The reality I am referring to is the current campaign for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, USA. And the belief, which I have held for a long time, is that one of the chief differences between right-of-center and left-of-center politics is that the former is mainly about power, and the latter mainly about ego.

I am talking here about politicians, not the voting public. Voting behavior, I still believe, has a different polarity: that between hope (which leads people to vote left) and fear (which makes them vote right).

But in my experience political leaders on the right have generally sought power in order to further the interests of the right, which are essential those of the wealthy classes. How they would wield that power is almost immaterial, and the trappings of office are secondary. Dick Cheney, we remember, was content to govern the United States from an undisclosed location as Vice President. And those on the right, who like to call themselves conservatives, have always been willing to make alliances with various radical movements in order to attain the power they need. It can be argued whether the leaders on the right in Germany, Spain or Chile knew, when — in the face of a perceived threat from the left — they allied themselves with the likes of Hitler, Franco and Pinochet, that by doing so they were helping to lead their countries into fascism. But they accepted it, as long as their economic interests were served.

On the left, by contrast, compromise for the sake of power does not come easily. Each leader tends to believe that he or she alone has the right formula to promote the cause of the people, and campaigns by the left have tended to founder on the clash of egos. It may well be that ego of Ralph Nader was what lost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election in the US, as did that of Jean-Pierre Chevènement to Lionel Jospin in 2002 in France.

The left’s lasting electoral successes have generally happened when there was one ego big enough to project such charisma that it forced the other egos to coalesce around it. I mean people like John Kennedy, Pierre Trudeau, Willy Brandt, François Mitterrand, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Lula da Silva, Felipe González, or Hugo Chávez. Those are the kind of leaders who can inspire hope, which is what, as I said above, the left needs in order to win. It seemed in 2008 that Barack Obama might be of the that mettle, but it has yet to be proved.

But the present Republican primary race has become a battle of alpha-male egos that rivals the best (or worst) that the left has had to offer. Romney and Gingrich seem to be trying to wound each other enough to make them unelectable (as, for example, Gore did to Dukakis in 1988). This is a new paradigm, and I wonder what it bodes for the future.

For me, the year was 1959, and what began was making love. It may not have been the year of my first sexual experience, but it was the first time in my life that it was called making love. It also happened to be the year of “the end of the Chatterley ban” that Larkin alludes to in his poem.

Coincidentally, it was in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, released in 1959 that I last heard to make love used (by Cary Grant’s character to Eva Marie Saint’s)  in its old-fashioned sense of  ‘to pay amorous attention; to court, woo’ (as given by the Oxford English dictionary, which adds “Now somewhat arch.“).

The OED also gives a few pre-1959 citations of the sense  ‘to engage in sexual intercourse,’ including one from Hemingway, but they are ambiguous. In fact, making love could well mean whatever it is that people do to each other when they are in love, possibly but not necessarily including sexual intercourse. When Cole Porter wrote (in Night and Day), “And its torment won’t be through /Till you let me spend my life making love to you,” it’s unlikely that he envisioned the song’s first-person subject to want to spend the rest of his life courting or wooing (or even paying amorous attention to) it’s second-person object.

Then there is the movie Let’s Make Love, which was not released until 1960. The verb phrase of the title was used only, as far as I remember, in the song-and-dance number performed by Marilyn Monroe and Frankie Vaughan. For its time it was quite suggestive — Marilyn, resplendent in a plunging gown, undoes Frankie’s bow tie! She takes off her high-heeled shoes! — but evidently tame enough to receive the MPAA  seal of approval. Given the year of release, the song (by Cahn and Van Heusen) was, in all likelihood, written… in 1959.

This time the matter is not terminology but pronunciation: Michele Bachmann’s saying the word commonly spelled chutzpah with the sound /ʧ/. This, of course, is the usual English way of pronouncing ch, as in church, except for some Greek-derived words, like character and architect, in which the sound is /k/.  (The words of the chemic family, originally Arabic, have also come to us by way of Byzantine Greek.)

Of course, one would think that someone with two instances of ch in her name, each pronounced differently, would be sensitive to such nuances. But one would be mistaken.

(C)hutzpa(h) is supposed to be pronounced with a /χ/ or /x/ sound, as ch is pronounced in German or Scottish words like Bach or loch. But neither in German nor in Scots does ch represent this sound at the beginning of a word; the only languages in which it does so, to my knowledge, are the West Slavic ones (Czech, Slovak, Polish), and why should that fact influence English? Especially since there is an old English tradition of representing the voiceless velar or uvular (commonly called guttural) fricative, in words taken from languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet, with kh.

