Category Archives: rant

Reader Friday-When Did The Music Stop?

Posted on by

This post is taken from one I wrote a couple of years ago on my own website. Thought it fit nicely in today’s world. You can read the original here.

When Did The Music Stop?

I get up every morning at about the same time, drink water and coffee, talk to my husband, pet my dog. Then drink more coffee.

Then what do I do? Usually the biggest mistake of the day.

Open the news media sites.

Then say to myself, “When did the music stop?”

Yeah, you too?

 

 

Those media sites are cluttered with other kinds of people. The ones who yell at each other, redefine life on planet earth in their own image, put God on a paper airplane and throw him to the wind, then sit in his chair.

The planet they live on is not the one I want to live on.

Where have all the real people gone? You know, the ones who go to work, take care of themselves and their families, mow their lawns, fill up their tanks, and shop for groceries? And, dare I say, go to church on Saturdays or Sundays?

Kids on tricycles and bicycles and skates—the kind with keys—zooming up and down the sidewalks, playing kick the can and hide-and-go-seek, with parents and grandparents and neighbors cheer-leading from their front porches is the planet I’m from and want to get back to. Back to where some things were just not confusing . . . ya know what I mean?

Back to when homework was the first thing you did after school . . . after the peanut butter, mayo, and bologna sandwich, of course.

When talking to someone happened without a screen between you.

And people cared. About each other, about animals, and a smile didn’t hide an agenda and didn’t need a mask. A smile was just a smile, the way God intended it to be. A handshake meant something and we weren’t afraid to touch someone else’s fingers.

Back to when we watched the TV–not the other way around.

Where did that world go? It slid away from us a long time ago and maybe hit a few snags along the way, like when Woodward and Bernstein were on it BlueBonnet . . . but now here we are. And we don’t even know where here is.

 Again, when did the music stop? Okay, take a breath, Deb.

I think it’s still there. We just have to listen with better ears.

 

 

After I get some more coffee, I’m going outside to see if I can hear it.

See ya out there!

 

 

 

 

 

Open Tuesday Rant: I Beg You to Stop

Posted on by

James Scott Bell


All right, I want you all to stop it.


I’m not the Language Sheriff. Grammar was not my strongest subject in school. I doubt I can tell a gerund from a gerbil. But there are some obvious sins that are creeping into our mother tongue. And some of them are worth beating back with a stick.


This is one of them.


“Begs the question” does not mean “Invites the question.”


It doesn’t. No matter how many times you use it that way, no matter how many talking-heads-trying-to-sound-smart blabber it on TV. Whoever started this trend should be taken out back and slapped around with a copy of Strunk and White.


Begs the question is a fallacy of logic. “Begging” here does not mean “pleading.” It is an alternative use of the word, and it means to “assume the answer.” It’s a form of circular reasoning.


Professor: Make an argument that war is always wrong.


Student: War is always wrong because too many lives are lost.


Professor: That begs the question. You assume that loss of life is, ipso facto, wrong. But you have yet to prove that. Loss of life might very well be justified for a greater purpose. Try again.


Student: Will this be on the test?


That’s what begging the question means. So when I hear some White House correspondent tell the home studio, “The President has decided to visit the Gulf Coast again, which begs the question, Will that do anything to stop the leak?” I want to make him eat his microphone so he can’t do any more damage with it.


So that’s my rant. Do not, under any circumstances, use begs the question as invites the question.


Now it’s your turn. What language sins drive you batty?