Words of the Day: "Love" and "Life"

The company making and/or distributing old-fashioned Dominica bay rum aftershave has apparently gone out of business, but I was able to buy a couple bottles on e-Bay at an almost-reasonable price. I made the purchase as a "guest," and the confirmation e-mail I just got was (a) misleading — suggesting they were holding my purchase hostage until I signed up — and (b) a temptation to join e-Bay and use their services to buy items I "love." 

Okay, at least they didn't insist on an e-Bay "community" or "family," but items I love, like aftershave?! I know we have those hearts on Facebook and that at least one NPR station asks if we love their shows, but I think we've gotten to some serious word-inflation with loving anything short of puppies or kittens that I'm likely to see on e-Bay (and I assume they do not sell live mammals). Now living in California, far from the pollen-attack-plants of south-west Ohio, I still have some minor allergy issues, and I really like lime bay rum as an aftershave that doesn't aggravate those remaining allergies. I'm grateful for bay rum; I like the smell, especially with a touch of lime — but it's just a casual relationship, not love.

* * *

"All Lives Matter," a meme I received said, and people have pronounced in my hearing "All Life Is Sacred" — and in that second case I've told them not to assert the sanctity of all life while chomping on a hamburger or even a carrot. Or using your leather shoe to squash a cockroach — and then clean your hands off with a bacteria-killing hand sanitizer. Most life on Earth over Earth's history and at any time by weight and number of individuals is Archaea, Bacteria, or, among us "higher" organisms, plants and insects. The Jains come close to literally respecting the sanctity of all life, but if they're to live healthily even their bodies must kill intruding bacteria and viruses, and kill aging or over-active cells of the body itself.

If people mean "All human life is sacred" (or whatever), they should say that, or argue for a definition of "life" that excludes most creatures your high school life-sciences teachers made you study.
This last point is important.
There's a dangerous arrogance in restricting real life to human beings on religious grounds or some secular theory of human exceptionalism. And even if we arrogantly assume we humans are extra-special special, it's just silly to say that cats and dogs and even ants and worms somehow aren't alive. And it's irresponsible to kill living things and not be conscious of doing so. Personally, I've killed bacteria by the billions, and I won't apologize for that killing — but I will take responsibility, and a heavier responsibility for the laboratory work I did that involved killing dogs, one cat, a rabbit or two, and a lot of rats. I've killed my quota of mammals, I think, which is one of the several reasons I now decline to eat them.
Mammals are kin, and I draw the line there for food. I also draw a line at octopuses, which is a lot easier since I'm not even all that fond of squid. 
Octopuses are invertebrates and not in the web of life close to humans and chimps and dogs and birds. But my sister and I were once invited backstage, so to speak, at a major aquarium and got to see an injured octopus in their veterinary section, in an aquarium cage inside a larger aquarium. Anything simpler, and this octopus escaped, picking locks and going around opening other others. As far as the (human) staff could figure out, the octopus got bored, and the locks and cages were a challenge. And I figured any creature smart enough to get bored and pick locks was too smart to kill casually (or have killed and eat if there's a variation of [squid] calamari made with octopus). 
Not too far into the 20th century, there was a fair degree of agreement that humans shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering to sentient creatures, with "sentient" not in the sense of "smart and conscious" and "capable of thought" but just, well, sentient to external stimuli, able to perceive enough to suffer. Whether eating hamburgers and spare ribs is necessary is something we can argue about; cruelty to animals for sport isn't something most of us argue: it's just evil, period.
Our treatment of non-human animals will become a more pressing issue as, as the over-stated title to an article in The Atlantic has it, "Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition." The debate on human life will become more pressing as we in the US enter another round of debate on abortion, with a new US Supreme Court. As others and I have stated repeatedly, that conflict over abortion isn't about "When does life begin?" Life doesn't begin; it began. How do I know? The Bible and my biology courses tell me so. Life began and gets passed down. So, yes, indeed, "There's always a death in an abortion." The question is what's being killed and what status should he/she/it/they have ethically considered and under the law? A human fertilized egg — a human zygote — is a potential unique human individual or, on occasion, a set of genetically pretty much identical but still unique individuals. ("Monozygotic siblings" aren't really identical twins or triplets or whatever: They've had slightly different environments in the womb, and individuality is their birthright.) But a zygote is a one-celled creature, and you shouldn't mind killing it if you eat that hamburger or carrot without qualms or stomp that cockroach and thereby kill more "highly" developed life.
 To get a human zygote more valuable than a steer and important enough to compete with the rights of its human mother, it's most efficient to have a theory of a human soul and to argue that "ensoulment" occurs at the moment of conception. In an important traditional Roman Catholic view, you can have the zygote and succeeded embryos and fetuses as unborn babies and, perhaps more significant, unbaptized babies, who, if killed would wind up in Limbo (at one time) or Hell. As the thoroughly Puritan Reverend Mr. Michael Wigglesworth had God say to unbaptized dead babies it in "The Day of Doom" (1662 —a truly awful poem):

