questions?

    Who, what, when, where, why, and how--those are the question words. I have been told that this is something reporters learn, and that they should answer each question when writing an article.  It's a good idea to check them when writing anything.

who?--the person or persons involved in the story. Please leave out the names of people having nothing to do with what's going on.  They distract the reader from the story, and can be annoying.

what?--the event or situation that makes the writer's subject.

when?--the time or date of the event or situation

where?--the location of the event or situation, or perhaps of the person or persons involved

why?--the reason for the event or situation, or the reason the event or situation should be interesting to readers

how?--other events or situations that make part of the development of the event or situation you (the writer) are telling readers about. Do not insert meaningless digressions here--no matter how interesting. They will distract and annoy your readers. Stick to the point. Save interesting asides for another piece of writing--or for the reporter who interviews you on your story.

the continental divide

     The continental divide is another bit of reality that some people believe to be fictional.  The continental divide is a point somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. From this point, all of the rivers run west on the one side, and east on the other, dividing the waters of the North American continent neatly in two.

why can't we kill all the bugs?

     A question still asked more frequently than you might think--"why can't we kill all the bugs?"  We can't kill all the bugs because we need the bugs to survive. Without them all the life on Earth might die. You may have heard on a nature show that bugs dispose of decaying organic (stuff that used to be alive--dead plants or animals) matter, and that by doing this they clean up the planet. That is what some of the bugs and insects do. Others pollinate (help make new plants grow) the flowering plants--including all fruits and vegetables--and probably the flowering grasses, too. This doesn't just mean a few flower gardens. It means everything but some ferns and mushrooms. Insects aren't always given credit for pollinating the grasses, but many people believe that they do. That doesn't matter, you might say, because you don't eat vegetables or grass--but you do. Wheat and rice are cereal grains (basically grass)--and all the bread or pizza crust or hamburger rolls you have ever eaten was made from them. All the meat you have ever eaten was fed on the grains and grasses. We don't "manufacture" food, although large factories may make it look like we do. We grow food and "process" it--milling the wheat into flour for bread, drying and grinding the corn for tortilla chips.
     We know that the bugs and insects make many crops grow. If we decided to kill all of the bugs, we might find out too late that they made everything grow.

flat tax

     The idea of a "flat" income tax is becoming news again. We now have what is considered a "progressive" income tax--the more money a person makes, the more he or she pays in taxes, not just because a certain percentage is being taxed ( say ten percent, or ten cents of every dollar earned), but because higher incomes are taxed at a higher rate. People with little money may pay five cents on each dollar earned, while people who make more money may be taxed fifteen cents on each dollar earned. The numbers are not accurate, as there are a lot of variations, but the idea is the same.
     Under a "flat" tax system everyone would pay the same percentage--the same ten cents, or the same rate, on every dollar earned. Many people think this would be more fair than taxing wealthy people at a higher rate. Many other people think that a "flat" tax would actually be "regressive"--that poorer people would be unfairly paying a larger portion of their income in taxes. The poorer people might actually be taxed on money they need for the rent or mortgage, while people with more money would be taxed on excess income. It might become a very unfair system. A "flat" tax law might be written with an exclusion for the income anyone actually needs to survive--but the exclusion or exemption would have to be high. With an exclusion set at at the first $20,000 or even $30,000 of income, a large group of people would be paying no taxes at all, and the wealthier would be making up the difference.
     A "progressive" tax system--like the one we now have--includes more people as a tax base, and avoids the danger that too many people might "drop out" of America's civic life because they do not have the personal political stake of watching politicians argue over how to spend the money they earned, and then paid in taxes.

tomb of the unknown soldier

     The tomb of the unknown soldier is a real American tradition--not pretend. There is a real dead soldier, killed in combat, buried in a tomb, with a memorial. Each of these "unknown soldiers" is someone whose body could not be identified. In this way the one soldier stands for all of the soldiers killed in the war. The unknown soldier of the American Revolution (1775-1783) is buried here in Philadelphia, with a perpetual flame as a memorial.

odds and evens

      Odd and even numbers--the concept is useful in a few ways, if you learn it. Odd numbered addresses are usually on one side of the street, evens on the other, for instance. Parking regulations sometimes stipulate different rules for odd or even license plate numbers. All of the "even" numbers can be divided by two. If you wanted to share any even number of things between two people, the amounts would come out "even". Odd numbers cannot be divided by two. When you start with the first ten numbers, it's easy to see--
odd--1,3,5,7,9
even--2,4,6,8,10
Larger numbers are odd if they end in odd numbers. They are even if they end in even numbers, including zero(0).
So two people can evenly divide 778, 962 M&M's between them---but not 778,963.

