March 4, National Grammar Day 2013

March 4, 2013

Are you motivated to do something about grammar?  If you’re lucky enough to subscribe to the Chicago Tribune and you read the paper today, you probably know where this is going.

Every year on March 4 (also known as march forth! which will make sense in a second), language-minded folks raise their grammartini glasses and drink to National Grammar Day.

Established in 2008 by author and editor Martha Brockenbrough, who also founded the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, National Grammar Day is a celebration of words in all their written, spoken, tweeted, texted splendor.

Grammar police

Grammar police visited this sign — for National Grammar Day? Photo: the_munificent_sasquatch

Probably the best place to start would be Motivated Grammar:

It’s National Grammar Day 2013, which has really snuck up on me. If you’ve been here in previous years, you know that I like to do three things on March 4th: have a rambling speculative discussion about the nature of grammar and/or linguistics, link to some people’s posts I’ve liked, and link to some of my posts. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy with dissertation work lately that I’m a bit worn out on discussion and haven’t been adequately keeping up with everyone’s blogs. So I hope you’ll forgive my breach of etiquette in making this year’s NGD post all Motivated Grammar posts.

Well, not entirely. Everyone in our little community gets in on National Grammar Day, so let me mention a few good posts I’ve seen so far. Kory Stamper discusses her mixed feelings on the day, as well as on correcting people’s language in general. Dennis Baron looks at the abandoned, paranoid, wartime predecessor of NGD, “Better American Speech Week”. And from last year, but only better from the aging process, Jonathon Owen and goofy had posts asking what counts as evidence for grammatical correctness or incorrectness, and why we’re so often content to repeat grammar myths.

Yeah, yeah.  He said “snuck.”  You and I know he should have said “sneaked,” but he’s probably go the new dictionaries that caved on the issue.  I think this breach of common sense and moral standards of grammar is the cause of our present political trouble in Washington, the Stupid Sequestration, and the Great Gridlock.

The rest of the post is pretty good, though, especially the debunking of ten more myths of grammar.  Go see.

An actual National Grammar Day website exists, courtesy of Grammar Girl, I think.

Excited yet?  Go back to that Chicago Tribune article:

A highlight of the holiday each year is the haiku contest, in which contestants are urged to tweet grammar- or usage-based haikus. Judges include Ben Zimmer, the Boston Globe language columnist and executive producer of Visual Thesaurus, Martha Barnette, who hosts a nationally syndicated public radio program called “A Way with Words,” Bill Walsh, a copy editor at the Washington Post and author of “Lapsing into a Comma,” and, of course, Brockenbrough.

Last year’s winner was Larry Kunz, a technical writer from Raleigh-Durham, N.C.. His winning poem:

Being a dangler,

Jane knew it would have to come

out of the sentence

Runners-up included this gem from one Charlie MacFadyen:

Wanted: one pronoun,

To take the place of he/she

“They” need not apply

And this, from Tom Freeman:

People shouldn’t say

“I could care less” when they mean

“I could care fewer”

The holiday is not, planners says, an opportunity to scold.

I understand Grammarly runs an annual photo contest.  I haven’t found it yet.  Will you let us know in comments, if you find the photos?  (This isn’t it, though there may be overlap).

(But, no, Dear Reader, I had not been aware of National Grammar Day, either, until just about an hour ago.  March 4th/March Forth!, is the link, I suppose.  We’re ten days away from International Pi Day, too:  3.14.)

Also, let me interject one of my favorite sentences.  In a long, sometimes bitter discussion about grammar and social reform way back in 1957, there were people who argued that grammar is essential to meaning, and that correct grammar could carry the entire meaning.  To that idea, Noam Chomsky came up with a rebuttal in the form of a sentence that, though completely correct grammatically, means absolutely nothing.  Watching politics, life and organizations, you will discover Prof. Chomsky’s sentence applies in way more places than it should, or than you can stand.  Chomsky’s grammatically perfect, though meaningless sentence?

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

More:

 

1 Comment | History, Writing | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

March 4, 1933: Frances Perkins sworn in as Secretary of Labor, first woman to serve in the cabinet

March 4, 2013

FDR’s administration hit the ground running.

On March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins was sworn in as his Secretary of Labor.  She became the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet.

Frances Perkins, by Robert Shetterly

Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, was Secretary of Labor in Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration. Painting by Robert Shetterly, part of his series, Americans Who Tell the Truth, Models of Courageous Citizenship

The text on the portrait:

“Very slowly there evolved… certain basic facts, none of them new, but all of them seen in a new light. It was no new thing for America to refuse to let its people starve, nor was it a new idea that man should live by his own labor, but it had not been generally realized that on the ability of the common man to support himself hung the prosperity of everyone in the country.”

Perkins was one of the chief proponents of Social Security and the Social Security System.  She was a crusader for better working conditions long before joining FDR’s cabinet.

Perkins witnessed the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and watched the trapped young women pray before they leapt off the window ledges into the streets below. Her incessant work for minimum hours legislation encouraged Al Smith to appoint her to the Committee on Safety of the City of New York under whose authority she visited workplaces, exposed hazardous practices, and championed legislative reforms. Smith rewarded her work by appointing her to the State Industrial Commission in 1918 and naming her its chair in 1926. Two years later, FDR would promote her to Industrial Commissioner of New York.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Jim Stanley and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut; Rep. DeLauro posted a Facebook note of the anniversary, which Jim called to my attention.

More:

1 Comment | Franklin Roosevelt, History, Labor and unions, New Deal, Presidents, Women in History | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

How wealth inequality crowds out America’s success

March 4, 2013

What happens when a lot of money — I mean, a lot of money — is concentrated in a few hands?

The nation runs the risk of economic failure.

This short video says that more money is concentrated in fewer hands than we think.

Description from the maker, Politizane:

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

This is just one facet of the figures necessary for having rational discussions about tax reform, federal budget and deficit cutting, tax policy, and economic and monetary policy.

But it’s an ugly portrait, isn’t it?  How much does it differ from the France of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette?  How much does it differ from the going-to-hell-in-an-accelerating-handbasket U.S. of 1929?  Wealth’s concentration in the hands of a tiny few literally crowds out hundreds of millions of Americans from the ability to successfully accumulate modest nest eggs.

What do you think?

I wish the film’s creator had provided citations.

Have things improved since 2007?  Look at this chart based on Institute for Policy Studies figures:

Maldistribution of U.S. wealth, 2007; Inst for Policy Studies

Source: Institute for Policy Studies, via BusinessInsider

More:

More, since the original posting:

Update March 9, 2013:  This is funny, to me:  Some people think just talking about this stuff is “class warfare.”  How are they so familiar with class warfare, you wonder?  That’s a self-answering question, isn’t it?

6 Comments | Economics, History, Income Distribution, Politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell