Notes on thuggery

Sam Smith - I’d like to cut a deal with Richard Sherman. I won’t compete for his gig if he doesn’t compete for mine. After a controversial, robust interview following the NFC championship game, Sherman offered some additional thoughts. Reports Travis Waldron in the liberal Think Progress: Richard Sherman on Wednesday said that the only …

The politics of symbols

Sam Smith - Last week, as a guest on the Mark Thomson Show (Sirius/XM 127), I found myself mainly listening to Mark and a southern man on the subject of the Confederate flag. The immediate topic was the ugly display of the flag in front of the White House during a recent protest but it …

Talking the walk

Sam Smith - It used to be that when a Hilary Rosen said something stupid, a George Zimmerman was said to have used an anti-black slur, or a black politician like Marion Barry publicly criticized Asian businesses, that such things would be filler items or paragraphs well down in a story, with a lifespan of …

Putting the G back into Obama

Sam Smith - You can tell when America isn’t anywhere close to dealing seriously with its ethnic problems because, during such times, the language we use becomes more important than actually solving the problems under discussion. So at a moment when there is extraordinary black poverty, glaring discrimination in who gets locked up on drug …

Ernest Hemingway

Sam Smith - Ernest Hemingway committed suicide fifty years ago this month. You can read a lot about that and his life in the media, but not so much about one reason he mattered: he knew how to write. As Robert Roper wrote in Obit Magazine. “He has come close to being remembered as much …

Why bad words aren’t the problem

Sam Smith- Read the following sentence: "F*** you." What did you just say to yourself? The asterisks wouldn't work if you hadn't filled them in. - Using correct language is the obsession of that part of our culture least likely to produce any positive social or political change. One reason for this is that people …

At a loss for words

Sam Smith, 2010 One of the beats that I have found myself covering over the past few decades has been cultural, political and  ecological entropy, enervation, eradication, and extinction. Beyond the cataclysmic – such as climate change or the end of the First American Republic – there has also been dysfunctional devolvement in little corners …

The metaphor spill

Sam Smith - The establishment is struggling to gain metaphorical control over the BP oil spill. It feels entitled to control metaphors just as much as it does oil drilling policy and doesn't it like when the non-establishment comes up with its own. Thus Chris Matthews goes berserk when anyone refers to the present government …

SomeRulesForWriting LLC (SRFW)!

Sam Smith Of all the losing battles in which I have taken part, one of the most annoying, because I am reminded of it daily, is the struggle to preserve the English language or - as my high school math teacher put it - to speak United States. Like so many things in our culture, …

Harder to read than Ulysses

Sam Smith All along your editor has thought his problem was that he didn't speak opaquely and complexly enough to make it with the Washington crowd. Now the Amazon text rating system has proved otherwise. As reader CH put it, "I'm laughing my ass off. I first found out about this feature yesterday at Jorn …

Confessions of a vision impaired stakeholder with dubious managment practices embarking on an ill-defined mission

Sam Smith 2009 Have pity on me. Say a prayer. Drop a penny in the pond on my behalf. In a few days I have to go to a non-profit's strategic planning meeting. It's a great organization that does great things, but - like so many non-profits - it periodically seeks to cleanse and refresh …

Word & meaning

Sam Smith 1981 I learned the other day that I had survived more than two decades as a writer without ever fully understanding what a predicate was: My ten-year-old explained it to me. I was glad he understood it, but I wondered whether he still would when he was forty-one and how many times he …

The language of cruelty

Sam Smith 2004 Listening to Diane Rehm the other morning as she and her panelists turned the horrors of Abu Ghraib into just another matter of politics, policy and process brought to mind the question: what if the prisoners had been Jewish and the time 70 years ago and the place Germany? How would Diane …

Harder to read than Ulysses

SAM SMITH - All along your editor has thought his problem was that he didn't speak opaquely and complexly enough to make it with the Washington crowd. Now the Amazon text rating system has proved otherwise. As reader CH put it, "I'm laughing my ass off. I first found out about this feature at Jorn …

A few thoughts about writing

Sam Smith 2006 Just because we are able to speak and write doesn't mean we have to, As someone once said, what this country needs is more free speech worth listening to. Accumulating verbiage without regard to its content is more likely to lead to indigestion than understanding. Speak United States. Avoid the private languages …