impressment

     Impressment was one of the main causes of the War of 1812, fought between the British and the young United States.  To impress someone was basically to kidnap him--usually from a port town or somewhere near a waterfront or dock. He might have been hit on the head or drugged in a tavern first. When the victim woke up, he was on a ship, out at sea--and in the British navy.  Unless he thought he could swim to shore, he was pretty much stuck with being a sailor. The navy, at the time, still flogged the disobedient and mutinous, so he probably quickly learned to work on a ship. The British had been doing this in England, but it caused a lot of outrage when they tried it in the United States, completely ignoring its status as an independent nation. The British burned the White House, but the United States won the war--the war Francis Scott Key wrote about in "The Star-Spangled Banner".

confederate

     Confederate is a word, with a meaning having nothing to do with the one-time Confederate States of America---the Southern states that attempted to secede from the union, resulting in the American Civil War. A confederate is a cohort, a partner in crime or some other business--with the connotation that the business is disreputable. This connotation must not have been current at the time of the Civil War, or the confederate states would not have named themselves as they did. A confederate ( a noun--a thing or idea) is a partner of some kind--to confederate  ( a verb--an action or doing word) is to make such a partnership. A confederacy would be what the confederates made--the group organized for some purpose--a partnership.

the second hand

    The second hand of a watch or clock actually means the third hand--which some clocks and watches do not have. The hour hand is the short or "little" hand. The minute hand is the long or "big" hand. If there is another hand for measuring seconds, this is called the "second hand".  Digital clocks don't have hands--only clocks or watches with dial faces have hands.

what's it worth?

     A thing offered for sale is worth whatever you can get for it--but not until after you get it. You can offer an Elvis commemorative plate for $500--but if you only get $50, then the plate is only worth $50. This would be the "market price" of your commemorative plate. If you think that accepting the offer of $50 is losing money, you will have to hold onto your plate until someone offers more money--even if that takes years.
     The stock market works the same way. People "gain" and "lose" money every time the price of stock changes--in theory. But they haven't really gained or lost any money until they have sold their stock at a price that makes money for them, or loses it. The people who owned stock at the beginning of the great depression didn't all lose money. If they could afford to hold onto the stock until prices rose again--which during the depression meant several years--they didn't lose any money at all. Some of the investments in firms that went bankrupt would have been lost--but nothing else. The "panic" sellers during the depression had bought the stock "on margin"--which means on credit. When it dropped in price, they had to sell--they no longer had stock in an amount equal to what they had borrowed to get it. They had to sell or make up the difference in price in cash--if they had it. Market prices "going down" don't have to mean losing money on investments.

how many?

a couple--2--of anything, or 2 people who are an "item"--sometimes called a "pair"

duo or duet--2 performers
trio--3 performers

twins--2 siblings born at one time
triplets--3 siblings born at one time

quartet--4 performers
quintet--5 performers--(these go on in number, even if people once invented a new word for them-sextet, septet, octet)

decade--10 years

dozen--12 of something--eggs or doughnuts, or anything else
half-dozen or "half a dozen"--6 of something

a "score"--an old-fashioned word for 20--"four score and seven years ago", spoken in 1863, meant 1776 (1863-87=1776)

century--a hundred years, or defining a particular century by the number of its years--as today, we live in the 21st century

a gross--a business term for 12 dozen, or 144

triangle--a 3 sided shape--as in a "yield" sign
"quad" or quadrangle-a 4 sided shape, hence a public court or square
pentagon--5 sided shape--the Pentagon in Washington, DC has 5 sides
hexagon--6 sided shape--some quilts or old-fashioned floor tiles are hexagons
octagon--8 sided shape--as in a stop sign-different shapes make the signs easier to see quickly

a quarter--1/4 (of a dollar), or of anything else--1/4 is what you get when you divide something in 4 parts
a quarter to 12 is 11:45, or 15 minutes (a quarter of an hour) before 12
half is what you get when you divide something in 2--so half an hour is 30 minutes

All of the words above mean a specific number--although we agree on what, or how many, "a few" is, or "several", they are vague--they don't mean an exact number--an approximation will do.

sharecropping, tenant farming

     A sharecropper or tenant farmer made a deal with a landowner to farm some or all of his or her land, in exchange for a "share" of the crops raised on it.  It was something like renting land. Someone who literally had nothing but the clothes on his back could become a sharecropper, and many of them were poor. The person who owned the land got crops to sell, even though he didn't farm the land himself. According to the deal made with the owner, the sharecropper or tenant farmer got the rest.

