The Natural Linguist

The word ‘values’ has taken on some unfortunate baggage. That happens to a lot of words. They go in and out of fashion. They become associated with Us or Them. They go from praiseworthy to pejorative and  back again.  It’s a pity about values , though. I just rewatched a movie, Pleasantville , that I hadn’t seen for quite a few years. It’s a charming and moving fable about a town trying to grapple with change. The protagonists in the movie are the people who felt hemmed in or smothered by the old ways and embraced the new. The antagonists were those who liked the old ways,  for whom the change was scary, and who clung doggedly to the old ways. The word Values was dragged out to the town square and tarred and feathered, metaphorically, by virtue of being uttered by the chief antagonist, and by being the thing that stood in opposition to the change at the heart of the movie. The reason it’s a pity is that we do ourselves a disservice in a couple of different ways. Fir...

In his book, The Diamond Age, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer , author Neal Stephenson presents a gripping and epic story full of nanotechnological marvels. It's one of my favorite books, an old friend now that I've read multiple times. Like all fine literature, it grows with you. At one time of life you read it and it conveys a message that you're primed to absorb at that time. At a different time of life, you read it and it might as well be a different book. I recently finished reading The Diamond Age , yet again, and its pertinence to the current state of our nation is very striking to me in a way that it has never been before. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the terrible political division that sometimes seems like it is tearing the country in half. Our two political parties' differences have become so irreconcilable that nothing constructive can ever be done. And if perchance anything ever happens to benefit one party, the other party immedia...