Death knoll for boo-who and boo-whom?

Writers are tortured by grammatical challenges.  Subject-predicate agreement. Dangling participles.    Modal verbs. Collective nouns, and their derivational agreements. Sentence-ending prepositions.  Placement of commas, exclamation points (Inside or outside the closing quotation mark, and I'll let it go at that!)

Rules, Rules Rules.

The latest catalog from The Great Courses is offering a 36-lecture DVD course which (that?) apparently tries to answer its own question: "How did we get from one language to 6,000?" In Lecture 26, it tells us, "you examine the famous Sapir-Whorf hypotheses, which proposes that features of our grammars channel how we think."  I have long enjoyed the rewards of the Great Courses, but this is one I may postpone for awhile.

Hang on.  There is better news from the April issue of The Atlantic.  An essay by Megan Garber removes much of our guilt  about our confusion over who and whom  - a couple of words that have (has?) baffled me for a half-century.  Whom, she writes,  is headed for the graveyard . Good riddance!

Megan is a dedicated researcher who (of course!) has based her conclusion on the impending death of  whom  from a 400-million word Corpus of Historical  American English records.   Using Time magazine as the resource, she noted that the magazine used whom 3,352 times in the 1930s, 1,492 in the 1990s, and a mere 902 in the 2000s.  The way things are going, if she had waited another year or two she might have been able to report zero usage of the dying word  in Time -  or all of the other words that once appeared in a defunct magazine.

So if you have come this far in this exercise, I will take the opportunity to intrude upon the rules in a gender sensitive age that gave us Ms. when a woman's marital status was unknown.

Then we moved on to "he or she" in referring to a man or woman when both sides deserved equal rights to the thought.   But it was awkward  to make that point in such instances as, say, "There were times when he or she wondered whether it was a good investment."

I have a solution:  Replace he or she with (s)he, or s(he).

Time to evolve, folks, which seems to be what so many people are doing these days anyway.

Look both ways crossing the tracks

Just listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar

As we glide across the woodlands,

Through the hills and by the shore. ---The Wabash Cannonball

WITH OUTRAGED REPUBLICANS, it's always something. Today it was the roaring matter of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama, that came after the matter of the president's botched efforts in America's exclusion from the Olympics, that came after the matter of the death panels in Obama's projected health reform, that came after the matter of his certain birth in Labrador or wherever, that followed the matter that he shoots basketballs in his spare time, followed by the lack of grey matter by Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh and other revelers of the anticipated day when Ronald Reagan will reappear in a World War II bomber to save the nation from extinction. At this moment, the raucous critics and the Taliban are on the same page.

That Obama promptly decided to give his $1.4 million prize to charity didn't cost the GOP a single stride because conservatives have long considered Nobel Prizes to be ill-gotten awards from an international leftist institution. So it didn't come as much of a surprise that Limbaugh, doing his frantic hula hoop movement at the mike, profoundly referred to Obama's honor as a "greater embarrassment" than the loss of the Olympics. But even that thought is a non-sequitur inasmuch as conferring conservatives gloated and cheered at the news that the event was going elsewhere. These, after all, are Rush's people, and having watched their reaction, it didn't seem to me that anybody in the hall was a tad embarrassed.

The leader of the drive-by assaults on the Obama award was, once again, the GOP national chairman, Michael Steele, who quickly popped off with the question: "What has President Obama actually accomplished?" and ranted on about fiscal responsibility and unemployment. Well, for one thing, he won the election handily and as they say, it's the victors who write the history. For heaven's sake, Mike, stop talking under the heads of your public. The history is already being written with Obama's towering approval ratings in Europe in the high 80s to low 90s. Why so high? Bush is gone. You bet.

There were warnings from all around, including the mainstream media, that Obama had been sucked into political swamp that may sink him, maybe 25 or 30 years from now. The reporter for the New York Times called our attention to the award as a "potential political liability" for the president, adding: "Already, Republicans are criticizing the president more for his star power than his actual achievement..."

Already??? Slamming Obama has been their schtick since his nomination. Why is it so much different now?

Time magazine was less than enthusiastic, reporting that the prize was the last thing Obama needed in his diplomatic efforts to restore a gleam of order in the international scene. Well, now that he is a tall figure in the European electorate, what's the next to last thing that he needs to gather support from other nations?

The last thing the national media and the howlers needed was to be blindsided by this blockbuster. They are just finding it hard to say so.

May Day! May Day!

Once again with feeling: Liberal Media!

WHAT WAS THAT? Did I just hear another snarky reference to the...eh, liberal media? Alas, it is one of those mossy idiomatic terms that is a convenient escape hatch for folks who can generally be expected to denounce, slander and/or vilify the aforementioned media that they haven't read in ages. They do so with such ease that it is useless to respond that much of the mainstream media is owned by corporate power brokers not far removed from Wall Street. The owners aren't the sort of people that you would expect to be pushing a cart on Saturday mornings at the local supermarket, if you know what I mean. And they have a way of supporting the Republican candidate.

But why limit the discussion to the print media? Take the recent study by FAIR magazine, a liberal publication that describes itself as the "media watch group" that targets the New York Times as well as any other print or broadcast voice that has slipped up on such news stories as, say, the American invasion of Iraq. ( It wasn't the only "liberal" editorial voice that servilely followed George Bush into the swamp on that story!)

