I'm glad I'm not an educator. Trying to teach kids while at the same time nanny them in accordance with the bigotries of the parent population — as interpreted by administrators — would wear too heavily on me. Take this story:

At issue is whether Chase's opinion column advocating tolerance of homosexuals was suitable for a student newspaper distributed to students in grades 7 through 12 and whether newspaper adviser Amy Sorrell followed protocol in allowing the column to be printed.

A kid writes a column advocating tolerance, and her supervisor gets fired. Oh, that's almost funny.

Of course, this kind of nannying is precisely what you have to expect in schools, especially public schools. Which makes this point seem risible:

"This is a real threat to quality student journalism if an adviser can be removed for not having censored a perfectly legitimate story that there was no legal reason why it shouldn't have been published," said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Virginia.

What is quality student journalism? I'm not sure I've seen it.

I'm not suggesting that public schools shouldn't censor student journalism. Why not? Institutional self-censorship happens to journalists all the time. Might as well prepare the little blighters for the real world of blight.

Still, that doesn't mean we can't protest every instance. Why? Because these instances all originate in other people's protests. So, the public (especially the government-run) sphere must be and always will be a contentious one.

But in this case, the whole thing appears more idiotic than usual: Tolerance can't be tolerated. That seems to be the upshot.

Of course, little children, no matter how hairy their crotches, must be protected from mere mention of homosexuality. They may see it on the tube and hear about it (and see it) in the halls . . . and experiment beneath the bleachers. But let's not let the school paper address it!

When I was in school, I knew I would some day work as a writer. But I avoided student journalism for the same reason a sane man avoids a madhouse. Yes, it has something to do with the matter at hand, but it undoubtedly teaches more bad habits than good.

My friend Don H. is now a teacher, but in high school he worked on The Comet. This student newspaper was as forgettable as any, but the one issue that had some hope of being lively was confiscated by the principal. I never saw it. Why? Because Don interviewed my friend Naki, who was heavily into hard rock. In the interview, Don asked about the prevalence of drugs in rock 'n' roll. Naki responded by saying that he thought it was too often overdone, but in moderation . . .

Oh, that opinion (and a mere opinion, at that), was too much for me to read. The fact that I already knew Naki's opinion (after all, anyone in the small school could do the same as I: just talk to the lad) didn't matter. I was not alloweed to read it. And thus it was not allowed to be debated.

That's how administrators and teachers make of student journalism a cesspool of inanity and pabulum. Nothing else is allowed. A real debate? On a controversial matter? Where young people are encouraged to think? Not allowed. Not in our schools!

The principal in question was much admired in the community. In that same year he came into my World History class and gave a little speech. It was about how the job of the school wasn't to teach, but to help us learn how to learn, as he put it.

I almost chortled aloud.

I had been in school over eleven years at that point, and I had indeed learned how to learn. But did I learn this at school? Well, in the first grade, perhaps, when I started reading encyclopedias, and when my teacher had me lecture on solar astronomy. More important, though, was Sunday School, provided not by the taxpayers but by tithing Christians, where we read good literature (the Bible) and discussed (if not debated) interesting concepts, and where I was encouraged to read church history and apologetics. And on my own, as I read perhaps hundreds if not thousands of books by the time I listened to the principal lie to me and my classmates.

Few of my fellow students could learn a damn thing without help. They had not learned how to learn. And their best chance, that year, was suppressed by that very same educator. A real debate of interest to them? Nope. They had to be protected from that!

I often think about the suppression of our school paper. As bad as teachers often are, I remind myself that they are ruled by administrators doing an often impossible task: trying to corral students and teachers in a system most useful for purposes other than education.

What purposes? You know, such high-minded purposes as babysitting and indocrtrination into the sports culture.

The Coen brothers are known for writing characters with the gift for gab. Some of these characters use big words in situations where big or strange words rarely get an outing.

This is funny. Hifalutin speech coming from low-status characters (recidivists, escaped convicts, Bible salesmen) helps make O, Brother, Where Art Thou and Raising Arizona such great movies.

