The Fix
The Passage
Here is an excerpt from a speech given by Kamala Harris on August 12, 2022:
Equity as a concept says recognize that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for them to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, well, we must pay attention to this issue of equity.
What? Kamala Harris is the Vice-President of the United States, a heart attack, stroke, or gunshot away from the Presidency. She should speak better than this.
Feedback
Let’s begin with the elephant in the room, her premise that “everyone has the same capacity.” That’s absurd. Hurley the Elder would like to play golf as well as Tiger Woods. Hurley the Younger would like to be a linemate of Sydney Crosby’s. But neither of those are possible because we don’t all have the same capacity.
But let’s suppose for a moment it was true. Then she is effectively arguing this:
Equity recognizes that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for us to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, there must be equity.
We think Ms Harris was trying to make a distinction between equity and equality within certain social programs. Equality is when all individuals have the same opportunity. Governments sometimes extend equality to equity when they provide varying levels of support based on need. In Canada, some might argue that our health care system is characterized by equality since no Canadian pays anything for health care. When it comes to higher education, some provincial governments try to make access more equitable by providing funding to students who can demonstrate a need.
The reaction to Ms. Harris’s comments was swift and merciless. A commenter on the RNC Research’s twitter feed posted this picture:
Odds and Ends
Twain’s Advice on Adjectives
Mark Twain did not like descriptors: “As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.” Good nouns and verbs go a long way and most don’t need the help of descriptors.
Here is a good example from the website of the NY Book Editors (from a piece entitled “Don’t Overuse Descriptors,” at https://nybookeditors.com/2013/05/editing-tip-1/). They begin with this paragraph:
The young, male soldier nonchalantly stood with his back against the ornately carved wooden fence and angled his head upwards towards the sky, smoking and staring distractedly at the cotton-ball like white clouds that moved westward above the city. From her place at the window two stories above, Melanie vigilantly watched him as he slowly and repeatedly brought his cigarette calmly to his lips, expelling plumes of grey smoke with each measured exhalation. She wasn’t sure why, with so many thousands of private gardens in the city, this strange, unknown, soldier had chosen her garden—with its walls of knotty rhododendrons and the rows of rose bushes, only now coming into beautiful, red bloom, that her mother had planted the year before in an attempt to bring some color into their lives—to smoke in. Her uncertainty made her scared, and she began to feel a cold fear spread throughout her body, from her terrified heart, all the way to her extremities.
They suggest this revision:
The soldier stood with his back against the fence, smoking and staring distractedly at the clouds that moved westward above the city. From her place at the window, Melanie watched him as he repeatedly brought his cigarette to his lips, expelling plumes of smoke with each exhalation. She wasn’t sure why this soldier had chosen her garden—one of thousands in the city—to smoke in; and, if she was being honest with herself, she was scared.
The revision is much easier to read. With fewer descriptors, there is less to process.
Word of the Week
It’s cockwomble.
Cockwomble means “a completely useless person that spouts constant bullshit.” [From the Urban Dictionary at
https://www.urbandictionary.com/
. By the way, shouldn’t it be “… person who spouts constant bullshit”?]
Tom Nicholson has written an interesting piece in Esquire entitled “There Is a Crisis in British Swearing” with the subheading “Just when you thought cockwomble, pisstrumpet and shitgibbon had died, they're launching a comeback.” (https://www.esquire.com/uk/life/a22747750/cockwomble-there-is-a-crisis-in-british-swearing/, 2018) His point is that these “faux-archaic compound insults” are poor substitutes for simpler insults such as prick, dick, wanker, and bastard. He also suggests that they say quite a bit about those willing to use them, including Boris Johnson who has used cockwomble on occasion.
It seems to us that “Kamala” and “cockwomble” could easily be used together in a sentence although it’s our guess that more than a few American commentators might use the obvious feminization of cockwomble.