"You sinners are, and such a share	345
As sinners may expect,
Such you shall have; for I do save
None but my own elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their
Who liv’d a longer time,	350
I do confess yours is much less,
Though every sin’s a crime.
"A crime it is, therefore in bliss
You may not hope to dwell
But unto you I shall allow	355
The easiest room in hell.”

And here we get to serious arguments on secular vs. religious ideas on what "life" means in "Choose life" and what we mean by "love" with either a God of Love who'd damn babies on a technicality or in a love one might have for one's fellow human beings viewed realistically and materialistically — and when one becomes human on the way from zygote to embryo to fetus to baby to, well, a conscious, talking, definitely-a-person person. 
WORDS MEAN; and if they "mean" in complex ways, that's all the more reason to use them carefully.

"Nation" v. "Republic," Russians, Trump, and "Smoking Guns"

On whether (or not) there's a "smoking gun" in Donald Trump's involvement with the Russians as candidate and/or President—and whether Americans should care:

The US "Pledge of Allegiance" to the flag lumps together the US as "one Nation under God" and "the Republic" symbolized by the flag. Usually conflated in colloquial usage, Nation and Republic are different things (with "the American State" aside for a moment).

If we are essentially a Nation, and especially if that's a White, Christian Nation — possibly in the sense of "I used to be Catholic but now I'm a Christian" (actual quote) — then President Trump is going an impressive job as Leader of the Nation, channeling the will of the *real* American people and resisting corruption by foreigners generally but also by internal elements on the Nation's territory who are not White and/or properly Christian. Or for more inclusive Nationalists, putting a larger Nation first and over all.

For the Nation, going further a Capitalist Nation, Trump's doing business with the Russians is no big deal, and Russian help for his election would be a neutral or good thing since it helped give the Leader authority over much of the apparatus of the State, returning it to the service of the Nation.

If the US is essentially a Republic with a "mixed Constitution" with democratic elements — even liberal-democratic elements — then messing with elections is a very big deal. Also a big deal would be Trump's trying to use agents and agencies of the State to protect his position as Leader. And a really big deal would be the Leader of the Nation asserting himself over the laws of the Republic and State.

Since most Americans are as double-minded on such matters as the Pledge to the Flag is, this division can get murky. At the extremes, though, it's clear enough, and the resolution (if any) may very well start there if and when small "r" republicans try to remove by impeachment or the 2020 elections the Leader of the Nation.

On Liberty: Required Vaccinations, Calorie Counts, & Food Pimping

            In 1970 or thereabout — anyway, sufficiently long ago for the relevant statute of limitations to have run out — I told the truth to an agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and probably misled him.

            I told the agent, "Mr. N__ is a very patriotic young man," which indeed he was. When he entered the University of Illinois, he didn't just take ROTC in the standard varieties most of us took, since required to, but entered Marine ROTC and had every intention to go off to Southeast Asia to fight for his country. As time and the war wore on, and as Mr. N__ studied US warfare in Vietnam and environs, he came to believe first that the war was ill-advised, then that it was wrong, and finally that it was an unjust war and immoral — and Mr. N__ became a highly active participant of the anti-War movement.

