Tuesday, October 09, 2012

AWAD Gets Its Comeuppance

"The rabbi inveighed against anyone possessing the popular smartphone: 'A religious person who owns this impure device is an abomination and a disgusting, vile villain,' he said."

One wonders what invective the good rabbi might heap on co-religionists practicing metzitzah b’peh (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/nyregion/infants-death-renews-debate-over-a-circumcision-ritual.html?_r=0). Talk about “impure”! Even the vile Vatican--the focus of all evil in our world--might well classify the practice as “disgusting” and an “abomination.”

Alas, the good rabbi in all likelihood embraces metzitzah b’peh. “Ritual circumcision with oral suction” (!) is widely practiced in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and even in the wake of an infant boy's death at the mouth of a mohel, it resists calls to end it. In the words of Rabbi David Niederman, “We do not change. And we will not change.”

No doubt the AWAD webmaster will make note of this stiff-necked depravity when he, e.g., introduces a week's worth of Hebrew words that have entered the English language. Then again, he may decide it doesn't become a latitudinarian to pile on. Late night comics and the mass media have already had a field day with this story.

What’s that? You've heard nothing about it?!

Clearly, the Catholic Church wields undue influence in the popular culture. It has so mainstreamed bigotry directed at religious (and irreligious) minorities we hardly even notice.


-----Original Message-----
From: Wordsmith
To: apivetta
Sent: Mon, Oct 8, 2012 4:45 am
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--inveigh

Wordsmith.org The Magic of Words

Oct 8, 2012
This week's theme
Miscellaneous words

This week's words
inveigh

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

What makes a good usage example for a word? It's not one single attribute. We try to find examples that, besides illustrating a word clearly, are topical, short, funny, and informative, though it's not always feasible to have it all. When it's an unusual word, we're lucky to find more than a couple of recent examples of its use.
Readers sometimes ask if they can read the whole story mentioned in the usage example. It's not always possible as the quoted article may not be freely available on the web.

This week's five words have interesting usage examples and include links to their complete texts. These examples are from several fields -- technology, religion, politics, literature, zoology, and more -- but they are all worth reading and provide food for thought.
inveigh

PRONUNCIATION:
(in-VAY)

MEANING:
verb intr.: To complain or protest with great hostility.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin invehi (to attack with words), from invehere (to carry in). Ultimately from the Indo-European root wegh- (to go or to transport in a vehicle) that also gave us deviate, way, weight, wagon, vogue, vehicle, vector, envoy, and trivial. Earliest documented use: 1486.

USAGE:
"The rabbi inveighed against anyone possessing the popular smartphone. 'A religious person who owns this impure device is an abomination and a disgusting, vile villain,' he said."
Jeremy Sharon; Rabbi Strikes Against iPhone; The Jerusalem Post (Israel); Sep 14, 2012.

Explore "inveigh" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way. -Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)

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