to imagine the M-word making the rounds in meetings among close associates of a Florida candidate who is a monkey-see, monkey-do for the Trump administration. The opinion call from this desk is that DeSantis' use of the phrase, “monkey this up,” was not an intentional dog whistle to white voters. However, his having ceded a few sentences earlier in the speech that Andrew Gillum was “articulate” may bear a closer look on those grounds. Dog whistle. A little hard to hear.

"Tape," like "film," is an anachronism.

My admiration for the resiliency of the word "tape" knows no measure. Very little audio record-keeping is "taped" these days. It is recorded certainly, it is captured, but not taped.

If you peruse today’s comment boards and even news headlines, you’ll read about the “taped” conversations between Cohen and Trump. Unless it was magnetically captured to a tape medium, which I doubt it was, it wasn’t taped. People familiar with Cohen’s work might not be shocked if it indeed were found on a microcassette, but this article refers to “tape” more generally.

The Watergate tapes were on actual tape. For recording one’s own phone calls in the 21^st century, however, it is almost always done with a tap off the phone into either a recording program or a handheld digital recorder. But nothing else sounds as cool as “tape,” so “tape” it is.

My hat is off to "tape," a word that managed to outlive itself.

"Proughts" is hereby coined as a conflation of "thoughts" and "prayers."

Due to the high volume of mass shootings and the attendant need for large quantities of thoughts and prayers, the word "proughts" (pronounced "prots") has been coined as a means of expressing "thoughts and prayers" more efficiently in a single word. It is estimated this will result in a 20% to 30% increase in thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families.
#proughts

Beside and besides, an easy one...

The difference between the usage of “beside” and besides” is a good thing to get clear on, as it’s an easy one to learn, but an easy one to get fuzzy on as well. 

“Beside” is a pronoun. It is a location for one thing relative to another thing, whether or not that thing can be touched. The nightstand is beside the bed and a good idea lives beside a bad one.

“Besides” means “in addition to,” and in that usage, it is also a preposition: “Besides earning millions in playing contracts, popular athletes earn massive promotional fees as well.” It also serves almost as an antonym to “beside” in the sense of “apart from.” "Besides" also has a linking adverbial function as well when you say something like, “Grammar tiffs are no fun. Besides, you have better things to do.”

It's "Happy New Year," not "Happy New Years."

You wish people a Happy New Year, not a Happy New Years. It is neither plural nor possessive and earns no letter "s," with or without apostrophe. You hope people have a good time on New Year’s Eve, and also on New Year’s Day, but when saying, "Happy New Year," such well wishing expresses your hope for the coming year at the moment of the new year. There are a few possessive holidays, and they include Valentine’s Day, Mother’s and Father’s Day, and if you’re a fan of Henry V, St. Crispin’s Day. On a related note, Presidents’ Day is plural possessive and Veterans Day is plural. As to the capitalization of "Happy New Year," convention and AP hold that all three letters should be capitalized. 

Tolerance is Something I Will Not Tolerate

I am always fascinated when the primary connotations of words are missed by tens of millions of people. Tolerance is one such word. As multiculturalism rises in this country, tolerance is celebrated by progressive thinkers as an ideal state of how one human being should regard another. “I attend a church that preaches tolerance,” says one, and “I voted for the candidate who displays tolerance toward others,” says another.

When we tolerate something, we permit its existence, we allow it to live, but we do so begrudgingly, with a sneer. You tolerate your uncle’s alcoholism. You tolerate your dog’s farting. You tolerate your spouse’s gnarly mole. You endure them under the yoke of some perceived moral obligation, but deep inside you loathe them. You revile them. Well, maybe the mole is cute if it is at least hairless, or if not completely hairless, maybe something just shy of it resembling a sea anemone.

Some of these tolerances are so in name only, and are perhaps more accurately described as resentments. You only refer to your willingness not to crush the host of the offending attribute like a bug as tolerance rather than as resentment because it makes you feel a little better about how you feel.

Something tolerated is something disdained. The occasional dead mouse plopped from cat’s jaws onto an oriental rug, the neighbor’s frequently noisy children, the boss’s incessant need for status updates. Why then has tolerance emerged within political discourse at least as the best word to describe the dissolution of all prejudice within a person or an institution?

When we display tolerance toward another religion, we make a promise not to blow up its mosques, churches or synagogues, but we still may disdain them profoundly under the umbrella of tolerance. Mutual tolerance across all of society would seem to promote a seething resentment amongst all peoples, but with a pledge not to slash anyone’s tires.

Acceptance is a far better word. The difference between acceptance and tolerance is the difference between involvement and commitment, which is in turn the difference between the pig’s and the chicken’s relationship to your ham and egg breakfast. It is in part a semantic debate, but only in terms of usage, not word choice. Acceptance is a bit further up the ladder as far as one's regard for another human being, but still, you can accept people you hate. Ideally, let's not hate one another.

That might invoke another word, celebration, but that I think celebration in this context a bit conspicuous. It is contrived political correctness at that point I think, so I'll stick with acceptance over the course of my campaign to eradicate tolerance. Down with tolerance! In closing, if there is one thing I will no longer tolerate, it is misuse of the word ‘tolerance’.