            Indeed, Mr. N__ was more active in the movement than I and, let's say, unfanatical in his devotion to nonviolence. He also rendered important services that I got to observe when he and I were marshals at a demonstration and one of our local Anarchists or outside provocateurs needed to be kept moving along and called Mr. N__ and me "Peace pigs."

            (Yes, we had our troublemakers in the Movement, and the Powers that Were supplied provocateurs, and even the Peace Movement occasionally needed some muscle. And Mr. N__'s mere assertive presence was enough to keep the moment peaceful.)

            Mr. N__ loved America and served it, so he was a patriot.

            And so I affirmed to the FBI guy, in full knowledge that I spoke the truth but probably not a truth that the FBI leadership, at the time, would accept.

            A lot of that was going on 1970 or thereabouts: some really serious disagreements on definitions of words like "patriot" as in whether a patriotic young American man resists his government when his government does evil or keeps his mouth shut, submits to the draft, and fights when he's told to.

            I state the matter as I would have back then and will state it even more emphatically now. America lost the Vietnam War. We're still here. We've got problems, but we're doing okay, and we'd be doing better if we had told the French to go to hell in 1946 and never fought in Indochina. Therefore no vital interests of the United States were involved in the war: had vital interests been involved — some "existential threat" as politicians say nowadays, there would have been horrible consequences when we lost. Q.E.D.

            So Mr. N__ was a patriot because he acted out of love of his country, and he was right.

            You do not, however, have to believe that to accept the point of the story for this blog post; you may indeed believe that Mr. N__ and I and the other peaceniks were traitors. The point is that argument over key words was and remains important, words like "patriot" and "traitor."

            A decade and a bit before I talked to the FBI agent — before the 1960s and "the Movement" and the US forms of "The Troubles," William Arrowsmith of the University of Texas suggested that defining key terms was crucial during periods of stress in ancient Athens and that the great Greek tragedies could be analyzed as each defining a key term contested (as we'd later say) in Athenian culture. So Sophocles's Philoctetes was about defining timē ("price," "worth," someone's value) and Euripides's The Bacchae was an examination of sophia, "wisdom."

            There's a brief shtick I heard among country-western singers that starts with the rhetorical question, "'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?'" and responds to it, "Shee-ut! Not while there's outright theft." And I flattered Arrowsmith and a tradition of Shakespeare scholars in writing a dissertation in the late 1960s into 1971, mostly on defining "wisdom" and "folly" in Shakespeare's major mature tragedies, with glances at other key words like "Nature" with a capital and "nature" without, "man" and "manly," and "traitor."

            Recently, I've been re-listening to Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer (1989) and Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Region Cultures of North America (2012). Woodard's work stems from Fischer's, and both look at competing cultural values, including meanings of some key words such as "order" and, what I've finally arrived at, liberty.

            When we were looking over the "unalienable rights" part of the US Declaration of Independence, one of my students noted that Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, was "a simple hypocrite!" I thought for a moment and said, "Not simple." Jefferson, as a well-educated and very bright person, was a hypocrite, if a complex one, in claiming liberty while owning slaves, but his contemporaries in the Virginia 1% ca. 1776 weren't hypocrites, at least not on this issue.

            It's safe to assume that most Virginia aristocrats didn't think enough about political issues to be hypocrites, and those who did think thought in terms of "republican liberty" of the old Roman sort, where owning slaves was part of aristocratic liberty. Owning slaves gave the elite freedom from servile manual labor — significant word, servile — and embodied the independence and power to order about one's inferiors, plus the authority where those inferiors usually obeyed and the power to coerce them when they got uppity.

            Liberty meant elite independence from interference from above, and the ability to enforce one's will on those below oneself in the hierarchical order of things.

            "Liberty" (libertas, classic liberty) was not a simple word.

            "Liberty" still isn't simple, although aristocrats nowadays usually have the brains not to call themselves aristocrats and to condescend more politely to people they consider their inferiors. Nowadays liberty gets most contested in claims of freedom from government regulation in such matters as sex, religion, commerce, and dealing with children.

