A Word Does Not Mean Just One Thing

Even if you've never given it much thought, you're probably aware that word can have multiple meanings. Occasionally, that's the cause of some misunderstandings, and such multiple meanings make much of our humor possible.

Here are some sentences that illustrate some of the meanings the word bar can have (and this is definitely not even the most striking example possible:

• We went into the bar.
• He walked up to the bar.
• A large number of gold bars are stored at Fort Knox.
• She might not have found a mate because she sets the bar too high.
• At one time, one's religion could have been a bar to membership in some clubs.
• She was admitted to the bar a few months ago.
• The lab experiment was conducted at a pressure of 0.8 bars.
• She spent 18 months behind bars.
  

And there are words with even more meanings than bar.

People who have learned only a certain amount of a foreign language—say, French—and then go to France, may be astonished to find that words are used differently from what they are used to. This can be a case of multiple meanings of the word, or sometimes the word being used with a slang sense.

This happened to me in France. I was riding a train, and one of the others in my compartment (all French people) asked me if I had gotten my bottle of water at the boite. Well, I knew boite only in the sense of 'box'. Turns out it also means a snack bar. (Typically, you don't learn slang terms in school.)

This phenomenon of polysemy, as it's called, gives the lie to anyone who thinks that interpretation a written text (such as the Bible or the law) is simple and straightforward. How many times do you hear, "It means what it says"? If only it were that simple.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Fourth Freedoms

Today is Independence Day in the United States—almost always referred to as "The Fourth of July."

Fireworks are traditionally associated with celebrating the Fourth of July. However, the law in some places is that fireworks can only be used by designated organizations, like municipal governments.

This state, Illinois, is one of those where shooting off and even possession of fireworks by individuals is illegal. (As to the reasons for such a law: Yes, it might be a case of the government trying to protect you and your children from your own poor judgment; but also, your fireworks might set your neighbor's roof on fire. It does happen.)

However, this illegality does not stop an awful lot of people. In this area, it's easy to drive to the next state and purchase fireworks, and then bring them home and shoot them off in your back yard, in front of your house (which might seem a bit more of a flagrant violation of the law), etc. The law seems to be very laxly enforced.

I suspect that many people consider it their God-given right to celebrate the Fourth of July with their own fireworks. Here, fireworks are going off right now and it's not even noon. And fireworks were going off last night and even the previous day—neither of which, of course, was the Fourth of July.

This made me reflect on who considers what to be their right.

Conservatives consider the following, among others, to be their right:

• To cheat other people by means of financial chicanery (if you are a Wall Street firm) or to deceive the public with false advertising, false product labeling, etc. (if you are a manufacturer).
• To not pay their fair share of taxes.
• To pollute or otherwise destroy the environment (again this applies to corporate entities).
• To own a gun.
• To drive as fast as they like, and without wearing seat belts.
  
• To impose their own religious and moral notions on others by banning books, forbidding mosques being built, banning abortion, and denying equal rights to gay people.

And here are some rights that many progressives ("liberals," if you will, although conservatives use the term as if it were a dirty word) feel they have, or should have:

• To be free from government spying.
• To have an abortion.
• To marry one's partner of the same sex.
• To be free from government-sponsored or –supported religious exercises.
• To read whatever they want.
  

Now I ask you, which group of rights causes more harm to the general welfare?

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

A Little Humor (I hope)

I went down to the canal with my bagel because I heard there was lox there.

I hear that McDonald's is opening another chain of restaurants. These new places are intended to compete with Hooter's, and they're going to be called McBoobs.

I was in a Greek-owned food store today and I saw that they had baby goat in the meat counter. I said, You've got to be kidding.

My grandmother always used to say that her biscuits were made from scratch. So I went to the store and I looked for scratch, but they didn't have any.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

A Little (English) Linguistic Oddity

Why is it that the smallest unit of pants (or jeans, shorts, etc.) is called a "pair"? Maybe, you might say, it's because a pair of pants has two legs. It might be like "a pair of scissors" and "a pair of pliers"; they both have two leg-like parts.

But, we speak of a pair of men's briefs—which has no legs at all.

Having come from people who were involved in the garment trade, I think I recall that in that business they might speak of "a pant."

Otherwise, it's just one of many, many little anomalies of English; and I'm pretty sure other languages have theirs, too.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Again, Police Commit Crimes, Go Unpunished

In a famous case, a police officer had been videotaped repeatedly beating with his baton (aka nightstick) a man who had been stopped for a traffic offense. The traffic offender was handcuffed while being beaten 12 or 15 times.

The officer was convicted of criminal wrongdoing. Guess what his punishment was. Probation.

Another policeman was charged with bilking a 90-year-old man out of his home, worth $500,000, plus his savings. He was convicted, and sentenced. Guess what his punishment was. Probation!

Maybe the judge in that case was in the pocket of the Fraternal Order of Police (the police union).

There have been other cases as well, where a police officer receives little or no meaningful punishment. There seems to be a different standard of justice for policemen who break the law.

This is outrageous. Is this a third-world country, where instruments of the government can break the law with impunity, beating and robbing the ordinary citizen, just because they are police?

