Learn a New Word Every Day: My Parenting Motto

by: CA Berkeley WV

Mon Jan 19, 2009 at 02:31:37 AM EST

I have delighted, despite my math degree, in challenging them with word. I try to use one they don't know and tell them to look it up in Websters. The oldest likes to be challenged by multiple crosswords puzzles everyday. All have taken a foreign language when offered.
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Well, today I learned a new word.

I have been reading several farewell essays to the man who will be president for less hours than I can count on by fingers and toes. I sure am looking forward to wince-free State of the Union addresses again.

The concept of a homunculus (Latin for "little human", plural "homunculi"; the diminutive of homo, "human") is, most generally, any representation of a human being. It is often used to illustrate the functioning of a system. In the scientific sense of an unknowable prime actor, it can be viewed as an entity or agent.

"Preformationism," a theory of heredity, claimed either the egg or the sperm (exactly which was a contentious issue) contained a complete preformed individual called a homunculus. Development was therefore a matter of enlarging this into a fully formed being. In the days of preformationism, genetic disease was variously interpreted: sometimes as a manifestation of the wrath of God or the mischief of demons and devils; sometimes as evidence of either an excess of or a deficit of the father's "seed"; sometimes as the result of wicked thoughts on the part of the mother during pregnancy.

Happy thoughts make good presidents; life was so simple in the previous centuries. Do you think any beautiful minds have been changed by the results we can see now of the last 8 years? This has worked out so well for the Bush family, two presidents in one family, like the Adams family.

The Economist in their farewell tribute to the 43rd president, did use this brand new word [for me] in a sentences with Gonzales, but doesn't this perfectly fit a whole list of departing characters? Take that, William Safire!

The fruit of all this can be seen in the three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence. Mr Bush was the most partisan president in living memory. He was content to be president of half the country-a leader who fused his roles of head of state and leader of his party.
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His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.

I would say, actually about one fourth of the country, because you know how seriously we Americans take electing the leader of the free world with our dismal voter turn numbers some years. Just political capital to the frat boy.

I also read the  front page story by Meteor Blades at the Orange Satan. Good-Bye Cheney and W. Yes, indeed.

Good-bye to your rip-offs, your malice, your arrogance, your ignorance, your outlawry, your denial, your deceit, your cronyism and your stubborn refusal to cease pushing the envelope in the department of shameless villainy. Goodbye to the administration you constructed of turdiness and explained with truthiness. To your smirk and your snarl. To your conscienceless cruelty. Good-bye to your corruption, your vanity, your world without grays. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, you insufferable despots, and good riddance.
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Less than two days from now, a new guy will take the office you have used for plunder and connivery. It's going to be a joyous day, an historic day, as the first African American recites the oath of the Presidency, the oath you repeatedly betrayed.

It has been a long time coming. The Villagers propped him up and we were mistreated to a second term. Stevewvu, this is for you. Digby indulges in a little what if.

(Whenever I look at footage from that day I just have to laugh that Bush and his cronies are actually making the case that the man under whose watch that happened is supposed to get some credit for not letting it happen again. It's patented Bushian hubris.)
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If they hadn't written that absurd hagiography of Bush the-great-wartime-leader, he probably wouldn't have gotten a second term. And once that Bush bubble finally burst, it burst hard, and the slide has been steep and ugly.

He probably would have been better off historically if he'd gone down in 2004. God knows the country and the world would have been.

The term "~-Gate" has lost it's meaning since Watergate, the edge of the Constitutional precipice. We let Iran-Contra go because Reagan admitted he could not remember what he authorized. The noise machine has begun to talk about overlooking the last eight years because "he kept us safe" and we cannot undo all that, whatever all that really is. Like Kagro X, I don't know where this leaves us.

Isn't it curious, though, that we're always having to invoke that phrase, and do it "for the good of the country" after Republican administrations leave office?

I have been hearing this my entire marriage. Eat a shoe, George.

So what word have you learned you lately, as The End of An Error approaches? Remember the children. Keep it clean!