Typee made Melville a sex symbol? What did that even mean back then?

July 29, 2014 VII - The Divine Magnet It turned Melville into America’s first literary sex symbol–an almost disreputable figure. All Excerpts From Hoare, Philip. “The Whale.” HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

He's at home:

July 25, 2014 V - Far Away Land Whaling separated sexes; and in this isolated place, as isolated as any ship, and yet bleaker in midwinter, whaling ‘widows’ had recourse to opium to cope with the loneliness. Others used plaster dildos known as ‘he’s-at-homes’. All Excerpts From Hoare, Philip. “The Whale.” HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

I prefer ‘winter-strained’ sperm, thanks…

July 25, 2014 V - Far Away Land Headmatter from sperm whales was brought directly from the ships to large wooden manufactories, where it was heated in great kettles to remove water and impurities. It was stored in casks and, over winter, cooled to a coagulate mass. This was placed in woollen bags, which were then compacted in a wooden press from which spermaceti trickled, like juice from an apple press, or oil from olives. This first pressing, the purest, was known as ‘winter-strained’ sperm. All Excerpts From Hoare, Philip. “The Whale.” HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

"it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops"

July 24, 2014 1. Embarkation Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters. A Scottish newspaper called this practice “madness,” but actually it’s just shipping. All Excerpts From George, Rose. “Ninety Percent of Everything.” Henry Holt and Company. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Sperm whales have a sonic boom attack!?

July 23, 2014 III - The Sperm Whale A sperm whale can create a two-hundred-decibel boom able to travel one hundred miles along the ‘sofar’ channel, a layer of deep water that readily conducts noise. It seems strange that such a physically enormous creature should rely on something so intangible; but bull sperm whales, by virtue of their larger heads, generate sounds so powerful that they may stun or even kill their prey. These directional acoustic bursts, focused through their foreheads and likened to gunshots, are the equivalent, as one writer notes, of the whale killing its quarry by shouting very loudly at it. All Excerpts From Hoare, Philip. “The Whale.” HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Cetacean appetite:

July 23, 2014 III - The Sperm Whale They eat mostly cephalopods, but also take tuna and barracuda; entire thirty-foot sharks have been found in their bellies. And they consume in enormous proportions, taking from three to seven hundred squid a day: worldwide, sperm whales eat one hundred million metric tons of fish a year–as much as the annual catch of the entire human marine fishery. All Excerpts From Hoare, Philip. “The Whale.” HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

So, the breadth of anxiety over violence evidences violence's dramatic decline

July 19, 2014 7. THE RECASTING OF HUMAN NATURE Contrary to widespread belief that the 20th century was more violent than any other, Pinker establishes that both personal violence and deaths in warfare have been in steady decline for as long as records can tell. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Man domesticstes dog. Man domesticates man

July 19, 2014 7. THE RECASTING OF HUMAN NATURE This lightening of the bone, a genetically based process, is seen in the fossil remains of species like pigs and cattle as they were domesticated from their wild forebears. In people this process, called gracilization, proceeded independently in each of the world’s populations, according to the physical anthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Take that, Mr. Diamond!

July 17, 2014 5. THE GENETICS OF RACE The single criterion that Diamond proposes as an alternative, genes that confer resistance to malaria, makes no evolutionary sense. Malaria became a significant human disease only very recently, some 6,000 years ago, and each race then independently developed resistance to it. Italians and Greeks resist malaria because of mutations that also cause the blood disease known as thalassemia, whereas Africans resist malaria through a different mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia. The trait of resisting malaria is one that has been acquired secondarily to race, so obviously it is not an appropriate way of classifying the populations. A scholar’s duty is to clarify, but Diamond’s argument seems designed to distract and confuse. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Fossils make evolution seem slower than it actually is:

July 17, 2014 5. THE GENETICS OF RACE Biologists have long had to depend on the evidence from fossils to judge the speed of evolution. But fossils capture just the bones of an animal. And since the skeletal structure of a species changes only slowly, evolution has long seemed a glacially slow and plodding process. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Euphemisms: Sheltering us from the cultural police

July 16, 2014 4. THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT As for the actual DNA elements now used by biologists to assign people to their race, or races if of mixed parentage, these are known discreetly as AIMs, or ancestry informative markers. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

…only to have evolutionary biologists express disappointment at her efforts…

July 15, 2014 4. THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT A few biologists have begun to agree that there are human races, but they hasten to add that the fact means very little. Races exist, but the implications are “not much,” says the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.6 Too bad—nature has performed this grand 50,000 year experiment, generating scores of fascinating variations on the human theme, only to have evolutionary biologists express disappointment at her efforts. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Chimp warfare? At what level do they comprehend their actions?