Update, March 20, 2013
A recent story in our local (Chicago) news is of an off-duty police officer from the suburb of North Chicago, IL. This man allegedly was driving the wrong way on a Chicago expressway and thus caused a crash that killed two young men. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Of course this suggests that he caused the crash ultimately because he was driving drunk.
This police officer is free on $500,000 bond. ("Free" may be theoretical because he is in the hospital.) The law requires that 10% of the bond be posted—thus, in this case, $50,000. The mothers of the two young men killed are outraged and assert that the police officer received lenient treatment (a low bond) because he is a policeman.
Another story, completely unrelated,in today's news makes me believe these two mothers are right. This news story is about a high school teacher accused of having sex with a student. His bond is $600,000. Thus the police officer who allegedly caused two deaths gets a lower bond than the accused teacher.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

The Enemy: Cheese

I've blogged several times about the problem of Americans' increasing weight and waists. This is a national medical problem of epidemic proportions, partly because overweight is correlated with increased risk for diabetes and other diseases.

Nutritionists and other medical experts have, naturally, been looking for causes and a lot of candidates have been proposed. And doubtless what is going on is more than one cause working at the same time.

A few causes of increasing overweight and obesity in America (and other countries) which I find plausible are as follows (not in any particular order):

• Our increasingly sedentary lives (e.g., more time spent with TV, computers, video games).
  
• Increasing size of the portions served in restaurants.
• Advertising for food (especially for fast-food chains) on TV. When food items are shown to us, it makes us want to get up and grab a snack.
• Increasing consumption of soft drinks which, with their high content of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) are known to contribute an increasing number of calories to our diets.
• People eating more of their meals in fast-food restaurants, where the food is high in fat, sodium, and calories.

Now, I have another trend in our diets to propose as promoting weight gain: cheese. Cheese is mostly fat (from the milk it's made from), and fat is much higher in calories than the other nutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fiber) or constituents of our food.

More and more of what we eat seems to have cheese in it or on it. Nowadays you almost can't get any sandwich with meat or poultry that does not also have cheese in it. On some restaurant menus, it's difficult to find dishes that haven't got cheese. Statistics show that cheese consumption has been increasing in America. (According to Wikipedia, US cheese consumption has nearly tripled between 1970 and 2003.)

Cheese added to a dish adds much more fat and calories than you might think. Those multilayer hamburgers, with several beef patties and several slices of cheese as well, have calorie and fat values that are almost beyond belief—like a day's worth (or more!) of fat and sodium.

So we are tempted by these restaurant offerings, and—guess what! We don't resist. Maybe we need to start to think twice when we're ordering our food.

Update, July 23, 2011
I recently read an item in Nutrition Action HealthLetter, the publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the people who periodically make the news with, for example, their exposés of movie-theater popcorn) that said precisely the same thing, about the prevalence of cheese in restaurant menu offerings. But remember, you heard it here first. They also say that the dairy industry persuaded restaurants to add cheese to their menu offerings.
And I want to confess, I love cheese--but maybe not in or on everything. I like to snack on cheese by itself, or eat it in a sandwich. Once in a while I'll sprinkle grated cheese on my pasta or use cheese in cooking. But I have cut way, way down, and also I sometimes buy reduced-fat cheese. (Some of them are pretty good.) But maybe I should be worrying about the sodium in cheese as much as the fat.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Bad News on Greenhouse Gases

The news a couple days ago said that targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have not been met. On the contrary, they've risen, rather than fallen. The figures for greenhouse gas emissions for 2009 were 5 percent higher than the figures for 2008. And thus the "tipping point," the time by which something has to be done before there is an irreversible problem, is coming sooner than had been thought (I think the original date was 2020).

So it looks like Mankind has not been taking this problem seriously enough. This calls into question, in my mind, whether Man is going to prove to be smart enough to avoid wiping himself out.

Well, actually, we do not really know what the consequences of global warming will be, beyond the simple fact that ocean levels will rise and that will cause flooding of coastal areas (and even of whole nations in the case of some small Pacific island nations). Of course that will be a disaster, and clearly we have not even been looking closely at just what that scenario will involve, because we haven't seen anything that would scare us enough, that would jolt us into more energized (or maybe I should say "panicky") action.

I wrote, in another posting, that I was reassured, in my view of humanity, by the fact that we have thus far not blown ourselves and each other up with atomic and hydrogen bombs. The statistics are that the US has produced 70,000 nuclear bombs—which could have destroyed the world several times over. Currently, "The USA and Russia each have 2,000 to 2,500 nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert right now." That sounds encouraging, as to our having enough wisdom to avoid destroying each other; but (to go on to give the bad news): first, the same article (http://www.rense.com/general47/global.htm) also says that's only the number on hair-trigger alert.

The five major nuclear powers currently have more than 20,000 nuclear warheads in their arsenals. . . . But this does not include a number of intact Russian nuclear warheads of indeterminate status--possibly as many as 10,000. Of the more than 30,000 intact warheads belonging to the world's eight nuclear weapon states, the vast majority (96 percent) are in U.S. or Russian stockpiles. About 17,500 of these warheads are considered operational.

Also,

There have almost been accidental nuclear wars several times in the past. There can be an accidental nuclear war anytime.

I suggest reading this article (link above). To include more of it would be getting off my subject. Maybe my bottom line vis-à-vis nuclear weapons is that the jury is still out. So maybe even there we should not heartily declare "Well we were sensible enough to avoid disaster"; and it's less clear that we're going to do the right and necessary things to avoid a global climate crisis.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein