A gentleman in London named James Nicholls has given a backhanded endorsement to You Don’t Say at his blog:
For those of you who feel the need to express your superior knowledge of English grammar, this is the place for you to stroke your ego and the ego of the similarly anal. As for me I read trangressive fiction and can’t be bothered with the whole affair, safe in the knowledge that message is more important than presentation.
A couple of things seem apparent.
One is that Mr. Nicholls appears to have been so engrossed in his self-described pursuit of “sex, drugs and, if at all possible, an early night” that he may not yet have encountered the critical commonplace that content and form cannot be so easily separated. Another likelihood is that he has not read enough posts here to understand that I am not of the tribe of grammar Nazis — rigid, unthinking, nagging prescriptivists — but am rather a moderate, indulgent, reasonable prescriptivist and all-around fine fellow.
(Perhaps, too, it is time to stop flinging about that word Nazi in a casual manner that trivializes what it represents.)
Adam Pagnucco, writing at Maryland Politics Watch, does not call me a Nazi, merely suggesting that I am a whore.
He dismisses the bloggers participating in The Sun’s Mobbies competition as saps and suckers, abjectly begging for an empty distinction. Among the “trollops, street-walkers, flesh-flashers or tramps” in this competition he spies — well — me. He quotes this passage from my blog post about the competition: “Embarrassing as it is to engage in self-promotion, I am soliciting your support… Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.”
Someday, I hope, Mr. Pagnucco will allow me to stand him to a pint and endeavor to describe to him what irony is.
In the meantime, those of you who wish to endorse You Don’t Say in this largely meaningless competition can make use of the link at the upper-right corner of this page. Voting continues today and ends tomorrow. You can vote once each day for this blog in the Misfits category and in the overall best-blog category.
On a somewhat more positive note, the Online Schools Web site has included You Don’t Say among the “100 Best Blogs for Your Liberal Arts Education.”* You’ll also find our friends Pam Robinson and Andy Bechtel listed there. I commend those hundred blogs to your attention.
*That’s not liberal in the wicked people-who-look-at-dirty-pictures, government-death-panel, gays-are-human-too, you-have-to-pay-taxes-if-you-want-services sense, but in the largely archaic favoring-the-increase-of-knowledge sense, which, to some people, is nearly as wicked.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
You may fire when ready
From an advertisement for an opening for an editor at a Christian publishing concern:
Knowledge of cannon law, Church history, & world history req'd.
Knowledge of cannon law, Church history, & world history req'd.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Why newspapers fail
I was well along in Alex S. Jones’s Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy,* nodding at what have become commonplaces in describing the plight of traditional journalism, when a short passage about “citizen journalism” and “reader-generated content” brought me up short:
To my dismay, such material often has more credibility and is of greater interest to readers than what is produced by professionals. My frustration is not based on scorn for nonprofessionals but on the unhappy fact that the professionals often can’t find a way to produce something as interesting, readable, and credible.
My entire career as a newspaper copy editor flashed before my eyes in column after column of gray stodge. And I realized that while the major problem with newspapers has been the collapse of the advertising-supported business model, newspapers have sacrificed their audience by the uncritical production of low-grade prose.
The vanishing generation of newspaper readers formed the habit when you had to read a newspaper when you wanted something more than the thin gruel of information offered by the radio or television. But the rising generations had more choices and did not form the newspaper habit. My children and my undergraduate students do not do much more than occasionally glance at a newspaper, if that. Why do you think? Perhaps because so much newspaper writing is appallingly, relentlessly, unapologetically DULL.
And journalists are trained to write that way.
Look at the standard, straight-news summary lead paragraph. The writer has been told to cram all the essential information into a single sentence, leading prose such as this, of a type that could be called The Clot:
Completion of a tower that will give Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport controllers technology and visibility to monitor air traffic for the foreseeable future, settling a contract that will keep the controllers on the job and redefining air space corridors, are keys to the Valley airport’s future, Robert Sturgell, FAA deputy administrator, said Thursday.
[It doesn’t help, either, that an error of grammar makes this fifty-four-word monstrosity even more difficult to follow.]
The alternative to the summary lead paragraph is the stock anecdotal lead, in which utterly banal details about some person or persons with whom the reader is expected to identify are piled up until the writer finally gets around to telling what the story is about. I think of this device as the Day Like Any Other opening:
It was a day like any other for Wendy Whitebread.
Shutting off the alarm clock as the sun was beginning to rise, she pulled on her jogging clothes and shoes and took the dog for a quick walk around the neighborhood.
Returning home, she woke her children, Axel and Amy, fed them breakfast, signed the permission slips for a field trip and sent them off to school.
Heading down to the basement, she started a load of laundry and then returned to the kitchen to sit down with the morning paper and a second cup of coffee.
It was just then that the booster stage from a failed NASA satellite launch fell from the sky and demolished her house.
Or perhaps the writer will produce a snappier opening by rubbing the moss off some hoary cliché and attempting to pass it off as something fresh: the If You Write It, They Will Read device:
’Tis the season, spirits weren’t dampened by bad weather, the dream that turned into a nightmare.
It is when you are intrepid (or foolish) enough to continue past the lead that you discover more clichés, more slapdash syntax, and a dialect called journalese which is not like any English ever spoken. You will recognize it in the opening of a famous exercise by Paula LaRocque:
Hack: How were things in your vacation facility?
Frack: We had wide-ranging weather all season. One storm dumped more than seven inches of rain on our densely wooded lot, spawning hurricane-force winds and golfball-sized hail. Plus an unprecedented number of visitors arrived amid the facility restoration. …
I doubt that newspapers could have driven readers away more effectively with cattle prods.
*Of which more in a subsequent post.
To my dismay, such material often has more credibility and is of greater interest to readers than what is produced by professionals. My frustration is not based on scorn for nonprofessionals but on the unhappy fact that the professionals often can’t find a way to produce something as interesting, readable, and credible.
My entire career as a newspaper copy editor flashed before my eyes in column after column of gray stodge. And I realized that while the major problem with newspapers has been the collapse of the advertising-supported business model, newspapers have sacrificed their audience by the uncritical production of low-grade prose.
The vanishing generation of newspaper readers formed the habit when you had to read a newspaper when you wanted something more than the thin gruel of information offered by the radio or television. But the rising generations had more choices and did not form the newspaper habit. My children and my undergraduate students do not do much more than occasionally glance at a newspaper, if that. Why do you think? Perhaps because so much newspaper writing is appallingly, relentlessly, unapologetically DULL.
And journalists are trained to write that way.
Look at the standard, straight-news summary lead paragraph. The writer has been told to cram all the essential information into a single sentence, leading prose such as this, of a type that could be called The Clot:
Completion of a tower that will give Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport controllers technology and visibility to monitor air traffic for the foreseeable future, settling a contract that will keep the controllers on the job and redefining air space corridors, are keys to the Valley airport’s future, Robert Sturgell, FAA deputy administrator, said Thursday.
[It doesn’t help, either, that an error of grammar makes this fifty-four-word monstrosity even more difficult to follow.]
The alternative to the summary lead paragraph is the stock anecdotal lead, in which utterly banal details about some person or persons with whom the reader is expected to identify are piled up until the writer finally gets around to telling what the story is about. I think of this device as the Day Like Any Other opening:
It was a day like any other for Wendy Whitebread.
Shutting off the alarm clock as the sun was beginning to rise, she pulled on her jogging clothes and shoes and took the dog for a quick walk around the neighborhood.
Returning home, she woke her children, Axel and Amy, fed them breakfast, signed the permission slips for a field trip and sent them off to school.
Heading down to the basement, she started a load of laundry and then returned to the kitchen to sit down with the morning paper and a second cup of coffee.
It was just then that the booster stage from a failed NASA satellite launch fell from the sky and demolished her house.
Or perhaps the writer will produce a snappier opening by rubbing the moss off some hoary cliché and attempting to pass it off as something fresh: the If You Write It, They Will Read device:
’Tis the season, spirits weren’t dampened by bad weather, the dream that turned into a nightmare.
It is when you are intrepid (or foolish) enough to continue past the lead that you discover more clichés, more slapdash syntax, and a dialect called journalese which is not like any English ever spoken. You will recognize it in the opening of a famous exercise by Paula LaRocque:
Hack: How were things in your vacation facility?
Frack: We had wide-ranging weather all season. One storm dumped more than seven inches of rain on our densely wooded lot, spawning hurricane-force winds and golfball-sized hail. Plus an unprecedented number of visitors arrived amid the facility restoration. …
I doubt that newspapers could have driven readers away more effectively with cattle prods.
*Of which more in a subsequent post.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Other stuff you ought to read
Item: The estimable Jesse Sheidlower, whose The F Word deserves your close attention, has an essay at Slate.com about the difficulties of including and properly defining sexual terms in the dictionary.
If you like vulgar words — and who among us is afraid to admit it? — he offers plenty. (Though nothing quite as graphic as the bovine flatulence that Language Log is celebrating.)
Item: It is probably even more difficult to determine what should go into a book of quotations. The Oxford University Press blog (Caution, reader: this is a promotional article) recently commented on the inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations of a remark by Paris Hilton: “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”
I have not solicited her views on the bow tie.
Item: Jag Bhalla, an amateur idiomologist and author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of idioms from ten languages, writes at the National Post of Canada about his addiction to language and his search for exotic idioms.
The title of his book is a translation of a Russian expression equivalent to the English idiom I’m not pulling your leg. Presumably the English would sound comically exotic to a Russian.
Item: Adrienne Carlson has sent me a link to “75 Awesome Games, Tools, and Links for Word Lovers” at the Accredited Online Degrees site. I can’t vouch for the awesomeness of all 75 entries, but several of them look as if they might assist you in wasting time at work.
Item: There is still time to for you to put a handful of votes in the ballot box for this blog at The Sun’s Mobbies competition. (See link at upper right corner.)
If you like vulgar words — and who among us is afraid to admit it? — he offers plenty. (Though nothing quite as graphic as the bovine flatulence that Language Log is celebrating.)
Item: It is probably even more difficult to determine what should go into a book of quotations. The Oxford University Press blog (Caution, reader: this is a promotional article) recently commented on the inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations of a remark by Paris Hilton: “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”
I have not solicited her views on the bow tie.
Item: Jag Bhalla, an amateur idiomologist and author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of idioms from ten languages, writes at the National Post of Canada about his addiction to language and his search for exotic idioms.
The title of his book is a translation of a Russian expression equivalent to the English idiom I’m not pulling your leg. Presumably the English would sound comically exotic to a Russian.
Item: Adrienne Carlson has sent me a link to “75 Awesome Games, Tools, and Links for Word Lovers” at the Accredited Online Degrees site. I can’t vouch for the awesomeness of all 75 entries, but several of them look as if they might assist you in wasting time at work.
Item: There is still time to for you to put a handful of votes in the ballot box for this blog at The Sun’s Mobbies competition. (See link at upper right corner.)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Here comes the judge
Sharon Eliza Nichols boasts that she has more than 300,000 members on her Facebook group, I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar, and these valiant battlers against the forces of darkness have submitted more than 7,000 photos in judgment.
Now the two or three dozen of you in the English-speaking world who have yet to sign up for Facebook can have a limited access to this trove of photographic evidence of subliteracy by buying I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-ups (St. Martin’s Griffin, 146 pages, $9.99).
I myself have passed up the opportunity to sign up for the Facebook group. Having gone gray in more than thirty years of struggle against entrenched ignorance and slipshod writing, I have withdrawn to the last redoubt. No more flailing against the grocer’s apostrophe (MELON’S) or defective signage, e-mails and text messages, I huddle behind a few crumbling ravelins and revetments to defend what is left of published prose attempted in standard written English. No doubt Ms. Nichols and her sidekicks are younger and more agile.
What they have discovered is the abiding difficulty that people who write in English have with contractions, possessives, pronouns, and homonyms.
The it’s/its confusion crops up repeatedly. So does the your/you’re issue, as in this Highland Park Junior High School Sign:
SOMETIMES YOUR THE DOG, SOMETIMES YOUR THE HYDRANT
(No doubt the ageless wisdom counterbalances the grammatical issue.)
Or this:
THERE BACK
CHICKEN FLAUTAS
Some of the confusions are homonyms are deeply regrettable, as at a nursery that presumably had peonies for sale:
FRESH CUT PENIS
Or the bakery:
SENTED HOLE WEET
Or the restaurant:
SOUTHERN BEASTRO
Sometimes it is just tangled syntax:
KIDS WITH GAS EAT FREE
But for my money, the most regrettable lapses occur with people who are attempting to be superior, as in this sign from the Village of Crestwood, Chester Stranczek, Mayor:
ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE
NO EXCETIONS
LEARN IT
A lesson apparently yet to be learned by a protester carrying a handmade sign:
GET A
BRAIN!
MORANS
There is little doubt that we speakers of English are a judgmental bunch, quick to calculate our relative superiority or inferiority against everyone else who speaks or writes the language, and this book will give you a sense of that quiet, buoyant sense of superiority that is so much to be desired.
Good for you.
When you think you know something, come to me.
Now the two or three dozen of you in the English-speaking world who have yet to sign up for Facebook can have a limited access to this trove of photographic evidence of subliteracy by buying I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-ups (St. Martin’s Griffin, 146 pages, $9.99).
I myself have passed up the opportunity to sign up for the Facebook group. Having gone gray in more than thirty years of struggle against entrenched ignorance and slipshod writing, I have withdrawn to the last redoubt. No more flailing against the grocer’s apostrophe (MELON’S) or defective signage, e-mails and text messages, I huddle behind a few crumbling ravelins and revetments to defend what is left of published prose attempted in standard written English. No doubt Ms. Nichols and her sidekicks are younger and more agile.
What they have discovered is the abiding difficulty that people who write in English have with contractions, possessives, pronouns, and homonyms.
The it’s/its confusion crops up repeatedly. So does the your/you’re issue, as in this Highland Park Junior High School Sign:
SOMETIMES YOUR THE DOG, SOMETIMES YOUR THE HYDRANT
(No doubt the ageless wisdom counterbalances the grammatical issue.)
Or this:
THERE BACK
CHICKEN FLAUTAS
Some of the confusions are homonyms are deeply regrettable, as at a nursery that presumably had peonies for sale:
FRESH CUT PENIS
Or the bakery:
SENTED HOLE WEET
Or the restaurant:
SOUTHERN BEASTRO
Sometimes it is just tangled syntax:
KIDS WITH GAS EAT FREE
But for my money, the most regrettable lapses occur with people who are attempting to be superior, as in this sign from the Village of Crestwood, Chester Stranczek, Mayor:
ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE
NO EXCETIONS
LEARN IT
A lesson apparently yet to be learned by a protester carrying a handmade sign:
GET A
BRAIN!
MORANS
There is little doubt that we speakers of English are a judgmental bunch, quick to calculate our relative superiority or inferiority against everyone else who speaks or writes the language, and this book will give you a sense of that quiet, buoyant sense of superiority that is so much to be desired.
Good for you.
When you think you know something, come to me.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
How dumb can you get?
Stupidity used to be defined, at least in Baltimore, by the guys who decided to rob a gun store on Harford Road in Parkville. They attached a chain to the barred window of the store, the other end to the bumper of their pickup truck. They intended to floor the accelerator and pull the bars out, smash into the store, and make off with a couple of armloads of guns before police arrived. But the bars held; the bumper gave way. In a panic, they sped off, leaving the bumper, with the license plate, attached to the chain. They were arrested the next day.
So it would take a lot to be dumber than that. But perhaps you have nominees.
Such anyone who refuses to drop the knife or gun when confronted by an armed police officer.
Or the dolt who published a “Should Obama be killed?” poll on Facebook — who can expect a visit from the Secret Service momentarily.
There’s the gentleman who posted his views on Facebook opposing Maryland’s new no-texting-while-driving law:
Not sure why I have to follow a law like this. I know how to text and drive at the same time and have not had any accidents as a result.
I feel so left out of the law making process in this state, so why should I follow laws that I didn't even have a hand in creating? Just sets up a funny social system...that's all. I guess people will follow the law because they are scared of the police and the legal system.
There’s a potential Darwin Award winner (as well as someone who apparently dozed during civics class).
Can you top these? Go ahead; try. Please, no nominations of people whose political views merely conflict with your own; I’ll delete those. It has to be something really, really stupid, and this great Republic surely boasts inexhaustible reserves of imbecility.
So it would take a lot to be dumber than that. But perhaps you have nominees.
Such anyone who refuses to drop the knife or gun when confronted by an armed police officer.
Or the dolt who published a “Should Obama be killed?” poll on Facebook — who can expect a visit from the Secret Service momentarily.
There’s the gentleman who posted his views on Facebook opposing Maryland’s new no-texting-while-driving law:
Not sure why I have to follow a law like this. I know how to text and drive at the same time and have not had any accidents as a result.
I feel so left out of the law making process in this state, so why should I follow laws that I didn't even have a hand in creating? Just sets up a funny social system...that's all. I guess people will follow the law because they are scared of the police and the legal system.
There’s a potential Darwin Award winner (as well as someone who apparently dozed during civics class).
Can you top these? Go ahead; try. Please, no nominations of people whose political views merely conflict with your own; I’ll delete those. It has to be something really, really stupid, and this great Republic surely boasts inexhaustible reserves of imbecility.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Your votes and patronage appreciated
Word arrived Friday that I have been nominated for a Mobbie, one of The Baltimore Sun’s awards for outstanding Maryland blogs. Voting begins today, and embarrassing as it is to engage in self-promotion, I am soliciting your support.
You Don’t Say is listed at the end of the Misfits catagory (natch), with a link allowing you to vote. There is also a link at the top of the site to allow votes for best overall blog. For reasons that I do not understand but which surely lie deep in Maryland’s electoral traditions, you can cast more than one vote — once a day until the polls close at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 9.
Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.
You Don’t Say is listed at the end of the Misfits catagory (natch), with a link allowing you to vote. There is also a link at the top of the site to allow votes for best overall blog. For reasons that I do not understand but which surely lie deep in Maryland’s electoral traditions, you can cast more than one vote — once a day until the polls close at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 9.
Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Purging the books
Every few years, it seems, some necessity demands removal of superfluous books from the shelves — or books that can be perceived as superfluous, if there are such things. When I was dealt a hand of aces and eights at The Sun in April, I had two cartons of books to remove from the premises. I can smuggle an occasional volume past Kathleen, but an additional bookcase would not escape her vigilant eye. Something has to go.
I am fifty-eight years old, and chances seem remote that I will ever make another run at Finnegans Wake. Off to the used-book sale at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill. Back editions of the Associated Press Stylebook are an easy choice.
But sentiment is hard to eliminate from these operations. I still regret having sacrificed the paperback edition of Philip Larkin’s High Windows that I bought in 1985 at Louie’s Bookstore Cafe while interviewing at The Sun, even though I have the contents in his Collected Poems. And despite the wreckage of my ambition to be an eighteenth-century man, I will not let go of Arthur Hoffman’s book on Dryden’s imagery or his late monograph on the plays of Congreve until I have to pack my bindle for the Old Editors’ Home. Professor Hoffman was a witty and engaging teacher of the old school, and he was kind to me. And I am not giving up Gibbon; one has to have something in reserve for retirement.
Discarding The Structuralist Controversy, however, leaves no pang.
Jane Austen and Barbara Pym stay, but perhaps it’s time to give up on Byron’s Don Juan. Nobody’s touching John McPhee or my ratty but complete paperback set of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. But Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have started four times without ever making appreciable progress, gets the boot. Boswell and Johnson, you may have guessed, are secure. So are Edmund Wilson and John Cheever. And the poets: Roethke, Jarrell, Lowell, Wilbur, Hecht, Kumin, Van Duyn.
But a shadow looms over numerous others.
Some of these books I have carted from premises to premises since the 1970s, with good intentions, but it is in the nature of things that the Long Parliament sooner or later gives way to the Rump. Farewell, my lovelies.
I am fifty-eight years old, and chances seem remote that I will ever make another run at Finnegans Wake. Off to the used-book sale at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill. Back editions of the Associated Press Stylebook are an easy choice.
But sentiment is hard to eliminate from these operations. I still regret having sacrificed the paperback edition of Philip Larkin’s High Windows that I bought in 1985 at Louie’s Bookstore Cafe while interviewing at The Sun, even though I have the contents in his Collected Poems. And despite the wreckage of my ambition to be an eighteenth-century man, I will not let go of Arthur Hoffman’s book on Dryden’s imagery or his late monograph on the plays of Congreve until I have to pack my bindle for the Old Editors’ Home. Professor Hoffman was a witty and engaging teacher of the old school, and he was kind to me. And I am not giving up Gibbon; one has to have something in reserve for retirement.
Discarding The Structuralist Controversy, however, leaves no pang.
Jane Austen and Barbara Pym stay, but perhaps it’s time to give up on Byron’s Don Juan. Nobody’s touching John McPhee or my ratty but complete paperback set of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. But Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have started four times without ever making appreciable progress, gets the boot. Boswell and Johnson, you may have guessed, are secure. So are Edmund Wilson and John Cheever. And the poets: Roethke, Jarrell, Lowell, Wilbur, Hecht, Kumin, Van Duyn.
But a shadow looms over numerous others.
Some of these books I have carted from premises to premises since the 1970s, with good intentions, but it is in the nature of things that the Long Parliament sooner or later gives way to the Rump. Farewell, my lovelies.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Zombie editing
Once again this morning, The Sun published an article about someone who suffered nonlife-threatening injuries.* Life-threatening is bad enough, but something severe enough to threaten nonlife — zombies, please take care — must be extraordinary.
Applying the Associated Press Stylebook’s rule — that the prefix non is not hyphenated, except when it is** — requires a little thought, a little attention, a little judgment. Supplies of those qualities appear to be running short.
*Yes, I wrote about the same construction in July. They don’t listen.
**Thank you, AP.
Applying the Associated Press Stylebook’s rule — that the prefix non is not hyphenated, except when it is** — requires a little thought, a little attention, a little judgment. Supplies of those qualities appear to be running short.
*Yes, I wrote about the same construction in July. They don’t listen.
**Thank you, AP.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Are you a closet Socialist?
Amid all the cries of “Socialism!” as the Congress has grappled with the problems of reshaping the nation’s health care system, I thought that it would be helpful to get a clearer idea of what the nation is up against. This would be particularly useful in identifying what used to be called “creeping socialism,” the insidious practices catching the citizenry unaware.
Accordingly, I took a look at the Socialist Party platform for 1912, the year Woodrow Wilson, nominated in sweaty Baltimore, defeated William Howard Taft. Amid a lot of boilerplate about workers and collective ownership, there were these platform planks:
[S]ecuring for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.
[F]orbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.
[A]bolishing official charity and substituting a non-contributary system of old age pensions, a general system of insurance by the State of all its members against unemployment and invalidism and a system of compulsory insurance by employers of their workers, without cost to the latter, against industrial diseases, accidents and death.
The adoption of a graduated income tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin-the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.
Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
Citizens, be alert!
Accordingly, I took a look at the Socialist Party platform for 1912, the year Woodrow Wilson, nominated in sweaty Baltimore, defeated William Howard Taft. Amid a lot of boilerplate about workers and collective ownership, there were these platform planks:
[S]ecuring for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.
[F]orbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.
[A]bolishing official charity and substituting a non-contributary system of old age pensions, a general system of insurance by the State of all its members against unemployment and invalidism and a system of compulsory insurance by employers of their workers, without cost to the latter, against industrial diseases, accidents and death.
The adoption of a graduated income tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin-the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.
Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
Citizens, be alert!
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