I already commented in an essay on the letter H that Orthodox Jews have a special predilection for using ch to represent the /χ/ sound of Yiddish, especially in words that are originally Hebrew where the sound is represented by ח (ḥet) (as in names like Chaim and Chana). While in modern Israeli Hebrew this letter is in fact read as /χ/, this has not always been the case; the older pronunciation (still practiced by some Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews) is more like /h/, as reflected in the English forms of Biblical names like  Hezekiah and Hanna.

Besides, most English-speaking people don’t bother pronouncing the “foreign” sound /x/ or /χ/. With the Murdoch name all over the media these days, I have yet to hear it spoken in the Scottish way, like this; everyone pronounces the final ch as /k/. And most people, except a few bubble-dwellers like Michele Bachmann (pronounced like Bockman), pronounce chutzpah with an /h/ sound. Why, then, not spell it hutzpah?

For it is chosen: Elizabeth George is American, and the American editions of her books are in fact the original editions. Reading her is, then, like listening to a virtuoso performance. But any virtuoso will hit an occasional wrong note, and every so often one finds a lapse that will make one wince.

The most common  is her fondness for the verb phrase (to) run interference for (someone); I’ve found in at least three of her books, in the sense of providing support or cover. I wonder if Elizabeth George knows that this is a blatant Americanism (the OED labels it as orig. and chiefly U.S.), originating in American football; nowadays it’s mainly used metaphorically, while the literal sense is covered by blocking. According to the prominent British linguist Geoff Pullum (in a private communication to me), this phrase has not yet entered British English.

In her novel A Traitor to Memory, a violinist muses about the fact that his teacher never became a concertmaster. But the use of concertmaster to designate the leading violinist of an orchestra in the United Kingdom is very recent; the traditional, and still predominant, term, is Leader. In a post dated 1999 in a BBC online forum on the subject, a British musician writes, “Every orchestra I’ve played in the first violinist has been billed as the Leader.” It is only from a post dated 2006 that we learn, “Leader is a British term, Concertmaster is international but is gradually catching on here.” According to a recent posting by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, “The SCO is seeking a new Leader (Concertmaster).” Butl A Traitor to Memory was published in 2001, and it seems unlikely that an English musician at the time covered by the novel would have thought of a concertmaster rather than a leader.

And then there is a curious typo in With No One as Witness: “undo reverence” instead of “undue reverence.” A typo, yes, but a distinctly North American one. In all the varieties of British English that I know of, do and due are not homophones, and such a typo would be highly improbable for someone whose native pronunciation has the distinction.

Elizabeth George is very gracious in extending profuse thanks to the “various individuals both in the United States and in England” who have helped produce her wonderful books. But none of them seem to have the linguistic skill needed to prevent shibboleths.

There is, of course, a nexus between the two beliefs: America is the greatest nation because God willed it so, and it is so regardless of the ungreat facts of the American past (slavery, indigenocide) and present (social and economic inequality, militarism).

But there are differences. American religiosity tends to be of the tolerant variety. Except for some extremists among traditionalist Christians (as well as fundamentalist Muslims and ultra-orthodox Jews), religious Americans generally profess respect for other religions. And faith is essentially an expression of humility, being the acknowledgment of a power (however personalized) higher than oneself.

The so-called American exceptionalism is another matter. It is, for one thing, absolute. President Obama was once criticized for relativizing it by comparing it to the putative exceptionalism of other nations, but he is now seen as having embraced it.

For another thing, it is a blatant expression of pride. And here’s my problem: most religious Americans are Christians. In Christianity, regardless of sect, pride is one of the seven deadly sins, along with lust, gluttony etcetera. But when an American politician gets caught acting on, say, lust, he (it’s usually he, except perhaps Helen Chenoweth) asks for forgiveness (from God and/or spouse). Expressing nationalistic pride, on the other hand, requires no apology. It is done, well, proudly.

I wonder if some day a journalist, when facing a politician spouting a prideful assertion of American exceptionalism, will ask: “But aren’t you a Christian? And isn’t pride a sin?”

It’s taken almost four years, but my first impression of Michelle Rhee as a glib self-promoter has been vindicated. An exposé by none other than USA Today has called into question her supposed accomplishments as Chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools, and the journalist Gene Lyons has called her an “education reform huckster.”

I hereby offer my services as a consultant on self-promoting phonies, especially to school boards, which seem to be highly susceptible to invasion by this noxious species.

But this past December I noticed (specifically in the streets of Henderson, Nevada) a message that was the opposite of the pacific one. It didn’t actually say WAR ON EARTH, but rather GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS. But I  don’t see much difference. Traditionally, when people seek the blessings of a deity for an armed force, it is to lead the force to victory over some enemy (who is also regarded as the deity’s enemy). If there is any thought of peace, it’s the peace that follows victory, not a truce or a cease-fire that might save lives.