            Dealing frequently in blog posts with sex and religion, I'm going to restrict myself to a couple issues on commerce and kids, and I'm going to start with a statement on liberty that's become pretty standard for traditional American liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Indeed, when I first read it at age eighteen — as soon as I'd puzzled out the old-fashioned language — it seemed to me a commonsense statement of the obvious. This is from John Stuart Mill's classic 1859 essay "On Liberty," where, he says,

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle [….], that the sole end for which mankind are warranted […] in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any [adult] member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. […] The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. […] Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. ("Introductory," paragraph 9)

         The principle was paraphrased to me as a child as "Your right to swing your arms starts at the next kid's nose," and there is a good chance you'll agree with it. The challenge for Mill was applying his elegant principle in the messy real world, bringing his full "Essay" to over 110 pages; and application remains a challenge. To begin with, Mill was a laissez faire, "leave it be," hands-off libertarian radical when it came to commerce. He wanted the government to stay out of the marketplace. But: but Mill was a laisse-faire, "leave it be," hands-off libertarian radical when it came to commerce on the grounds of "utility," what we might call pragmatic grounds. In advanced commercial societies it was usually better, he believed, to just leave the market do its thing; but commerce is necessarily a social activity in which people's conduct definitely "concerns others" — and therefore could be regulated "to prevent harm to others."

         Also, Mill excludes children from his principle of liberty and, unfortunately, "those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage." Hey, he was radical for 1859, but that allowed for a heavy dose of what we'd call ethnocentrism and condescension for the "wogs" of the Earth: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." As we used to joke, "As H. Rap Brown would say" — a Black Power activist — "'Damn White of him to say that ….'"

            Anyway, it's still relevant that Mill would have State and society protect children and young people below the age of majority even from themselves; and he goes on to insist that "There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others" that any full adult in a society "may rightfully be compelled to perform" in various kinds of "joint work necessary to the interest of the society" that offers us protection" and "to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill usage," concluding that "whenever it is obviously a man’s duty to do," something he may "rightfully be made responsible to society for not doing." This follows from the Principle of Liberty because, clearly, "A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction […]" — although he had of be careful with trickier cases of making people do something positive to help others as opposed to just forbidding them to hurt others.

            I clearly don't have a right to swing my arms randomly into some other guy's nose, but things get tricky in cases were I may have an ethical obligation to try to stop him from beating on some third person. Those fictional corporate "persons" the US Supreme Court has been much concerned about can clearly be stopped from doing harm, such as selling tainted meat, but can they be made to reduce harm or even do some good?

            There is also the problem when people profit by encouraging and/or arranging for other people to do that which society thinks will harm those others, even if Mill's principle would have them free harm themselves. If an adult is free is sell his or more often her sexual services and other adults are free to purchase those services, it may still be permissible to forbid someone to act as a pimp.

            Which brings us to some issues in our time.

            By Mill's principle, it would be tyrannical for State or Society to prohibit an action if it hurts some adult individual if that hurt is completely and entirely confined to the individual acting and suffering the action. If you want to ruin your health in one way or another, that, in itself, is something an adult "you" is free to do. But if State and society may only act "to prevent harm to others," we have often acted "to prevent harm to others" in the area of public health.

            If you've got a serious contagious disease, the State can order you to stay home, and the State and your neighbors are justified in enforcing a quarantine, even if quarantine blatantly and seriously restricts your liberty.

            But what about a positive action like inoculations against contagious diseases, especially diseases of children?

            Back when I was doing summer work in the bio-science and medical biz, I was taught, "There is no such thing as an absolutely safe procedure," and that theory was reinforced for me when I drove home a colleague with a high fever from our inoculations at Illinois Public Health — the bubonic plague shot probably — and when I myself almost got a vein torn just getting blood drawn. Some kids are going to get bad reactions from inoculations, and, given the great law of Nature, "Shit Happens," a small number of those reactions will be dangerous and a very small number will be deadly. The safest thing for your kid would be to live in an area where just about everyone else has had inoculations or a childhood bout of some disease, avoid the shots, and depend on "herd immunity."