When I was in high school, I too inculcated a gift for gab and a passion for twisty sentences and big words. After all, I was reading big words all the time. And the people around me regularly used low words, vulgar words, to put down others and raise themselves up. My strategy amounted to a sort of ironic counter-thrust. My deliberately out-of-place constructions formed a kind of self-defense. I was serious about my agenda, but engaged in the tropes and figures of speech, as well as the extended subordinate clauses, with a sense of humor, too. I realized (to some extent) its limitations as speech.

Real communication should not be so closely tied to establishing hierarchies, I came to realize. Real communication would be, in essence, post-conflict. (In high school, post-conflict meant one thing: after high school!)

In my own writing, big words still appear. And some of my sentences go on longer than Hemingway's. Or a newspaper reporter's. As a reader of James Branch Cabell, these constructions often conjure up a languorous irony that functions, by turns, as beautiful and witty.

But I don't write stuff like this (I hope):

Connectivity has been called the genius of feminism (by theorist Robin Morgan 53), and this genius is being realized in electronic spaces and texts in more totalizing ways than in any other medium to date. The multidimensional networks of the new media and the structural models of computing offer methods and approaches that I have freely adapted as a feminist pedagogy. Cyberfeminism is a process of dynamic interaction and fluid boundary-free practices that pose new strategies for navigating real and virtual worlds, and navigations in the cyberspaces of networked literature point to potentialities for how it might be possible to escape the white western male power structures that tend to rule technological discourse and our classroom work as well.

It, too, is funny, in a sort of Coenesque way. But it is, I think, unintentionally funny. The metaphor of fluidity is risible in and of itself. And the piling on of jargon is mind-numbing. That it comes from a philosopher's pedagogical manifesto strikes me as sad.

But, could I put myself in her shoes? What would I say if I believed and taught as she believes and teaches?

Here's a quick attempt at a revision:

Connectivity is the genius of the Internet. Everyone knows this. A new science now gestates: the science of networks. It used to be "who you knew" that was socially important. Then it became "what you know." Now, the connections themselves rise in importance, and both What and Who become subsumed by connectivity itself.

This may be new, but it is not unprecedented. Feminists have had an inkling of this, for as Robin Morgan (aged 53, or is that note 53?) has suggested, connectivity is the genius of feminism. The expanded dimensions of networks in new media, along with the structural models of computing, suggest methods and approaches that I freely adapt to teach and advance feminism.

We could call my method Cyberfeminism, I suppose. But let's smile as we say it, for as jargon goes, it conjures up a few unfortunate terms from science fiction: cyborg, for instance. We do not want cyborgs, or "the Borg," or any hive mind or mechanistic computation. Real human minds are more fluid, limber than A.I. constructs, -- at least so far. And with the dialectic now possible in the dynamic interaction of today's . . . .

But I can't conclude her passage, because she seems to believe that what characterizes science and computing theory is male. She speaks of white western male power structures that tend to rule technological discourse; is she suggesting, as so many feminist theorists have suggested, that rational thought, and the requirement to break things into pieces and then put them back together, are inherently male and thus inherently domineering?

Not human, but male. And sexist, to boot?

If yes, the proper response is dismissal, for such a gambit deprives women taking her courses (and those willing male victims, ready to be psychologically lobotomized by a figurative castration) from the tools that might allow them to think their way out of any sort of trap that social custom and political power has, in fact, set against them.

Rationality is not about sex. Or gender. It is the ability to distinguish one idea from another, and weigh them. Compare them. Privilege them, perhaps.

At a fairly early age I came to hate sexism, the very kind of thing the above-quoted philosopher hates. I saw it as both unnecessary and unjust.

And I quickly came to believe (based on observation, not ideology) that sexism arises naturally from childish attempts to sort out the world. It is a fairly obvious dogma that both men and women (or, perhaps more accurately, boys and girls) cook up almost spontaneously, probably out of fear and insecurity. They identify aspects of their own sex and then reinforce them in illegitimate ways.

I, as a youngster, noticed that my sisters were given piano lessons as a matter of course, but I was not. My interpretation was: boys don't play piano; that was unmanly.