FAIR reported that six of the biggest media companies (including the leftist Fox News, New York Times and Washington Post) had interlocking directorates with pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. In a survey of how the big corporate media covered the health care issue, FAIR observed:

"In the past six months, the Washington Post has published hundreds of articles on the subject of healthcare reform, fewer than 25% of which mention single-payer. Fewer than 30 percent of the sources who spoke about single-payer in those articles were advocates of the plan."

The same retreat from single-payer advocates appeared in the other mainstream media, including the networks. Although FAIR concluded that the interlocking directorates didn't necessarily lead to the lopsided reporting of the issue, it did indicate "at the very least, corporate media and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' interests are fundamentally aligned." There is reason to believe it.

A greater threat to the performance of the media these days is its struggle for survival that has shaped its mission to be inoffensive and less intrusive into what it assumes to be the public's intolerance of anything beyond garden variety news dispatches. The networks' evening news shows are 22-minute recaps (with film, of course, and friendly reminders to the audience that "We're here for you!" ) of whatever might be sorrowfully noteworthy in the world. There is seldom an attempt to explore a complex issue beyond a couple of minutes. Seldom, too, is an effort to correct misinformation by political celebrities and their flaks. The medium simply doesn't permit it, and there are obviously moments when the interviewer doesn't know that he/she and the audience are being taken as fools. And when the collegial pundits take over on Sunday mornings, they offer no more than the same George-Will-like analysis that there is no such thing as climate change. Are you there, Cokie?

The final degradation of national media occurred twice in one week, with Time's doting cover story of Glenn Beck and Jay Leno's hunt for audience inflation by interviewing guest Rush Limbaugh. (Limbaugh needs another rostrum?) Leno should have stuck to standup comedy. Rushbo was all over him with such insights as "Medicare doesn't work" and "Social Security doesn't work." It's interesting to me that Limbaugh could pass honest judgment on two essential government programs that a multimillionaire of his resources will never need anyway.

It's during moments like this that I decide to give Chaucer's Canterbury Tales another shot in hopes that it will be easier to comprehend than what's happening in those liberal media today.

It's Time out for this Beck article

NO DOUBT Glenn Beck loved this week's cover story about...Glenn Beck. Such glorification of the hysterical right-wing hero, even with a few mild negatives tossed in, are precisely what sustains and exalts media celebrity in America. So when the headline above David Von Drehle's piece rhetorically asks the reader, "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?" it was merely a teaser to suck you in to a story that never really answers the question. Indeed, it concludes by asking four more questions. Even the reference to "mad" seems to point more to anger than to insanity.

Otherwise, the piece is drive-by puffery that adds few new insights into an often out-of-control demagogue that will please his followers and frustrate his critics. In editorial lingo, it didn't advance the frightful story of Glenn Beck with much new information. Instead, the reader got a heavy serving of gee-whiz flattery of Beck's M.O. from a writer more in awe of his subject than to the gravity of a renegade on the loose.

The author was so politically correct in trying to make Beck and his critics equal participants in balancing the pro-and-con argument that it allowed Drehle a wide range of maneuverabilty in the pretense to be playing fair. Actually, the balancing act was no contest for Beck inasmuch as I didn't find more than a buried reference or two to any response by Beck's critics.

One glaring example of Time's game plan was the article's attempt to show that there was nothing unusual about the great difference in the crowd estimates for the recent angry Beck-hustled Tea Party crowd in Washington. Conservatives gave a soaring number, liberals a much lower figure, Drehle noted, making it a business-as-usual ideological divide. What he didn't do as a reporter was to take the story beyond ideological differences and report that even FreedomWorks, which sponsored the rally, later halved its original crowd estimate from 1.5 million. Suffice it to say the crowd was what it was, allowing either side bragging rights.

In reference to the dozens of sponsors who withdrew their ads from Beck's programs on Fox after he damned Obama as a "racist with deep seated hatred of white people" the article blew off that incendiary issue with a single sentence: "A liberal group called Color of Change has organized an advertiser boycott of Beck's TV show - great publicity for the group and a boon to Beck's ratings." That's it, folks.

As has been reported in other stories and observable to those who have seen Beck tearfully crash on TV, the Time article did describe its protagonist as "45, tireless, funny. self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian living with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactive syndrome)." And, I noted, getting by on $23 million a year, a primary measure of broadcasting success.

In its effort to soften Beck's image, the article did add a new way to describe a lie. "Yarns of less substance," says Drehle, of Beck's accusation that Obama wants to establish a "civilian national-security force that is just as strong, just as powerful as the military." And the President plans to do it with his love affair with "volunteerism". Is that the work of a sound mind? Or simply a carnival barker trying to scare the hell out of his willing audience?

As a longtime journalist, I've often wondered whether it's better to treat people like Beck with silence, allowing him his audience while the world tries to move forward. But in this instance, he has such a loud megaphone with Fox that I'm inclined to believe that a constant shower of exposure for this nonsense will inflate him to the point of self-destructing. As for Time's desperate effort to reverse its decline as a general interest magazine with a naked appeal to a self-contained audience of nitwits, it's a readership effort that is destined to fail. And with such shallow cover stories as this one, not a moment too soon.