Writer's Words (page 4)

Yet when apprised of Whitestone's remark about ASL↗ being limiting, Doshi says (via computer E-mail), “I truly disagree with that.” MJ Bienvenu, head of the Bicultural Center in Riverdale, Maryland, goes further. Speaking through an interpreter, she says, “That's a very damaging statement; there are many successful Deaf people.” Bienvenu, a leading ideologue of cultural deafness, isn't happy Whitestone won. “It misportrays what Deaf is,” she says. “She may be (medically) deaf, but she does not have the social identity of a Deaf person.”

America's losing fight against fat — one sure to fluster consumers as they frantically scan the nutritional labels on supermarket shelves — comes from the Boston University Medical Center.

The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. This collection of short stories about damaged men poses important questions: Is courage a virtue, or is it simply testosterone poisoning? Is God just a neurochemical event, part of the tantalizing aura that precedes an epileptic fit? Jones is an ex-Marine and former amateur prizefighter who puts a wallop in his prose.

To justice, continence, and nobility;

Having thus, in obedience to your majesty's commands, diligently searched all his pockets, we observed a girdle about his waist made of the hide of some prodigious animal, from which, on the left side, hung a sword of the length of five men; and on the right, a bag or pouch divided into two cells, each cell capable of holding three of your majesty's subjects. In one of these cells were several globes, or balls, of a most ponderous metal, about the bigness of our heads, and requiring a strong hand to lift them: the other cell contained a heap of certain black grains, but of no great bulk or weight, for we could hold above fifty of them in the palms of our hands.

Programmers can be very stubborn — Stallman, to be sure, is legendary for his intransigence.

indeed, it requires a special degree of chutzpah to write an entirely new version of one of the most famous programs in the free software arsenal.

My PhD dissertation was entitled Prescriptive Kanji Simplification.

Pinyin↗ was Promulgated in 1958 by People's Republic of China. (Pinyin is a Chinese romanization system. To romanizatize a language means to make a transliteration system using latin alphabets. That is, using English letters to represent Chinese pronunciation.)

People keep asking me, “Why a camel?” And I have a standard litany of answers. (I'm allowed to give more than one answer, of course, because of the Perl Slogan: “There's More Than One Way To Do It!”)

Don't garble what you don't understand.

the cubs are still having a bit of trouble adjusting to their new non-feral life.

It was dropped after the 1997 model year. But while Toyota makes mistakes, it seems to make them only once, not only learning from its errors, but also atoning for them by correcting shortcomings.

I'm on y2k vigil.

boundary, perimeter.

deceit.

the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist...

cliché, bromide, commonplace, truism

appendage, appurtenance, accessory, attachment.