poll tax

     A poll tax was a tax a citizen had to pay just to vote. This is now illegal, by the 24th amendment to the US Constitution. Citizenship tests as a voting requirement are also illegal. Either an American was born in this country, and can be assumed to have been educated in our public schools or an approved substitute (private school), or an American has become a citizen by residing here for at least five years and passing a citizenship test. The only time a citizenship test is given in the United States is when a foreign born person (an immigrant) wants to become a citizen, which he or she would have to do to be able to vote--so no citizenship tests just for voting are necessary. The citizenship tests were made illegal because they had been used unfairly, to keep some people from voting. This happened in parts of the American South, where one person's citizenship test might merely ask him to name the president, and another person might be asked to recite the US Constitution. Citizenship tests were particularly used in some parts of the South to keep blacks from voting.

grandfather clause

     A grandfather clause was a ploy used in the South to keep the recently emancipated blacks from voting, during the era of reconstruction after the Civil War. After the US Constitution was amended to give black males the right to vote, some Southern states passed "grandfather clause" laws.  Under these laws, you couldn't vote unless your grandfather could vote--they effectively disenfranchised blacks in the South. This is illegal now. What is more recently called "grandfathering" something means to make it retroactive--as if it had begun at an earlier date.

Latin

     Latin properly refers only to the language spoken by the Ancient Romans more than 2,000 years ago. In modern times it has become a "dead" language--meaning that no one speaks it. It was kept alive in Europe for many centuries by clerics and scholars--priests, lawyers, doctors, scientists and philosophers--as a written language, although a few people could speak it.  In this way scholars from all over Western Europe could read what the other educated people were writing. There were very few people who could read and write at the time, so they made something of an international community. Almost no one can read Latin now--perhaps just enough to understand medical terms and scientific nomenclature.
     We commonly call South America and Central America "Latin America".  This is because the languages spoken there are "Latin" languages. Both Spanish and Portuguese are "Latin" languages--said to be linguistic "descendants" of Latin. Modern French and Italian are also "Latin" languages. English is not called a "Latin" language, although we have used Latin for many scientific and technical terms. Much of English has its roots in the ancient language of the Anglo-Saxons. More words were added when the Normans conquered England. The Normans came from part of what is now France, and had been led for centuries by Vikings and their descendants--so the "story" of English becomes quite complicated.

ad hominem

    One of the Latin phrases still in use in English is "ad hominem".  It means "to the man", and refers to what was once taught as one of the standard logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are ways to lose an argument, or to argue badly--not unfairly, but badly--they weaken or ruin your own argument, and allow your opponent to make a case against you. This sounds like a bit of philosophical idle chitchat, but it isn't. Most people who use the internet probably encounter it every day.  An argument "ad hominem" means throwing an insult, instead of offering a refutation, rebuttal, or retort. Someone says he thinks taxes should be lower, for instance, and by way of disagreement, someone else calls him stupid--or worse. That's not an argument. It's an argument ad hominem. An argument ad hominem can be more subtle--as in " I didn't think someone like you would agree"--but it's still an argument ad hominem--an argument to the man (or woman) instead of his or her ideas.

gerrymandering

     Gerrymandering is in the news today. Voting districts are being redrawn here in Philadelphia, and someone suspects at least potential gerrymandering. There are really two subjects here. The first is the reason for the census. We have a census every ten years because people move, die, and have children, who eventually become old enough to vote. Leaving the voting districts in the same place for decades (or centuries) can result in very unfair apportionment of representatives. The people who wrote our Constitution knew this, and provided for it with a census every ten years.  They knew from experience--England's system of representation became so corrupt that three people could elect a Member of Parliament (MP) in one district, and 50,000 in another district had no representation at all--that reapportioning representatives would be necessary. Every ten years, districts that lose population may also lose a representative in Congress. Districts that gain population may gain a representative. Districts may also be redrawn--be given different boundaries--to keep them even. If each representative has 500,000 constituents, for instance, the lines of voting districts may be redrawn so that 500,000 voters live in each one. Local government follows the same procedure, using the federal census data.  In this way we ensure that every vote "counts" the same. "One person, one vote" is always the goal to be achieved. If 100,000 people can elect a representative in one place, and 500,000 can elect a representative in another place, the district with 100,000 people has more than one vote per person, compared to the district with 500,000 people. Because we have a census every ten years, differences in population are not as large as in this example, but the principle is the same.
      Gerrymandering means drawing voting district lines irregularly--with the idea in mind that if one party or group draws the lines, they can arrange it so that their party wins more seats than they would if districts were drawn as simply as possible. This has usually meant that the party in power has tried to keep or extend its influence by gerrymandering--Republicans and  Democrats have each been accused of this at different times. In parts of the South, there have been accusations of racial gerrymandering--drawing voting district lines so that as many districts as possible would have a white voting majority.  Gerrymandering winds up in court when a person or party sues. The districts are a matter of public record, so once an accusation of gerrymandering is brought to court, the districts may be redrawn.
    