            Can the State coerce people to forego that game and get their kids inoculated; and can Society, as in the neighbors, act on our own to shame "Goddamn freeloaders!"?

            Uh, yeah. The answer to the question is "Yes." Carefully and reluctantly, we can so act; it is the obligation of State and Society to protect kids generally, not just yours, and it's a right and obligation of State and society to compel "positive acts for the benefit of others" in protecting public health.

            A more problematic situation involves commerce and speech and the somewhat paradoxical idea that society might have to allow people to act as whores and johns (and janes?) — in the interest of liberty — but could, without injustice, forbid pimping.

            And, of course, there can be regulation of commerce when there are good utilitarian (and for Mill, Utilitarian) reasons for regulating, especially when, again, public health is involved.

            So: Even in the midst of an obesity "epidemic," Carl's Jr. is free to make obscenely fattening burger combinations — 1230 calories in one Half-Pound Mile High Bacon Cheeseburger — and adult customers have the liberty to buy and eat them (although I shouldn't, since one of those Mile Highs delivers the calorie allowance for an inactive day for a man my size). But Carl's Jr. has had some fun, and apparently a good deal of success, coming close to literalizing the expression "food porn" in their 2014-15 commercials. What are their rights, using John Stuart Mill's approach, for commercials and marketing?

            Even adding in the US First Amendment so beloved by aging dissidents such as I (Life Member, ACLU) — even adding free speech, there's a fairly simple solution here.

            You have the right to stuff yourself at Carl's Jr. or more sufficiently with a Denny's Grand Slamwich, with Hash Browns (1528 calories), but they have an obligation to tell you the calorie count, and not just on their websites or a smartphone app.

            Those brilliantly produced TV ads can have a slow-moving crawl across the bottom in a readable large font and clear colors giving the calorie count of the food pushed by those gorgeous models. Ditto for the menus, as some jurisdictions have already required.

            Mill's principle of liberty was paraphrased by one of my students as "Freedom is the right to screw yourself," and I have asserted the right of people to "Go to hell in our own manners, so long as we don't seriously annoy the neighbors." There is no absolute right, however, to encourage people to screw themselves or grease too much the road to perdition, or to obesity.

            "Sex workers of the world, unite! Solidarity forever! Form unions and free yourselves of pimps!" And even before the unionization of sex workers, the pimping of other vices, like gluttony, can at least be rationally regulated.

            Obesity isn't an epidemic, but it is a problem in American public health, and other places penetrated by American "food ways." Pushing fast food (etc.) is commerce, and especially when commerce affects public health we can at least demand disclosure and helping to ensure people's informed choice is buying a product.

            I want to see calorie counts on all menus for any food-pusher operations bigger than a pushcart or a mom-and-pop corner dive. And Carl's Jr.: If you stick with those models, better put the calorie count on the bottom and in a large diagonal band across the screen, with the numbers where people's eyes go when checking out the models.

"Words Mean": Precision, Clarity, and Royal Pudding (13 July 3013)

Royal...Pudding...

Rich, rich, rich in flavor!

Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk,

More food energy than fresh, whole milk!

            I'm sure there were exceptions, but my memory is that every term I taught a writing course — which pretty much meant every semester for forty years — I'd write on the board at least once, "Words means." Often words mean complexly and sometimes ambiguously, but it's only rarely and perversely that we get the Humpty-Dumpty rule that a word "means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." If you're a legislative body words can mean what you command them to mean, and you can define "weapons of mass destruction" to include a hand grenade, which is destructive, but not massively, or nerve gas, which is somewhat figuratively "destructive to life" — though less effectively than well-placed hand grenades — but leaves objects very clearly undestroyed.

            Few of us, though, have such power, and most of us, most of the time, use words to communicate and have to stick to generally accepted definitions.

            Still, many were the times my students (and older folk who should know better) said, "Oh, you know what I meant!", and sometimes I did know. "Pedagogical confusion" is an old trick, where the teacher pretends not to understand what the student is saying and prods the little sod … uh, encourages the pupil into clarifying the point. Sometimes, though, no, I didn't understand; sometimes I'd been grading essays into the small hours of the morning and had trouble even seeing the words on the page. Sometimes, yeah, I understood — but I understood because I knew the material, knew the context, knew the student's dialect, and was a professional with a lot of experience and someone paid to read and figure out what authors mean; it's really arrogant for most writers to place such expectations on normal people, working for free.

