Category: Feature

Last week a 51-year-old man was briefly in police custody in the northwest of England for passing leaflets to shoppers of the fair sex in a town square. “No offence intended,” read the culprit’s appeal. “You are simply a female that caught my eye, and I don’t have the time to talk right now.” “I am not looking for a girlfriend or relationship,” ran his argument. “I am looking for a possible private arrangement.” This was followed, in case any of his readers might mistake his intentions in some unexpected way – for instance, spitefully misconstruing them as honorable –...

Last month, those in the know were told by the good Dr. Thomas Fleming that “with valid passports and plane reservations, you now only need endure the rigors of international air travel and get to the Grand Hotel del Gianicolo.”  Quite so, but it has occurred to me that what the chosen among Pastor Fleming’s flock may need at the point of departure for Italy is a nice little epithalamium. I have written on a number of occasions in the past that a country is invariably defined by what its climate allows its people to cultivate, so that France or Italy...

If epochs have sounds epitomizing them, as the pealing of church bells and the rustling of crinolines may have been for some in the West just four or five generations ago, then the sound most characteristic of the present is the woodpecker noise of an acrylic fingernail upon the tempered glass of the smartphone. Like the jingle that haunts the man on the bus in Mark Twain’s story – remember? “A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,/A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,/A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,/Punch in the presence of the passenjare!” – this...

“Now, when our enemies hear the F-35 engines, when they’re roaring overhead, their souls will tremble and they will know the day of reckoning has arrived.” Now that I am in London, I see it all rather more clearly. In Palermo in September, such things tend to get veiled in sea mist, and the fragrance of roasting peppers wafting upward from the apartment below does little for the sharpness of the geopolitical picture. From this perspective, the morbid irony of an American president elected on a ticket of isolationism who speaks in the idiom of Kim Jong-un, or perhaps of...

Last week a reader complimented my parody of “preternaturally American” English, a patois favored not only by gum-chewing schoolgirls and their future husbands, but also by demagogues of every persuasion, notably Russian propagandists broadcasting to the West.  A key element of its sentence structure is the word “like,” at times roughly equivalent to the traditional locution “that is to say,” but most often an interjection signaling approximation, relation, or equivalence. It occurs to me that the almost universal acceptance of this word in its neologistic role has a significance that runs deeper than mere misuse of language.  It is to...