The Lexicographer's Rules

I posted this a while back to ADS-L, but the avian bird flu epidemic continues. Not the virus, the redundancy of “avian” and “bird” when talking about the virus.

Maybe “avian bird flu” is when an airline pilot gets sick from the chicken entree. What’s the opposite of “avian bird flu”? Pedestrian bird flu?

But how about this one for redundancy: “H5N1 Avian bird flu influenza virus.”

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An amazing three-part series on a Muslim leader’s difficult work with his congregation in Brooklyn deserves to be permanently outside of the New York Times’ paywall (buyerwall, feewall, whatever you want to call it). There’s a mosque a couple of blocks from my apartment; I’ve always wondered how difficult the lives of the immigrant families who go there must be. Update: Ben Zimmer reminds me of the blog-friendly New York Times link generator which keeps stories fully available and free. I’ve changed the URLs below (and added a link to part three of the series) but I’d still really like the Times to keep these available at the regular URL.

Part 1: A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds.

Part 2: To Lead the Faithful in a Faith Under Fire.

Part 3: Tending to Muslim Hearts and Islam’s Future.

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I have a submission in the March issue of the online-only Lost Magazine. (Source Link)

“It was one of the earliest student sex columns.”

Baloney. The University of Missouri student newspaper, the Maneater, had a sex columnist more than 18 years ago, long before Natalie Krinsky was anywhere near puberty. (The newspaper’s name refers to a tiger, the school’s mascot, not to your collegiate sexual fantasies.)

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There’s a passage I often quote (or, usually, misquote) from William Least Heat Moon’s 1982 book Blue Highways.

A Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete Easternness, and the Easterner taking him for a cowhand.

Bill is from Missouri and lives, last I heard, not far from Columbia and Jefferson City in the center of the state. His people are Osage Indians (thus the unusual name—his European name is Bill Trogdon). Blue Highways holds up remarkably well 24 years on. It’s one of those books I always seem to have more than one copy of (another one is Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities).

But my point in bringing it up is this: that quoted passage gets to the core of Missouri’s identity as a divided state. It’s the start of a larger thesis, one I’ve contemplated for years, that if the lines of states were redrawn according to the character (or “tribes") of its citizens, then Missouri would simply vanish. It’s an arbitrary political identity, despite any boosterism or claims to a statewide character.

For example: the Bible Belt (mainly Southern Baptists) covers only the lower third of the state, the same area, more or less, covered by a form of Southern American English. In the north of the state they tend to be non-Southern-Baptist Protestants (like Methodists) and speak with a Midwestern accent. St. Louis is a bit of an island, with more linguistic similarities to Chicago than to Kansas City, and a lot more Catholics than most parts of the state. Kansas City and St. Louis are like a cell undergoing mitosis, each drawing half of the state magnetically towards opposing nuclei. They, like Boone County (home to a large university community), tend to be more socially liberal than the rest of the state and tend to vote Democratic. In the hinterlands, folks tend to be socially conservative, fiscally conservative for local issues, and fiscally liberal for national issues—and vote accordingly, since fiscally liberal national votes mean more pork and earmarking for all sorts of bridges to nowhere. Also, the geology in the north is distinctly different from that in the south—the edge of the great plains in the north, the Ozarks in the south. The state is not only split roughly horizontally by a river, but vertically by two Federal Reserve districts.

A long essay on this, with maps and many more examples of divisions, is on my lifetime to-do list. One day I’ll get to it…