This dogma, never once spelled out to me, was disastrous, for music later became for me an abiding and deep interest. But I had waited too late to master the musical instrument that fascinated me most, namely, the piano.

Should I blame my parents for not sending me to piano lessons at age seven, like my little sister did? Or the sports-obsessed society I grew up in, for its numerous clues about what it is to be a man?

Or myself, for too long accepting such notions?

Blame isn't the point. Harping on it isn't the point. A truly liberating education would simply assert a more humane and open course for each individual life. Idiotic limitations, like boys don't sing and girls don't play sports should be rejected simply as a matter of course.

I began to suspect, years ago, that feminism itself was too hung up on blaming people, too hung up on the past, and on human foibles, rather than offering up effective alternatives.

And this philosopher in question, with her ridiculous mélange of jargon and periphrasis, she, too, seems to think that everything is the result of male dominance. But I was prevented (to the extent I was prevented from anything) not by male dominance, but mostly by a limited view of sex roles that, as a boy, I took to with eager readiness. That I came to see it as childish, and other men and many women do not see such extra limitations as childish, is a problem. But it's not a question of men are wrong and feminists are right. It's a question of ethics and rationality and manners and norms and order and . . .

You get the idea. To call the remedy for foolish dogma on matters of sex feminism is itself foolish. An equal standard of conduct applied to individuals of both sexes should not be named after one of those sexes, and not the other. The very unequal (privileged!) naming leads its adherents, as if by an invisible hand, to espouse doctrines that are in fact sexist rather than equal.

The standard is not feminism or masculinism. The standard is individualism.

That may be a big word, but I'm not using it for comic effect.

Nineteenth century scholar and psychologist Alexander Bain wrote an excellent textbook on rhetoric, English Composition and Rhetoric, of which I own an edition published in the 1870s. His explanations of the key terms, such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, etc., are quite clear. I'm scouring the book, now, looking for his perspective on contrast.

Bain offers the standard synonym for simile, comparison. But hey: In modern usage, the word comparison no longer implies just similitude, though, does it? 1(b) below is more in accordance with the way I use the word:

1: the act or process of comparing : as a: the representing of one thing or person as similar to or like another b: an examination of two or more items to establish similarities and dissimilarities [his faults seem minor by comparison]

While in written composition one often uses similes, I note that the modern stand-up comic tends to use the opposite type of comparison, dissimilarities, if not always out-and-out Antithesis. Dennis Miller's act is filled with such figures:

• The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.
• Americans stick their nose where it doesn't belong more than Cyrano de Bergerac giving head.
• I say the word fuck more often than Jake La Motta being Rolfed.
• Einstein proved that reality itself makes less sense than Rod Steiger's dream journal.

That latter could be categorized as an hyperbole. But that's not quite the point, is it?

In Miller's case, his contrasts are as funny as his similes. That's the source of much of his humor. And Miller's rants do characterize what Bain saw as the nature of the figures of speech:

A Figure of Speech is a deviation from the plain and ordinary mode of speaking, with a view to greater effect.

Miller's greater effect is humor and wit (themselves chapters in Bain's book).

I like Bain's explanation for the figures:

Several of te more important Figures have refrence to the operations of the human Understanding, or Intellect, and may be classified accordingly. All our intelletual powers are reducible to three simple modes of working.

And he lists them and explains them as

• Discrimination, or Feeling of Difference (he lists Antithesis or Contrast)
• 
  Similarity, or the Feeling of agreement
• Retentiveness (he lists Metonymy)

So I see that Bain could no doubt explain Dennis Miller's pre-9/11 act. It's a pity that the Mill scholar is deader than Miller's career. If not much deader.

Which brings to mind the classic comparison of dissimilarity: deader than a doornail. It began life as pure simile, though, as dead as a doornail. Both are now cliches, as well as the reference an atavism.

I won't use this comparison until I dare write less dead than a doornail.

I just came across this word, which I'd never seen before: intromit. I haven't figured out why insert wouldn't do just as well. I read it in a scientific context. Scientists love Latin-based words. This one doesn't grab me. But perhaps I'll find a reason to use it. (I love some Latin-based words, such as scissile and frangible.)