If someone were to argue that the message only expresses support for the troops, I would ask: what does it mean to “support the troops” without supporting what they are doing? What they are doing is waging, in our behalf, two destructive, wasteful and counterproductive wars in far-away countries that have never, as such, posed any threat to us, against an abstract enemy called “Islamic terrorism.” The United States has a history of referring to campaigns against abstract enemies as “wars” — we have had a War on Crime, on Poverty, Cancer, Drugs and so forth — but these have been metaphorical wars. The ones in the Middle East are literal.

I am vehemently opposed to these wars, and the only way that I support the troops fighting them is by wanting them to be sent home (or wherever they want to go), safe and sound. If this were how those who believe in God interpreted God’s blessing, then I would be on their side. But I doubt it.

By the way, I use “google” as a verb meaning “use an Internet search engine on” regardless of whether I use Google^TM as the search engine. As I wrote in a previous post, I was once a devoted Yahoo user, and  I began to use the verb during the time when the URL for the search was google.yahoo.com, before I even knew that Google was the name of an entity. I see no reason to change my usage.

When products are commonly available for sale in two sizes, these sizes are likely to be called Small and Large. If they come in three sizes, these are usually Small, Medium and Large.

Eggs in supermarkets typically come in three sizes. But they are called Large, Extra Large and Jumbo. Yes, eggs in a carton marked Large are actually small.

I am old enough to remember eggs sold as Medium, but I’m not sure about Small, though they must have existed at one time. But chickens of the egg-producing variety have been bred to lay ever larger eggs, and the ones that laid Small and Medium eggs have been bred out of existence, except perhaps on some organic farms that market “heirloom” eggs. But the USDA standard for eggs in the United States doesn’t seem to have changed, and so we live in a world where, as regards relative egg sizes, Large means small.

Now, when it comes to cups of coffee in coffeehouses, just the opposite has happened.

For me, a normal cup of non-espresso coffee is 6 to 8 fluid ounces (US). I would call the 6-oz. cup a small cup “small” and the 8-oz. cup (usually a mug) “big.” Also, coffee in coffeeshops (that is, casual restaurants, as distinct from coffeehouses), when served with meals or without them, typically comes in 8-oz. cups, and if customers want more coffee, they get free refills.

But in American coffeehouses that are not Starbucks — at least on the West Coast — the cup sizes that are designated Small, Medium and Large are typically 12, 16 and 20 ounces respectively. (Starbucks, famously, has invented a special language for these sizes, but they seamlessly translate orders from English into this language, so that, for example, Small = Tall.) For my coffee-drinking habits, these would be Large, Extra Large and Jumbo — exactly the terminology of egg sizes!

I have come across a few coffeehouses that offer an 8-oz, cup called Mini (or something like that). But they are the exception. (At Starbucks this size is called Short, and is available despite not being listed on the menu board.)

I suspect that the reason for this development is that in American coffeehouses takeout has become the default. I would guess, from my long experience of hanging out in these places, that by now the ratio between “to go” and “for here” is at least 2:1. Now, Americans like to drink their coffee (traditionally weak) in large amounts, and if they are limited to one cup without refills, they might as well make it big. And so Small is actually large.

In fact, the health-care law is about as capitalistic as any such legislation can be. By comparison — but only by comparison — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would fill a Marxist with joy. Of course, I don’t mean the dog-eat-dog, free-market capitalism of Adam Smith or Ayn Rand, a form that Wall Street said good-bye to many years ago, but modern capitalism, with corporations getting heaps of subsidies and a modicum of regulation from the government. That, plus tax incentives, health savings accounts (in private banks, of course) and the like — where in the world is the socialism?

I understand that Rush Limbaugh, the leading hurler of the “socialism” epithet, has gone back on his vow to move to Costa Rica if the law were to pass. I don’t think much of Rush Limbaugh, but I never thought of him as an ignoramus, and yet how did he not know that a civilized country like Costa Rica would have nationalized health care?

Here’s another personal experience. Unlike Spain, where government-run hospitals and clinics are open to tourists (as I found out from the excellent treatment that my wife received in a little mountain village after arriving from Morocco with an intestinal disorder), in Costa Rica such services are only for permanent residents. And so, when I found myself with wax-clogged ears the day before I was to fly  back to the US, I discovered that all the doctors in the town where I was staying were working, on that day, at the public health center, and that without a national ID card I would not be attended there. All the doctors, that is, except one. I was given directions (Costa Ricans don’t use street addresses) to his office, was seen by him, and then referred back to the public health center, where I was to ask a nurse named Doña Carmen for a lavage. When I protested that I wouldn’t be served at the center, he said, “Just ask for Doña Carmen. She’s my wife.”