Kiam ni ne respektas havis por mia frato

Mia frato Blejr neniam respektitas, ne eĉ kiam li falas el aŭto.

​Antaŭ 43 jaroj, mia familio loĝis en Forest Hills, urbeto ekster Pittsburgh. Blejr havis amikon, Akti, kiu patrino havis kabrioleto. Somertage, ŝi ofris kondukis la aŭton malrapide dum ni sidas sur la dorsoj de la seĝoj, por nia amuzo. (Mi aĝis 2 jarojn; Blejr kaj Akti aĝis 6 jarojn; kaj nia alia frato, Vilĉo aĝis 4 jarojn.)

La rajdo amuzis por ĉiuj ni, sed kiam la patrino de Akti turnis la ĉirkaŭe angulo, Blejr elfalis dum ni rigardis.

Poste 2 aŭ 3 minutoj, la aŭto alvenis ĉe nia domo, kaj ĉiuj ni eliris el la aŭto.

"Kie estas Blejr?" mia patrino demandis.

"Ho, li falis ĉe la angulo," Vilĉo diris, kaj ni iris en la domon por glaciaĵo.

Something to remember next time you need surgery

I got a call from my younger brother today that made me stop and think about some of the problems that are endemic in health care.

We all have our areas of specialty. Brian has a degree in computer science. It's generally accepted that we call him for tech support. Herb  is a handyman, so we call him when we need help with our cars. And I think we've all talked with Ward at one point or another about our pets and their proper care,

Meanwhile, I majored in English back in college and have made a career as a writer.

Contrary to what you might expect, I don't get many panicked phone calls from relatives. Shockingly few people face crises where they need a point-by-point comparison of "Troylus and Criseyde," Chaucer's paean to romantic love, with Shakespeare's satirical "Troilus and Cressida" in the next twenty minutes. Nor am I asked to field questions about sentence structure, subject-verb agreement or dangling participles.

In fact, no one in my family has called with a question related to my field of study or choice of career, ever. 

Until now.

Ward, who runs the heart-lung machine during open-heart surgery, called the house around 10 a.m. Monday with a burning question. The surgeon he was working with had been reading an article in The New Yorker, where the writer had used the word coöperate, and the doctor was trying to figure out why the writer had put two dots over the second O. 

He was pretty sure that was called a dipthong, but even so, it was a mystery. 

So Ward called me from the hospital to find out.

Those two dots are properly called an umlaut. When they appear, they signal that the vowel they're attached to is pronounced separately from the vowel before it, so we know to read the word as co-op-er-ate, and not as coop-er-ate. but it's pretty rare to see them in English. 

More broadly, umlauts are a kind of diacritic, a typographical flourish that shows that the letter they're attached to is breaking with conventional pronunciation rules. Diacritics in English most often appear attached to loanwords that come from another (typically European) language and that haven't completely made themselves at home yet.

English by and large has done away with diacritics, umlauts included, in favor of the standard 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. That's why we write fiancee instead of fiancée, facade rather than façade -- and cooperate instead of coöperate.

A dipthong, incidentally, is two vowels that combine to make a single sound, like the oy in boy, or the au in baud.

Having gained the answer he wanted, and -- what's more -- having learned two new words to showboat with, Ward hung up the phone and returned to surgery, where he shared his news.

"I have decided to change my title to perfusiönist for added snob appeal," he later wrote me. "That was the moment of public recognition guys like you wait a lifetime for, and you were a couple states away. Sorry."

Just remember: This is what occupies the minds of your surgeon and her crew when you are on the table.

when your parents just don't seem to get it

It's a difficult thing when your parents forget some of the moral lessons they worked so hard to instill in you.

I never had any black friends growing up in suburban western Pennsylvania. My neighbors and everyone at school were as white as my family. We saw non-Caucasians from time to time, but for all I knew, most of the rest of the world was as white, culturally and racially, as I was. To my parents' substantial credit, they raised all four of us with a clear moral understanding that it was wrong to denigrate anyone based on the color of their skin. As much as it was possible in such a situation, we were raised to be color-blind.

So I've been a little disappointed by some of the e-mail I've been getting from my mother the last few years. A few years ago, she shared an outraged e-mail about how the U.S. Postal Service was honoring Islam with a set of Ramadan-themed stamps, even though Muslim had killed thousands of Americans on 9-11. When I would get these things, I would chalk it up to her infamiliarity with the Internet, debunk the claims of the e-mail, and remind her to check those things out on Snopes.com before forwarding them, and move on.

Then on Wednesday, I got an e-mail from her about Barack Obama and what a disaster he would be for the United States if he were elected president.

Now I'm an Obama supporter, it's true, but if someone wants to question his qualifications, that's fine. You can complain that he's too liberal, or that he lacks the requisite experience for the job, and while I might disagree, I won't begrudge you the right to say your piece. I probably won't even begrudge you the right to send such a critique to my e-mailbox, especially if you're a good friend or a close relative.

