Effect, Impact and Opening Ceremonies

And Clapping Seals!

So I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week, which is here. It is behind a subscriber wall, I think. If you can’t see it, I will sum it up: it is about the gross abuse and misuse of the word “impact” and the near-extinction of the word “effect,” and also about dinosaurs, wisdom teeth and maybe some RFK Jr. This might not seem significant, but words become popular or unpopular for reasons that can be significant. For example, I think “impact” is everywhere because everyone wants to believe they have experienced trauma (I blame, among others, Gabor Mate for this, but that is for another column). It isn’t enough to say you have been affected by your lousy childhood, or that your drunken/angry parent or psychotic brother had an effect on you. They had to have impacted you, as an Acme anvil would the roadrunner if the poor coyote ever managed to succeed.

There are many other uses and misuses in English that drive me batty. Some of them are the result of stupidity and poor education: people writing “should of” instead of “should have” or those who say they “could care less” when they mean they “couldn’t care less.” There are millions of such nightmares from which to choose. And there are nouns being used as verbs: dialogue, parent, and - I wrote about it here - genocide. Not to mention that the latter is often used inaccurately. There are a number of pop-psychology words I dislike: “self-care” is, as far as I can tell, mere code for “selfish” and/or “rude.” But I have to tip my hat to GenZ for making such hay with it.

A current word making me crazy is “nuance.” It is not that it is misused, as much as that it is being overworked. It just seems like a way for people to pretend they are smart about something - usually something about which they know nothing - or else a way for them to condescend to others. “I’m afraid you don’t see the nuance in this issue, but I do.” After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a woman I know claimed that I was failing to see how “nuanced” an event it was and that it was not, as I claimed, black and white. Er, huh? Where is the nuance in slaughtering cartoonists because they drew something you deem offensive? Seems pretty black and white, good versus evil, to me. Or should I say, “binary”? It seems pretty binary to me, as does Israel versus Hamas/Houthi/Hezbollah/Iranian regime.

Which brings me to Kamala Harris, currently the adored object of a “mediagasm,” as one of the hosts of the Powerline podcast calls it. She said that the current conflict in the Middle East is not “binary” and is, in fact, “nuanced.” Seriously? What would she say about World War II? Or Ukraine/Russia? Look, most of life has nuance as do most wars, but that does not mean they do not have clear bad and good guys. They do. The good guys are likely imperfect good guys - and there could possibly be sane, even good people among the bad guys, but that does not make it a conflict full of shades of grey. I will take imperfect Ukraine and Israel over the clear agendas of Moscow and Tehran any day.

This is not a political comment about the American election - I honestly don’t know who I would vote for, were I American. I’ll say this: I do not obsess about U.S. domestic issues. Americans can work that out for themselves - it is their country. In fact, I get quite a laugh out of Canadians who appear deeply invested in the domestic issues going on south of our border. I do care about foreign policy, however. Trump is good on Israel and lousy on Ukraine. Harris seems middling on both. (RFK Jr? Well, he says the U.S. should dramatically slash military spending and therefore become more isolationist. He is a silver fox, though.) So I almost feel like they cancel each other out, don’t they? Anyway, good luck in November, neighbours!

Another word getting used to death (one lives in hope) is “woke.” Speaking of, how about those Olympic opening ceremonies? I loved Celine Dion, of course. An absolute triumph for her. But the rest? You know what? I don’t care whether the fat naked blue person was meant to be a Greek god or Jesus or another of the Last Supper attendees. It seemed beyond inappropriate for a sports event. And I feel like Zeus would be more outraged by it than Jesus. I believe in the right to be offensive, but you have to wonder what the organizers were thinking. That said, it has been parsed to death and does not really matter - what matters far more is that the Israeli athletes were apparently forbidden from wearing small yellow ribbons representing the hostages. For the life of me, I cannot understand this - how is it political or provocative to wish for the return of the hostages? There is a baby in Hamas captivity who has spent more than half his life that way. This should be universally condemned and the small yellow ribbons representing that baby and others universally supported.

I wrote above that one had to wonder what the Olympic organizers were thinking - well, maybe not. Years ago, Christopher Hitchens was on Bill Maher’s show and Bill Maher took a cheap shot at George Bush. The audience applauded and Hitchens flipped them off, saying that they were like clapping seals - not the term he used, but that was his point. He said that making fun of Bush and his alleged lack of intelligence was what stupid people did to prove their cleverness. (You can watch it here.) He was correct. And I think being “woke” and shoving sexuality in its various permutations at everyone is the 2024 version of that. It is for clapping seals. It is for people trying to prove they are clever and interesting and hipper-than-thou, when, in fact, all they are showing us is that they are unimaginative and shallow. Not to mention cowardly. It is easy to attack gods of yore and Christians. There won’t be reprisals, other than some editorial page columns.

[One part of the Olympic ceremony I liked was the can-can ladies. In tribute, La Goulue’s grave in Montmartre Cemetery. Photo: Rondi Adamson, 2018]

***

Going through some old stuff and I found this column I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor about Gaza, back in 2005. I was in Israel when Israel was pulling its citizens out of Gaza, ending its occupation and leaving the area to what it hoped would be a better future, one in which Gaza could have become a Dubai or a Singapore, not to mention a decent neighbour. But the people there made different choices. On that trip, we also visited the north, including a Druze town. (This would have been very close to where a Hezbollah attack killed 12 Israeli children last week, an attack that has been covered with the usual contempt and lack of care by much of the media.) I remember we had lunch in a cafe where the owner’s adorable daughter - about six-years-old - kept hanging around us. The owner had told us that he had the choice to be a Syrian citizen or an Israeli citizen. I asked him why he chose Israel. He pointed to his daughter. “For her,” he told me.

Those were hopeful times. Here is to hopeful times in future.