"The containers for milk are always square boxes, containers for mineral water are always round bottles..."

"... and round wine bottles are usually placed in square boxes. Write an essay on the subtle philosophy of the round and the square."

That's an exam question from the standardized college-entrance exam in China, as quoted in "Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic" by Simon Winchester.

"Instead of angry politics, we got something more interesting — 90 minutes of Mr. Keillor's muted Minnesota Zen, a comedic art form, contiguous to religion, that he invented a long time ago...."

"... At the microphone, he is the opposite of a 'man of ego, hubris and entitlement.'... Some 35 miles east-northeast of here, in Northampton, Jonathan Edwards preached his fierce sermon, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' during the First Great Awakening. In the midst of America's Fifth Great Awakening, the Awakening of the Woke, here sat Garrison Keillor, a sinner, bearing witness, though slyly. He paid a steep price for his sins, whatever they were. He said it didn't matter -- it was 'injustice on behalf of a good cause.' The 'good cause' was #MeToo. 'The way you change behavior,' he said, is through fear -- the same point that Jonathan Edwards made. It 'is to whack prominent men with a two-by-four.'"

Writes Lance Morrow in The Wall Street Journal, about Garrison Keillor's appearance at the Meeting House in New Marlborough, Massachusetts (where he was interviewed by Simon Winchester).

Does Morrow take Keillor's remarks at face value? I wish I'd been there and able to look him in the eye and hear the sound — the famous sound — of his voice. He is a humorist. I wouldn't take at face value the notion that the way to change behavior is through fear and that it's fine to whack prominent men with a two-by-four for a good cause. I'm going to take Morrow's "but slyly" to mean that he took it all as satire, even the choice of setting, the New Marlborough Meeting House, which looks like this:



Come on. That's comedy!

Whatever happened to Primo Communist Flitworth?

I'm reading Simon Winchester's "The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible," the part about Robert Owen, born in Wales in 1771, who came to America with ideas of utopian socialism he'd developed in Scotland. He met "with President Monroe, took tea with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and gave two public lectures in the Capitol. John Quincy Adams, the president-elect, came to both talks, and was so taken that he had Owen build a scale model of his proposed New Harmony building and display it at the White House." New Harmony failed:

As is so often the way with utopias, factions developed — no fewer than ten had formed within just two years of Owen’s arrival, and all began bickering, squabbling, and arguing for various rewritings of the commune rules, each splinter group jostling for ideological supremacy. In the end, a demoralized and disillusioned Owen, shocked at a brand of waywardness he had never experienced back home among the Scots, returned to Britain. His confidence was sorely shaken: his ideas for the universal betterment of the working classes began slowly to evaporate, and he became steadily ever more marginalized and ridiculed a figure.

That paragraph ends with a footnote, and it is in that footnote where we encounter the most perfectly silly name I have ever seen:

Robert Owen’s final grand gesture was the creation of an immense and ruinously expensive cooperative community in Hampshire called Queenswood, in which seven hundred people lived, their inner quadrangle illuminated by “koniophostic light,” with conveyor belts bringing food from central kitchens to their dining halls. Couples moved in. A first baby born at Queenswood was formally named Primo Communist Flitworth. But the community never really prospered and closed after only a short while. Owen then changed gear once again and provided valuable help in settling the rival US-Canadian claims to Oregon territory, then tried in vain once more to sell his socialist ideas in Paris, where he died in 1858 and was buried in the grounds of a deconsecrated church.

What happened to Primo Communist Flitworth? Was he not worth a flit? Did he have some informal name that he used and blended into the general populace. He's the 19th century's Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz. Who did he become when he disaggregated himself from the commune that gave him his stigmatizing name? A nobody?

After an absence, "absent."

Sasha Volokh is back at Volokh Conspiracy after an absence of 2 years. It's nice to see him back and nice to get a chance to see what's the first thing he wants to talk about when he gets back. It's the surpassingly nerdy dual topic of the way anyone can contribute information about word usage to the Oxford English Dictionary and whether the use of the word "absent" as a preposition is really, as some blog commenter recently said, just a lawyer's tic.

Don't get me wrong. I love this subject matter. The lawyer's "absent" has been driving me crazy for years, and I love almost any sort of discussion of the OED. My iPod Shuffle contains Simon Winchester's unabridged reading of "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary." So I'm completely on board with the nerdiness Sasha brings to his reemergence as a VConspirator.

Anyway, Sasha came up with some info on the prepositional use of "absent," which he puts in OED style:

1888 South Western Reporter VIII. 898 If the deed had been made by a stranger to the wife, then a separate estate in her would not have been created, absent the necessary words; but, being made to the wife by the husband, a separate estate, as against him, was the result. 

1893 South Western Reporter XII. 629 Absent any evidence to the contrary, a proper and legitimate purpose will be presumed. 

1898 South Western Reporter XLV. 303 Absent any one of these ingredients, there is no contract. 

1906 South Western Reporter XCIV. 591 Absent one of these ingredients, there is no contract. 

1914 South Western Reporter CLXXII. 17 A mere barren and abandoned conspiracy sounding in words, but jejune of acts or results, is not actionable, absent a statute so declaring. 

1929 South Western Reporter (2d series) XVIII. 490 Absent a tender of an instruction properly defining said words, it was not error for the court to fail to do so. 

1938 Federal Suppl. XXV. 861-62 The design, absent the color and display thereby created, is not more ornamental than many types of similar shoes.

This doesn't refute the blog commenter, of course. It demonstrates the ugly lawyer's use of the word. Is it limited to lawyers? It's so often used by lawyers that it's hard to believe it hasn't infected nonlegal writing, but it's still ugly and feels abnormal. I'd recommend avoiding it even in legal writing, precisely because it sounds like legalese.