July 13, 2014 3. ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIAL NATURE Male chimps are unremittingly hostile to strange males and if possible will kill them on sight. Their favorite tactic on invading enemy territory is to surprise and kill any male whom they find alone. If the raiding party senses that it is outnumbered, it will retreat. A neighboring territory will be captured after its resident males have been killed off one by one in a campaign that may last several years. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

"Imbecile" as technical term, fit for legal writing:

July 13, 2014 2. PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE In the 1927 case, known as Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found for the state, with only one dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, endorsed without reservation the eugenicists’ credo that the offspring of the mentally impaired were a menace to society. “It is better for the world,” he wrote, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Darwin on the poorly-named "Social Darwinism"

Compulsion to help the helpless as central property of human species. July 13, 2014 2. PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE Yes, vaccination has saved millions whose weaker constitutions would otherwise have let them succumb to smallpox, Darwin wrote. And yes, the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind, which, to judge from animal breeding, “must be highly injurious to the race of man.” But the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is part of our social instincts, Darwin said. “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature,” he wrote. “If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.” All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

I appreciate authors who define their central vocabulary explicitly

July 13, 2014 2. PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities. Besides superiority, racism also connotes the idea of immutability, thought once to reside in the blood and now in the genes. Racists are concerned about intermarriage (“the purity of the blood”) lest it erode the basis of their race’s superiority. Since quality is seen as biologically inherent, the racist’s higher status can never be challenged, and inferior races can never redeem themselves. All Excerpts From Wade, Nicholas. “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-05-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

acronym vs initialism

July 11, 2014 …For those of you who care about such things, there is a difference between an acronym and an initialism. The former refers to an abbreviation consisting of letters that are pronounced as a single word (such as NASA), and the latter refers to an abbreviation consisting of letters that are pronounced separately (such as CIA). All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

game of bumdockdousse, anyone?

July 10, 2014 Five: The Continuing Deterioration of the Language …bumdockdousse (a game, now infrequently played, which appears to entail little more than three people standing about and kicking each other in the buttocks). All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

In other words, Dan Quayle died for your sins.

July 10, 2014 Five: The Continuing Deterioration of the Language I am concerned with the question of why we all know that potato has no e at the end of it. The answer to this question is that many of us now have a firm grasp of this thanks to our beleaguered former vice president. In other words, Dan Quayle died for your sins. All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Could you repeat that as a Homeric epithet?

July 8, 2014 Four: Sins of Grammar Nuria Yáñez-Bouza is a professor of linguistics, specializing in the history of English presciptivism, with a subspecialty in attitudes toward sentences that end with a preposition (or, as the linguists would phrase it, preposition stranding). All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

If you must gripe, gripe well:

July 6, 2014 Three: Verbing Nouns That man, Frederick W. Lienau, wrote a letter to the managers of the company, making clear his displeasure with the use of the word: “Somewhere there cumbers this fair earth with his loathsome presence a man who, for the common good, should have been destroyed in early childhood. He is the originator of the hideous vulgarism of using ‘contact’ as a verb. So long as we can meet, get in touch with, make the acquaintance of, be introduced to, call on, interview or talk to people, there can be no apology for ‘contact.’” All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

“The Americans are coming, and they’re verbing nouns in a transitive manner as they go!”

July 6, 2014 Three: Verbing Nouns …“The Americans are coming, and they’re verbing nouns in a transitive manner as they go!”… All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Thou shalt not doubt my plausibility

I love that even in scenes of action & suspense, he doesn't flinch from justifying his artistic liberties in fact. It gives the narrative an oral feel. June 26, 2014 CHAPTER 135 The Chase • Third Day It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east. All Excerpts From Melville, Herman. “Moby-Dick.” Harlequin, 2009. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright. Available in iBooks Store

why you so stupider?

July 5, 2014 Two: Words That Are Not Words We do not say that someone is honester than someone else, and so it follows that we would likewise not say “so-and-so is the honestest person I know.”* Yet we would have little trouble saying “When you use the word stupider, it makes you sound like the stupidest person in the room.” All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

"no one complains much about irk"

June 30, 2014 One: Arguing Semantics If all this befuddles you, and you would like to say that something aggravates you without running the risk of having your audience confused as to whether you intended it to mean “makes you worse,” “inflames your disease,” “accuses you,” “weighs you down,” “increases your offensiveness,” or any one of the other possibilities that the word offers, then I suggest you just go with irk—no one complains much about irk. All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

"belittle": The "harshing on" of the 1780s?

July 1, 2014 Two: Words That Are Not Words Belittle may look like a fine old English word, but it has the whiff of cheap backwoods neologism to it. It was coined in the early 1780s by Thomas Jefferson, shortly after the American Revolution; a time when there was a marked tendency on the part of some residents of the United Kingdom to cast aspersions at our country. All Excerpts From Shea, Ammon. “Bad English.” Penguin Group, USA, 2014-06-03. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.