The Lexicographer's Rules

;Adopt an opponent. I love heated and strident political arguments, but I am abandoning that in favor of gentle and relentless suasion. I have a half dozen potential “recruits” among family and friends that I am trying to tip. I am sending them articles and trying to leave them lots of room to save face. They united behind their president and now feel betrayed, but view the peace and/or anti-Bush crowd with all the negatives that the media and the administration have been heaping on them. Bush persuaded them with daily on-point sound bites and relentless brainwashing. I am trying to reverse that process with the most likely candidates I know, recognizing that this might need to be done in increments. I have found that sending British news stories is effective—they see Brits as allies, they like Tony Blair, and are surprised and unnerved when faced with the British media and public reaction to all of this. (Source Link)

;Piety is nine-tenths silence and one-tenth fleeing from people. (Source Link)

;I’m very wary of statistics on how many people speak English as a second language. In my experience, those who claim fluency are far from fulfilling my (perhaps lofty) definition of the word. Countless thousands of businesspeople have a passable command of it, enough to get them through a meeting or type up an e-mail, but they are not fluent, nor is the language being batted around conference halls anything better than a sorry dilution of the English language. It’s a nasty “lite” version called International English where everyone is on a first-name basis, and nobody’s quite sure what all those apostrophes replace. It has no style, no poetry, no nuance, and no purpose other than to do business. It is indeed the new Lingua Franca, and will ensure only that you’ll get your martini dry, a room for the night and increase your third quarter earnings. It will not equip you to enjoy James Joyce, or even Dr. Seuss. It is nothing to rejoice about. (Source Link)

;Away from home, I was in a small hostel, Ningbo. The moment I stepped into my room, I saw a cockroach creeping on the bed. “Oh, dirty!” I couldn’t help shouting these words out. The owner of that hostel, a thirty-something woman, was standing beside me, but she seemed totally indifferent to what she saw, and tried to kill the cockroach with the pillow I was gonna use. She failed—the cockroach disappeared quickly, finding a nice place to hide below the bed. The owner shrugged her shoulders as if to say that there was nothing else she could do about it. (Source Link)

New York City has been ranked 47th in a list of the nation’s most literate cities. At first is Minneapolis. Please.