From Will Miller
Monroe
To the editor:
The thievery that is cattle rustling had its day, its prime time, over a century ago when rangeland was open. Nowadays the activist "word rustlers" are having their day.
The old rustlers separated a steer or cow from the herd, threw it down, and with a searing hot iron altered or "rewrote" the brand. They thus covered over the truth and their crime with their lie, and claimed possession.
Word rustlers of their time take words with a more or less useful history and liberally change meanings to suit their purposes. It's a kind of identity theft.
For instance, the word "homophobia" in old dictionaries was defined as a fear of men, therefore fear of crowds. Phobia rightly means fear rather than dislike or hatred.
"Gay," a word with a literary history as a synonym for merry, was rewritten to mean not just effeminate but especially committed to sexual abnormality - in fact to perversion.
A word firmly established in both usage and law is the word marriage. Liberal word rustlers are currently trying to steal that word, to falsify the brand.
It was found with cattle that the true original brand could still be read from the inside of the cow's hide. That of course would have to be in the way of a postmortem.
When the time comes for the postmortem of American society, will the insides of our hides tell the truth - how we let thieves come stealing and altering, changing our words, our thinking, our identity, our soul?
Truth coming by postmortem comes too late.
There's now a case in point. As the national Boy Scout leaders show more compatibility with Obama liberalism than with the principles of their founders and leaders for 100 years, how is Boy Scouting to be redefined? What happens to the Normal Rockwell brand? What of the Scout's pledge to keep himself "morally straight?" More brand rewriting?
Monroe
To the editor:
The thievery that is cattle rustling had its day, its prime time, over a century ago when rangeland was open. Nowadays the activist "word rustlers" are having their day.
The old rustlers separated a steer or cow from the herd, threw it down, and with a searing hot iron altered or "rewrote" the brand. They thus covered over the truth and their crime with their lie, and claimed possession.
Word rustlers of their time take words with a more or less useful history and liberally change meanings to suit their purposes. It's a kind of identity theft.
For instance, the word "homophobia" in old dictionaries was defined as a fear of men, therefore fear of crowds. Phobia rightly means fear rather than dislike or hatred.
"Gay," a word with a literary history as a synonym for merry, was rewritten to mean not just effeminate but especially committed to sexual abnormality - in fact to perversion.
A word firmly established in both usage and law is the word marriage. Liberal word rustlers are currently trying to steal that word, to falsify the brand.
It was found with cattle that the true original brand could still be read from the inside of the cow's hide. That of course would have to be in the way of a postmortem.
When the time comes for the postmortem of American society, will the insides of our hides tell the truth - how we let thieves come stealing and altering, changing our words, our thinking, our identity, our soul?
Truth coming by postmortem comes too late.
There's now a case in point. As the national Boy Scout leaders show more compatibility with Obama liberalism than with the principles of their founders and leaders for 100 years, how is Boy Scouting to be redefined? What happens to the Normal Rockwell brand? What of the Scout's pledge to keep himself "morally straight?" More brand rewriting?