BuzzWhack offers the 13 most fun buzzwords of the past year. Here I list just my faves:

1. blamestorming: A group process where participants analyze a failed project and look for scapegoats other than themselves.

2. Death by Tweakage: When a product or project fails due to unnecessary tinkering or too many last-minute revisions.

5. plutoed: To be unceremoniously dumped or relegated to a lower position without an adequate reason or explanation.

10. deja poo: The feeling that you've stepped in this bull before.

Four out of 13. Not bad. Yes, buzzwords can be fun!

Stevan Kinsella is one of the more interesting thinkers in the libertarian movement. I disagree with him often, but I usually learn something. And about our recent debates (here and on mises.org) regarding intellectual property (IP) he may indeed be right. I've not yet settled my mind on this subject. I'll have to give this issue more thought.

But there's one type of intellectual property that I have a lot to say about: names. Proper names. He made fun of my Wirkman on the Mises Blog. I thought it was a pseudonym (and they bug me), he later explained in the commentary on this blog. Name-changes also bug me, he elaborated. Hey, I'm used to it. My friends don't much like Wirkman, either. The simple fact that it has been part of my public presence (embedded in those initials TWV for nearly 20 years, for example) doesn't matter to them. They know me as Timothy.

Except, of course, that they don't.

Here's the main deal about this name, Timothy.

Say I introduce myself to a man. I call myself Timothy. And only one in ten men will use my name. Without prompting, they'll call me Tim.

With women, this is about half and half. Half of women, or perhaps a few more, when prompted with Timothy will respond with Timothy. To the rest I'm automatically given (and without asking permission) the name Tim.

So usually I give up. I'm Tim to people I meet. I even introduce myself as such, especially in business. It's just not worth a struggle with every man I meet. It is hard to go up against an in-grained bigotry.

To Finns and some others I've pushed the Finnish version: Timo. That's a lark. It's certainly preferable to me than Tim. It more accurately echoes the Greek origin of the word: honor.

But the point is, by common practice in American manners, I am not allowed my given, Christian name, the name my parents gave me. My use of it for writing became a pen name, a pseudonym, without my intention. All because people have their preferences, and Timothy bugs them.

That it doesn't bug me bugs them, too.

It is not manly enough a name, I gather. It implies weakness. And when I'm firmly shaking another man's hand, this man doesn't want to say Timothy, he wants to say something shorter, harder.

This is, you guessed, sexual politics. The positioning of people in the social environment according, as some theorists would have it, to notions of gender (by which they mean the social layers constructed around the natural division of sex).

I loathe the bulk of this aspect of social life. I loathe many of the prejudices built into our culture, whether passed on by tradition or arising out of early biases latched onto in childhood. I do so because some of these gender biases have deeply affected the course of my life.

Because of biases I picked up as a child, picked up as implied from my parents, from my church, from my teachers, from my fellow students, I accepted for too long something that had disastrous impact on me. I accepted the idea that it was sissy for a boy to study piano. And, so in my childhood I had nothing to do with music for about ten years.

This may mean nothing to people who listen to rock. Or country. After all, a late bloomer can easily make it in pop music. But my earliest inclinations, as well as all later ones, were to the fine arts, especially in music. In classical music skills need early development, for a career. By the time I took up the piano, and especially by the time I discovered Grieg, Haydn, Stravinsky, et al., there was no real hope for me to become any kind of respectable musician.

So my attitude towards others' dislike of Timothy (and hey: it is a deep aversion, I can feel it, it's as strong or stronger than Mr. Kinsella's aversion to name changes and noms de plume) is one of cynical defiance.

How so? It occured to me some time ago that I had been naive to use Timothy. I had simply thought it was my name. But it was not. According to your average American, at least American male, it was definitely not. It was my pretentious nom de plume. My real name was Tim, of course, not Timothy.

So, I later realized, if the name I was known by beyond my immediate social world had been a pen name all along, then why not choose something that would at once annoy others with its alien nature, but somehow, at the same time, conform to their sense of masculinity? So I went with that other name, Wirkman. In writing.