culling the herd

     Lions don't cull herds--of anything.  Lions, when hungry, pounce on the creature that looks easiest to catch. If the lion catches the creature, it eats it. No animal "culls" herds--or works with the idea of enforcing the notion of "survival of the fittest". People may do this, if they keep herds of cattle, for instance. Perhaps they kill all of the weakest to have for dinner, and are left with the stronger animals to reproduce and increase the herd. This would be "culling " a herd, as beans are culled by removing the "bad" ones, or clumps of dirt that may be mixed in with them.  Lions and other predators do not do this, so to continue to state that they do is poor science and worse grammar.

the 3/5 compromise

     When the founders of the United States were writing the US Constitution, they couldn't agree on what to do about slavery. Some wanted it abolished. Too many others--those from the states where slavery was legal--could not agree. They also could not agree on what to do about slaves when the subject of proportional representation was discussed. They made two compromises. The first was that no anti-slavery law would be passed for twenty years. Twenty years later, the importation of slaves was made illegal.
     The second compromise was that each slave, for the purposes of apportioning congressional representatives, would be counted as 3/5 of a person, hence the name 3/5 Compromise. This meant that the more slaves a state had, the more representatives they would have in the Congress in Washington. The American South, from the very beginning, had political power out of proportion to the number of voting citizens. This didn't end until the slaves were emancipated during the Civil War.
      To learn just how out of proportion this political power was, we would also have to know how persons were counted in the North for the purposes of representation. For instance, were immigrants counted?--after all, they couldn't vote until they became citizens. Were propertyless working people counted?--these also could not vote. Neither could women. Indians were not counted, by a provision in the Constitution--they were not considered citizens until the 1920's. We would need a history of the US Census to find out how much leverage the 3/5 compromise gave to the American South.

AD, BC, BCE

     The letters AD after a year stand for "Anno Domini"--Latin for "the year of our lord". In this old style of naming the years, we now live in AD 2011. The letters "CE" have recently been substituted for this. "CE" means in the "common era"--the set of years we are living in right now. This is important because there are more than 2,011 years of human history to read about. When discussing something that happened more than 2,011 years ago, the letters "BC" were once used. They stand for "before Christ". The letters "BCE" have recently been substituted for this--they stand for "before the common era".  Something that happened 2,012 years ago is said to have happened in the year 1 BCE--one year before the common era. Something that happened 2,511 years ago is said to have happened in the year 500 BCE. You can see by this that the numbers of the years before the common era, or BCE, seem to go backward. When discussing events that happened before the year "1", we are talking about how many years distant from the year "1" they are. So the larger the number of the BCE year, the longer ago it was.

first and last

     In most of the "West"--the United States, Europe, and South America--when we say or write our names, we put our given name first, and then our family name or surname. Sometimes we are asked for our last name first, as this is the way lists of names are usually alphabetized. When a name is written that way, a comma ( , ) is placed after the last name so that we know the names are listed last-name first ( this matters because occasionally a surname is the same as a given name).  For example--
John Smith  would be written--
Smith, John  when the last name is the first one written or typed.
   This can be confusing when Oriental names are added to a list, because Oriental people often put their family name first, and then their given name.  Chang Ho is Mr. Chang, for example, whose friends call him Ho.  When we see an Oriental name on a list of names, we are not always sure which name is the surname or family name, and which the first or given name.  We know that Oriental names may be written last-name-first, but so do other people, who may have already corrected for this when making up a list of names--by changing the order of the names to read the same way that Western names do. Unless you already know which name is a given name, and which a surname, you may need to ask. The same thing may happen when our names appear in a list of mainly Oriental names, read by an Oriental person--who may have to ask which name is which.

how to keep your ducks in a row

     Consider the alphabet. Its 26 characters are always arrayed in precisely the same order. Which is very useful for organizing information, even when a computer is handy. When a list of items is arranged in alphabetical order, any number of things can be easy to search through--you can find whatever you're looking for in matter of seconds, assuming you know what it was called, or under what name or title it was filed.  A list of thousands, or even millions of names, can be checked for one particular name--in seconds--perhaps even if you're not sure of the spelling. Everything beginning with the letter "A" comes first. Next we look at the second letter--"A" comes before "B", and so on through the alphabet, according to the number of letters in each word. People managed to keep track of files by the hundreds of thousands in this way, long before computers were invented, and alphabetization is still useful to people who need to look through a list, as opposed to entering a name in a search box.