            Sometimes, though, people expect you to just know what they mean and not challenge them because they're passing on received wisdom and speaking in clichés. A few such folk have an agenda, as your boss or coach very well may when urging from you a "110% commitment"; that 110% is a figure of speech and a cliché, but it's also a veiled demand for a blank check for your time and effort.

            Most clichés, though, are less pernicious than bosses of various sorts setting themselves up to demand way more of your time and effort than you should reasonably give. (If you give more than, say, 33.3% commitment to your job or 22.7% to a sports team, you're probably short-changing your family, community, and yourself.)

            I was generally spared motivational and inspirational balderdash, and most often just got innocent lemming-thought like a fair number of my more sentimental students' seeing Romeo and Juliet's being together "forever."

            I would quote Hamlet at them and suggest that "The rest is silence" is probably the best way to think about deaths at the end of tragedies. Romeo and Juliet, as tragedies go, is highly romantic and upbeat, and ends like an Italian comedy gone horribly wrong: a new and better world coalesces around a young married couple — Verona will finally know some peace — but the newly-weds are dead. So I would repeat back to my students, "they will be together forever" and ask, where?

            Romeo and Juliet are Catholics, you know, and so were most of my students; the earliest reference to Montagues and Capulets is in Dante's Purgatorio (canto 6, lines 106-08). If Catholics get the doctrine right, and Dante correctly supplied the gory details, Romeo and Juliet are together forever in the middle ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, as trees or bushes eaten by Harpies.

            If the Protestants are right, R&J are less graphically burning in the lake of fire.

             Taking a more materialist or spiritualist view, the question is still, if "You can never kill love / When love is true" — as The Kingston Trio affirmeth unto this day on my old tapes — where does love live eternally. Unless you're a Buddhist, the fashionable cosmologies open to you insist on a doomed universe. "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice," but there's wide agreement that the world will end. Mythically, there's the Christian Apocalypse — possibly that "fire next time" — or Nordic Ragnarok for the ice alternative. Or the universe peters out through entropy or comes to a fiery pop out of existence with The Big Crunch. Take your pick: if you want to see love lasting forever, it has to be outside our universe.

            Even a saved pair of lovers up in heaven will have their love subsumed in an infinite divine love, or they will be in a variety of hell. Think seriously for a moment on heaven as an eternal family reunion. Then wait for a Rod Serling voice-over reminding you that an eternity of anything not infinitely interesting will become torture. However much Juliet et al. think their loves infinite, eternity had better be an "eternal Now," 'cause a century or so of human time with Romeo, and she's going to try to strangle him (if he doesn't snap first).

            Romeo and Juliet's love is a bright flash, tragically beautiful, tragically brief; it's of infinite value, if you like that idea and believe, but also "sudden; / Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say, 'It lightens'" (2.2.119-20): its an awesome fireworks of "fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume" (2.6.10-11).

            Let it go at that, kids, I'd say; it's plenty.

            All of us some of the time and some of us much of the time just don't think much about what we're saying. And that's OK, so long as we note that when we get serious about, say, love and marriage, the legal formula is precisely, clearly, and with hope but minimal bullshit, "until death do us part."

            In less exalted matters, and more generally, precision and clarity can still be difficult.

            I recently contributed to a tribute to my colleague Brit Harwood upon his retirement from the Miami University (Oxford, OH) English Department. My comments included the point that he improved our vocabularies.

            Brit was into precision, and his suggested wording for rules and policies and reports and such were very, very precise — and sent us to the dictionary. On at least one occasion, the trip, so to speak, was worth it. Brit taught us the word "cognizable," which is a very useful word for white-collar peasants and the professorial proletariat: in an extended meaning. it's a claim that actions by one's superiors can be reviewed and potentially blocked.