So I should forgive Mr. Kinsella his sleight. After all, I am at war with much of the world on a cultural level. I despise values expressed regularly in society, values that most people never even think about. I uphold other values that seem foreign to Americans, especially those of a conservative temper.

And in war, respect goes begging. This is simply the way of the world.

Still, respect is the hallmark of a peaceful society. Calling a person by the name he (or she) prefers, that's a sign of respect.

And since respect for individuals is at the heart of the libertarian idea, I do expect libertarians to be a little more sympathetic to my switch.

Still, Timothy is a lost cause. Only a few people use it. Call me Timo. Or Wirkman.

Or if you know me from the past, in the flesh, Tim will have to do. For most of you.

But you might want to give respect a chance.

Someday I've got to read Veblen. So influential. And yet his most famous concept, conspicuous consumption, strikes me as of dubious import, at least in explaining much of market activity. My desire for a flat-panel TV screen, in any case, is not an example of the concept, though it is a luxury. I'd put it in my bedroom or my office. Very few people would see it. Not very conspicuous, eh?

Which brings me to an email I just received from The New Republic:

From Art Basel Miami Beach to Bleecker Street, market forces have entered the art word with a vengeance, turning art fairs and art galleries into bonanzas of conspicuous consumption. Each week brings the coronation of a new bright young thing whose awful painting will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars if press and publicity are managed correctly--just look at John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage for some particularly egregious examples.

If we put the art in our front yards, that'd be conspicuous, yes. But putting them in our homes? How conspicuous is that?

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I'll have to try reading Veblen's horrible prose again. But most normal uses of his most famous phrase seem more like misuses.

Besides, it's government projects that are most obviously open to the charge (and it is a charge, isn't it?) of conspicuousness: public art, public transport, parks, these are conspicuous, and the temptation to fard up the public sphere is what's behind many careless public expenditures.

Obviously, I've read more James Buchanan than Thorstein Veblen.

Edmund Burke wrote a book in his youth, A Vindication of Natural Society, that later came to embarrass him. He said that this treatise on anarchism was irony. Later anarchists never quite believed him, and they printed the book and praised its insights. They regarded the mature Burke as a traitor to his youthful good ideas.

Many readers have never been quite sure whether Burke changed his mind or was, from the beginning, an ironist.

But I know what it feels like to be an unsuccessful ironist. Sometimes I write what I intend to be an ironic piece, and find that it is taken utterly earnestly. Does this make me a poor writer or the reader a poor reader? Probably it depends. In the case of Lem Bingley, I want to believe the latter, but it's almost certainly a case of the former.

Years ago I came across a scientific term, and wrote about it on Instead of a Blog, in a piece entitled The Good Word: Deconvolve?

Mr. Bingley used the word on his blog, recently, and apparently a reader excoriated him, using my blog as back-up. Later, in a column, the author writes that I had asserted that scientists arrogantly use the word deconvolve when they mean untangle or unscramble. I came across this and was puzzled. The definitional talk I remembered. But arrogance? I saw the word as jargon, and then wrote a short essay containing what I thought was a pretty obvious clue to its irony. (I devoted most of my attention to the evolution of Herbert Spencer's terminology for evolution. It turned into a flight of fancy, about the evolution of deconvolve in a Spencerian direction, not its current meaning. And then I used the very word in the course of not recommending its use.)

I guess I was wrong. As an ironist, I failed. One of these days I'll have to go to the Instead of the Blog article and add a cautionary note.

I guess my readers couldn't see my odd subtext: I love the word. I've used it since. I've even learned to use deconvolve with some precision! (One website puts it this way: In simplest terms, convolution is the smearing of a data set by a given instrument response function. Deconvolution is the procedure of undoing that smearing in an effort to see what the data would look like had the instrument perfectly rendered it.) Ah, the perils of the English language.

