Writing

A historical note on blackface

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In the nineteenth century, minstrel shows were a popular form of entertainment in the US. Their focus was racial caricature. The songs were in a fake form of black dialect, and many of them trivialized bad things that happened to black people. Some of them have survived in a cleaned-up form. “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the South, was originally “Dixie’s Land,” about a woman who “died for a man that broke her heart,” treating it as a bit of fun. (“But if you want to drive away sorrow, / Come and hear this song tomorrow!”) Other songs were still worse.

Minstrel shows featured performers in blackface. This didn’t mean simply black makeup; it was an intentional caricature, with dark makeup on the face and white lips. A well-known example is Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Even black performers were sometimes expected to wear blackface.
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Vancouver Comics Arts Festival is looking worse

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In an earlier post, I discussed the Vancouver Comics Arts Festival’s exclusion of Miriam Libicki for, in effect, being Israeli. Today I found a newly published interview with Libicki that makes the convention look still worse. Based on what she says, the convention’s motivation was more a matter of book-banning.

She characterizes the disruption which allegedly endangered the convention as “screaming.” As described, it might be grounds for restricting or expelling the person responsible, but there doesn’t seem to have been any threat to anyone. At one point, security removed some people for being disruptive. The “screaming” person was objecting to Libicki’s books without having read them. Subsequently the convention demanded a review of Libicki’s writing. Libicki was asked for digital copies of her books, which she couldn’t readily provide.
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The attack of the singularized plurals 2

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged grammar language writing on by

English includes many nouns that end in “-um” or “-on” and are pluralized by changing the ending to “-a.” They come from Latin and Greek respectively. Examples include “medium,” “datum,” “ovum,” “criterion,” and “phenomenon.” As with everything else, the language isn’t consistent; we have museums, not musea; morons, not mora; polygons, not polyga. I wouldn’t complain if the language regularized the endings of all these words. “Bacteriums” and “phenomenons” would sound weird at first, but we could get used to it.

What’s happening instead is that people turn the plurals into singulars. With some words, like “data” and “media,” the change has been firmly established. Others are substandard but turn up often, like “a bacteria” or “a phenomena.” Recently I saw a writer friend who should know better talking about “a criteria.” This doesn’t make the words any more regular, since double-pluralizing “medias” or “datas” is still frowned upon. It leaves us with words that are the same in the singular and the plural.
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What really is a theocracy?

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged language usage on by

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the overbroad use of the term “Fascism” and what it really was or is. Another political designation that gets freely tossed around is “theocracy.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.” This is too broad; governments of all kinds have claimed that God guides their heads of state. Listen to traditional patriotic songs, and you’ll hear lots of claims that the leaders act under God’s guidance.
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Update on Smashwords and Draft2Digital

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Smashwords is now saying that some accounts will be automatically moved to Draft2Digital. A May 1 email says:

On June 1st, we’ll begin automatically migrating some Smashwords author accounts to Draft2Digital. If you desire more control over the migration process, or want to have your account migrated sooner, please complete the brief questionnaire that was previously sent to the email address associated with your Smashwords account.
 
When Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in March 2022, we announced that the integration of the two companies would be completed in three phases, with the final phase involving the migration of Smashwords author/publisher accounts over to Draft2Digital. Given the vast number of Smashwords accounts, the migration process itself must be divided into phases to ensure maximum effectiveness and efficiency.

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