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.