The context for all this is pretty clear. Scientists who use words that are technical confuse non-scientific readers. This leads to all sorts of vexation. In my goofy little essay (most of my old Good Word essays were intended to be a bit goofy), I wrote: So when Brown and Trujillo write that they could deconvolve the data, they might also have written that they could unroll, or (better yet) untangle, their data. They would have gotten their idea across to non-scientists, yes. And had they written, once, the definition of the term in their study, they surely would have taught non-scientists. They could have written, for example, that the data, unscrambled from noise introduced by our instruments -- in a word, deconvolved -- etc. and been quite clear.

But modern scientists do not write for laymen, usually. This is not the 19th century. This is the age of specialization (which is one reason I brought up Spencer; it was not an irrelevant bit of playfulness on my part; or so I thought.) Besides, when you have a precise word, run with it. In my original squib, I wrote But with deconvolve available, why use anything so common as untangle? Bingley rightly notes: for precision. I would add: for the sheer joy of it.

I deal with this in economics all the time. Economists use terms with precision (well, most of the time), and non-economists take those terms and make of them very different meanings. (When I helped edit a magazine, I was often given the technical papers to help put into more readable English. This led to many editorial squabbles, and I often unsuccessfully lobbied to include original jargon.) This divorce between the professional and the non-professional is not limited to economics, of course. I bet every scientist has dealt with it. I'm not sure every scientist is prepared to deal with it, though.

I remember watching Bart Kosko on Politically Incorrect. Kosko was pushing fuzzy thinking (fuzzy logic) at the time. He meant something very precise by it. And he had a good point, about vague sets, fuzzy sets . . . well, good ol' shades of gray. But the other participants of that episode Bill Maher's tough-talking issues program used the term in a standard pejorative way. And used it repeatedly. You could almost see Bart writhing in his chair.

Is it a coincidence that Bart's current book is about Noise? (His discussion of convolution is on page 121.)

Failing at irony is something I will have to live with. The only thing that bothers me about Mr. Bingley's criticism of my squib (other than discovering that I'm a source for stupidity, no small thing) is one word he chose: arrogantly. It's not arrogance I see in the desire for jargon. It's not a sense of superiority (though that may come into it) but a need for separateness. (To use a very clunky word.) An economist must separate his word-sets from others, and so uses distinct meanings for common words, and those words become jargon. A linguist does the same thing, as do engineers and what-have-you.

And there is the pleasure in a good, juicy word. Deconvolve is one. It has a distinct ring to it. It conjures up associations that (not-quite-right) alternatives such as untangle and unscramble — or, perhaps better yet, some readily understandable coinages, such as de-noise or noise-compensate — do not. And it does have a distinct meaning.

It strikes me, now, that irony itself is akin to convolution, as is delphic speech. It is supposed to be a beautiful noise, skewing the truth but allowing the reader to correct for it.

But there is an esoteric/exoteric level to the very process, and as contexts change (such as the rise of anarchism for Burke, the absence of my original Good Word page history, for me, perhaps) the ability to correct for irony goes.

That is, irony cannot always be accurately deconvolved. (Or should I just say decoded?)

Too bad.

This is especially the case if the irony was not indicated clearly enough in the beginning.

A highbrow needs never to raise an eyebrow to cast an arch glance at the culture around him. His eyebrow is always at arch.

Alas, it is a pity to learn that the term highbrow comes from phrenology, not some folksier source. It has nothing to do with eyebrows, or hairy eyeball. It's about the size of the forehead, I think. I'm not going to study phrenology to find out.

But I can hazard this observation: As I age, my forehead is becoming more and more obvious.

By the way, I can raise my right eyebrow independently (for the most part) of the left; but not vice versa. How this affects my ability to give hairy eyeball should be judged empirically.

As I type these words, I'm on hold to receive help with my Internet connection, which has been bad for several months now.

But that's not quite right. I'm not on hold. I'm on hode.

Wherever tech support for my Internet is, physically, the person who recorded the messages for automatic telephony with this service was from the South. Or the East. Somewhere they do not pronounce the L consonant in monosyllabic constructions, followed by another consonant. Such as d: hence hode not hold.

And yet when the construction goes beyond one syllable, the L becomes clearly spoken.

I've always been amused by this strange regional dialect pronunciation.

Somehow I'm not amused that I say aunt (ONT) and creek (CRICK not CREEK).