Read­ers may notice that I often get a bit worked up about how par­tic­u­lar words are used. It’s not just the writer in me, annoyed by peo­ple say­ing “I could care less” instead of “I could­n’t care less,” or oth­er degra­da­tions of the lan­guage. Oh, I have that ten­den­cy all right. Strunk and White’s Ele­ments of Style had a strong influ­ence on me. But a stronger influ­ence was George Orwell’s bril­liant essay Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage, which I read when a teenag­er. Orwell was inter­est­ed in how polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies tend to debase lan­guage. But I came, over the years, to be more con­cerned with the way lan­guage is used to debase polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal thought, and to serve the inter­ests of the pow­er­ful. I tend to get most on my high horse when I feel that some stu­pid or wicked notion is being smug­gled into our sub­con­scious by a turn of phrase or an implied def­i­n­i­tion. Read more »

The cit­i­zens of Toron­to have just elect­ed a drool­ing moron as may­or. Toron­to is now a joke.

While in Caith­ness and Orkney, I had some delight­ful con­ver­sa­tions. Many were with Orca­di­ans I met briefly, but did not exchange names with. An Orkney bus dri­ver, in par­tic­u­lar, gave me a fine word pic­ture of what it’s like to be a south­ern­er relo­cat­ed in Orkney. “My chil­dren are Orca­di­ans,” he said, after some reflec­tions on the ambiva­lent sta­tus of new­com­ers in a very tra­di­tion­al place. Like many new­com­ers, he had fled the fast pace and com­plex­i­ties of the south to find a safe and qui­et place to raise kids. Sev­er­al farm­ers answered my agri­cul­tur­al ques­tions terse­ly, but intel­li­gent­ly. Read more »

I snapped a pho­to of this curi­ous car, which I found parked on a street in Kirkwall.

To iden­ti­fy it, I con­tact­ed my friend Peter Svi­lans, an expert of auto­mo­tive his­to­ry. He replied:

“That is indeed an inter­est­ing car. It goes by the charm­ing name of ‘Figaro’, and was built by a spe­cial divi­sion of Nis­san in lim­it­ed num­bers in 1991. The delib­er­ate­ly retro-styled car was ini­tial­ly sold by means of a lot­tery in Japan only, but it proved quite pop­u­lar and addi­tion­al cars were built. Rare and col­lectible. An off the beat­en track car in an out of the way place.”