I draw the line at racist crap, though, and my mom (I'm sad to say) crossed that line. The e-mail was a collection of quotes allegedly culled from "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams of My Father." As near as I can tell, the quotes are all accurate ... as long as your notion of acccuracy isn't affected by little details like changing the meaning of a quote by removing it from its defining context.

The basic thrust of the e-mail is this: Barack Obama hates white people, is sympathetic to al Qaeda and its goals. You'd have to be insane to vote for him.

Racism is an ugly little snake. It feeds on ignorance and fear, and uses them both to stoke the fires of its own hatred a little bit higher and a little bit hotter. My mom's no dummy, but for some reason she's willing to shut off her filters when someone she trusts forwards this crap to her, and then she allows the hateful little people who spawn this e-mail to use her to spread their hate further.

She knows better than this. Why does she do this?

The really sad thing is, I called her up on Saturday to talk with her about it. I had just spoken to my oldest brother. He was so repulsed by what she had shared that he actually had set up his e-mail account to reject anything from her address. I realized that I was letting something simmer and stew that I needed to address head-on.

So I explained to her why I found the e-mail objectionable: not because it attacked Barack Obama, but because it was racist and because it pandered to fear and hatred. I tried to explain what a reasoned criticism of a candidate would look like, and why this one completely failed to pass the muster.

I explained that it ran contrary to the values that she and dad had tried to pass on to us, and that we were passing on to our children, and I might as well have been talking to a wall.

She could not see what the problem was. To her, it was just a different, and important, perspective on the man who likely will be our next president. She could not understand why I thought it was racist, or why Brian found it so objectionable. As far as she could see, she was the wronged party in this whole affair, because we weren't listening to what she had to say.

It was sad to see, and more than a little painful. My mom raised us to be tolerant and respectful, and now, for whatever reason, it looks like she's forgetting in her age the lessons she taught us so well in youth.

Building vocabulary one fake word at a time

Every time you say "disencluttered," God kills
a puppy. Please think of the puppies.

I was perhaps 10 minutes into a phone call with my brother Zero when he mentioned "disencluttering" something.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Disenclutter."

"Sounds like a Bushism," I said.

"It is not a Bushism!" Zero insisted. "It's a real world." I wondered momentarily if that meant that he had taken the word clutter and loved it so much that its eyes had fallen off, and its fur was all worn away, like some linguistic Velveteen Rabbit, and then he added: "It comes up on Google and everything."

At this point I appealed to a nonexistent language snobbery on my part, and insisted that if it doesn't show up in the Oxford English Dictionary, then it's not a real word.

Zero wasn't moved. "It's a real word," he said again, clutching that mantra like a security blanket when the night is closing in and monsters stir unpleasantly beneath the beds of little children. "It shows up on Google."

Late Sunday night, I checked, and sure enough, disenclutter does show up on Google. What Zero failed to disclose was that his site is the only place this alleged word appears. At least it was. I expect a Google search soon will turn up this page as well, with the following notation: Zero is a goober.

Still, I don't blame him for failing to disclose on the phone that the word is his concoction. If I were responsible for such an abberation, I doubt I'd be all that quick to draw attention to it either.

On his site, he asks that readers add the word on their own web pages so that its usage will proliferate. Note that I have done so here. After all, what are brothers for?

the third parent

If you have an older sibling, chances are pretty good you understand what I mean when I use the phrase "the third parent."
In our family, the third parent was my oldest brother, Brian. Brian traditionally has thought nothing of issuing directives to us, or of translating a parental request into a command.

I believe when we were kids he tried to be the heavy and make us do our chores (in all fairness they were ours to do, not his) when our parents were out. About six years ago, for example, we were both visiting our parents, and our mother asked him to get me up. Brian comes up the stairs, opens the door to my bedroom, and with the light of divine revelation setting his face aglow, commanded me: "Dave, up!"

I never did like that.

So tonight, Rachel was trying to play with something that Evangeline also was trying to play with. After a while, I guess it started to get on Evangeline's nerves and she said, "Rachel, you're in time out."

I thought I contained myself pretty well. I didn't spank Evangeline. I didn't growl at her or give her a lecture at the top of my lungs. I scooped her up, told her never to presume to punish Rachel again, and said it was time for bed.

Natasha pointed out to me that Evangeline isn't Brian and just because I had problems with him doing that doesn't mean I have to take them out on Evangeline.

*sigh*

Our story is a generational one, isn't it?

I'm sure there are times when an older sibling really does valid input or advice that younger siblings can benefit from. I've had some for my youngest brother, Herb, that he's taken, and I've received from Brian and from Herb, brother number two. (I'm number three if anyone's trying to keep count.)

There's a difference between giving advice and trying to run another person's life, and between passing on instructions from mom and dad and just being a bossy jerk. In the latter choice of each of those pairs, the older sibling generally would do everybody a favor by sitting down and shutting up.