Earlier in the week I quoted from Shakespeare. “Hung be the heavens with black” which comes from Henry V. Now we have a new quote the comes from Henry V, as well. “The empty vessel makes the most noise”, of course was replaced with “barrel”. I also mentioned before that we might start to be getting more erudite in this country because the press have to scramble to figure out what “dotard” meant when the Korean dictator called Donald Trump one. Suddenly the media is scrambling to look up all kinds of words and phrases that they obviously never heard before. The vituperous comments on some media outlets about words that were never used in white people’s neighborhoods such as empty, barrels, and noise, seems to be rather strange and probably racist. I guess there are no empty barrels in white Boston neighborhoods. They only exist in the south, and must have been used for lynching. Lunacy like that could probably use some serious scholarship to figure it out, or maybe some serious couch time.
We live in interesting times when “the resistance” has to leave the barricades and find a dictionary or run to Google search.
I had two aunts who were very classy and they had wonderful vocabularies. They could insult you five different ways in a short conversation and you would go away feeling good about yourself. I was proud that they cared enough to insult me. Further more it helped me learn stuff. A few minutes with them and I was wandering off looking for a dictionary. The medias various hobby horses, like the connection between the poem at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty and the statue; the meaning of “ban”, “dotard”, and “illegal”, who it is that actually is supposed to originate spending bills under the constitution; etc, can be quite educational in a country that seems to be more and illiterate as time goes on. Of course when some who are not naturally obtuse decide to deliberately be stupid the education takes on some added importance.
