Believe it or Don't

Call me old fashioned, but I still get most of my news from the newspaper. The Cheboygan Daily Tribune is just a two bit small town newspaper, and I have been reading it for so long that I remember when it actually used to cost two bits, although it now sells for a dollar. All this paper needs to make it actually worth a dollar is more news, less sports, and better comics, but that's a whole nother story. They do get some stuff from the AP, and they run a few syndicated columnists but, other than that, it's strictly local yokel. There was a column in there today by Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner. He opens with, "There's one fundamental difference between the new White House and the old when it comes to immigration: Barack Obama ordered his administration not to enforce a number of immigration laws. Donald Trump has ordered his administration to enforce them." He doesn't talk about the travel ban on the seven countries, the column may have been written before that was announced, but he talks about some other stuff that may be of interest. It must be on the internet someplace, everything else is. The title in our paper is, "Trump's radical approach to immigration: Enforce the law", but that headline might have been written by our local guys, so you may find it under a different title.

I didn't know how long they have been using the word "vet" as a verb that means to critically examine somebody or something, it seems like only a year or two, but I wasn't sure, so I looked it up. My dictionary says that the word has been used that way since 1891, but I never noticed it before. It's like that Moslem-Muslim thing. Every book I ever saw it in before 1967 spelled it "Moslem" but, when I got home from the army, they were spelling it "Muslim". Some time after that, I read George Orwell's "1984", where it explained how They like to change the language just to confuse people. The spooky thing about it was that, in the book, nobody ever remembered how something used to be before it was changed, they sincerely believed it had always been that way. Well, that's how it was with that Moslem-Muslim thing, everybody I talked to about it insisted that it had always been spelled "Muslim", but I knew better. Years later, I came across an old dictionary that was printed back in the 1930s, and it said that both spellings are correct. My hypothetical wife had that dictionary since high school and, to her knowledge, nobody had ever tampered with it. Some more years later, I found the answer to this mystery in an introduction to the Koran written by some professor who was supposed to know what he was talking about. He said that, before you can translate a heathen language that doesn't have a proper alphabet, you have to transliterate it, which means spell the words the way you think they would have been spelled if the language had a proper alphabet. Scholars of antiquity frequently disagree about this, and different spellings go in and out of fashion from time to time, so don't be surprised if you see a foreign word spelled differently than you're used to.

There were an number of other words that were changed while I was in the army and out of the country: Centigrade became Celsius, maniac became manic, rubbers became condoms ( not to be confused with condominiums, which was a word that seems to have been made up out of thin air). Additionally, a whole bunch of Third World countries changed their names after achieving independence from the colonial powers, and a few have changed them more than once since then. Since I am not nearly as paranoid as I used to be, I assume that there is a logical explanation for each of these changes, but I don't know what any of them are. Then there was Peking, China which was changed to Beijing, or something like that. I asked some internet smart aleck one day, "If Beijing is the capitol of China, then where do Peking ducks come from? He gave me some kind of answer, something to do with the duck merchants of Beijing speaking a different dialect, but I'm not sure if I believe it or not. After all, it was on the internet.