            I didn't know "cognizable" but do now. Similarly with a number of words Brit used, including in communicating with the Department's Promotion and Tenure Committee. Some of Brit's totally precise terms were totally unclear to your average full professor in English at a respectable university, though not a first-rate one.

            Which brings us to another question of precision and clarity.

            The closest thing I ever had to an argument with the Chair of my Department came when I was making claims for more appreciation of my scholarship or some such thing, and my Chair said to me, "Oh, come on Rich! You've got a second-rate mind." To which I replied, "Yeah, but I'm at a third-rate university," an assertion with which he didn't argue.

            My boss and I were both PhDs from the University of Illinois at Urbana, which is a second-rate school: usually in the top twenty-five world-wide, but not in the top ten or even up there with my other alma mater, Cornell: ranking thirteenth in the Shanghai Rankings of 2012. If Miami University has ever appeared in the top 500 in the Shanghai Ranking, then I missed it.

            Talking about Miami U as "third-rate" was precise (arguably even generous) but maybe misleading. Something like "third-rank" might be better, ranking just behind, say, the academically major Big Ten schools. Miami University is a good school and nearly a perfect "fit" for many of our students; it's a place where an undergraduate and even many graduates can get a good education, usually more than adequate for their needs and abilities.

            That the whole ranking system might be legitimately characterized as having "all the intellectual respectability of a pecker contest": that's a different issue. Still, if you can't make the top 500 on an international list, calling yourself a "top-rank" institution is either really parochial — "Best School in the Miami Valley!" — or it's hyper, or lying.

            My favorite example in this area combines precision with obfuscation disguised as clarity, and with gleeful dishonesty.

            I refer to a Royal Pudding jingle from my childhood, the one I quote as my headnote and can sing from memory, and the associated Royal Pudding ads.

            The ad copy touts that Royal Pudding has "74% more food energy than fresh whole milk" in large red type and informs you that that extra energy is "in every delicious serving!" That last part is undoubtedly true, given that it'd be 74% more food energy in any size serving. The ad continues in smaller, black type, "Milk is Nature's best food — as every mother knows. It's needed for strong, sturdy bodies, for growth, for vitality. But a serving of ROYAL PUDDING gives you all the benefits of the milk you make it with plus 74% more Food Energy," and then goes on with useful and straight-forward reminders that you can buy Regular  ROYAL or Instant ROYAL.

            The Royal Pudding people got into trouble for misleading advertising.

            Regular or Instant, Royal or Jell-O or homemade, you make pudding by adding to milk a thickening ingredient, stuff for the specific taste (color preservation), a touch of salt, and sugar or sugars, lots of sugar.

            Sugar is the point with most desserts — well, and fat, which the whole milk supplies — and Royal Pudding delivered sugar, and with it a whole bunch of food energy.

            Food energy in the US and UK is measured in "food calories" or "dietary calories" or kilocalories.

            Now consider a modified form of the jingle (and ad): " Rich, rich, rich in flavor! / Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk, / More food cal-o-ries than (even) fresh, whole milk!" Since the extra calories are (a) plentiful and (b) pretty much uncontaminated by vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, or nutrients you might want in addition to high-power carbs and fat, tight-ass nutritionists and various health agencies would deride them as "empty calories" and assert that rich, sugary, smooth Royal Pudding and its successor products are pretty much just fattening.

            Still, the jingle and ad might be misleading, but they are eminently defensible as precise.

            Verily, even (sort of) as it is more exact to talk of "the environment" rather than "the ecology" and "rock formations" rather than "the geology," so it is more exact to talk of The Thing Itself, food energy, than the units in which food energy is measured, i.e., for most of us, calories.

            Changing "energy" to "calories" would make the ad less precise.

            My memory is that the ad was eventually pulled but not before it had run its course and drummed that dumb-ass jingle into at least hundreds of thousands of little minds. And frankly, I kind of admire the hucksters who developed the Roy-al Pud-ding! ad campaign. It's a rare and brilliant example of how to be precise and apparently clear while being memorable, effective, and really, really, dishonest.

            "Words mean," but if you're wily enough they can mean in nastily misleading ways and get the gullible public buying a lot of product.