When I lunch at home, it’s usually the same thing. My chicken salad sandwich phase ended quite a while back, and now it’s ham and cheese. Any variety comes from whether it’s on light rye, pumpernickel, or a croissant. Add the yellow mustard, three or four of my favorite pickles, and some potato chips, and we’re done.
Earlier this week, I was preparing that unchanging lunch when I noticed something for the first time. Large print on the plastic bottle of mustard proclaimed “40% MORE,” followed by “than our 14 oz.” in smaller print. What was Mr. French trying to tell me? Why state the obvious that 20 ounces is more than 14? It seemed a pointless truism, on the order of saying, “Our yellow mustard is yellow.”
Then my math nerd took over. 40 percent of 14 is 5.6, not 6.0. For the proclamation to be accurate, it should have been “42.86% more than our 14 oz.” Even so, that includes rounding to four significant digits. So now, Mr. French has somewhat offended both my inner English major and my innate math nerd in one fell swoop.
Another inaccurate use of language has been bandied about recently, and I’m not the first to protest its usage. Not that I’m not against oxymorons on principle. In fact, it would be almost impossible for me to get through the day without getting some old news, which I respond to with intense apathy from a television program anchored by a guest host. Good grief, it would be a minor miracle to even write this column without fear of being clearly misunderstood. See what I mean, and all of that is in random order.
But the one that bears repeating is that there is no such thing as an underage woman. By definition, a woman is an adult. By definition, being underage is not being an adult. This Venn diagram has no intersection. Many of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and that Maxwell woman whose first name I don’t care to learn how to pronounce properly were targeted because they were girls. Underage girls if that’s needed to drive the point home.
This should not be confused with pedophilia, which is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. As far as I am aware, there has been no claim of that in the Epstein case, which in no way makes those crimes less horrific. So pedophile, no. Sexual abuser, yes. Sexual predator, yes. Monster, abso [fill in the blank] lutely.
While I’m on this accuracy bit, let me apply it to the killing of Charlie Kirk earlier this week. We should all be used to the platitudes that drop out of the mouths of politicians and newscasters and that flow from the fingers of anyone with a keyboard and access to social media. The one I want to highlight is about political violence not having a place in our democracy.
In fact, the American Revolutionary War was political violence, as was the American Civil War (there’s another one). So was virtually every war and military conflict between those two, and all the ones that followed. When folks say political violence doesn’t have a place here, I think they mean individual citizens committing violence against politicians or other political figures. But let’s go back to the numbers.
There have been 45 men who have served as president, four of whom were assassinated. That’s almost 9%. Add in attempts on two former presidents running to get back in the White House, and actual violent attempts from American citizens on nine other presidents, and we’re at exactly a third of all presidents having been targeted by assassins.
Of course, this doesn’t include the killings of Robert F. Kennedy and George Wallace while campaigning for the presidency or those of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Nor does it cover acts directed at other elected officials and their family members far too numerous to name.
So is political violence a flaw or even a failure in our democracy when it rears its ugly head? Undoubtedly. Is it also a feature of that same democracy? Sadly, but apparently so.
As Edith Ann might say, “And that’s the truth.” To which I might add, and that’s pretty ugly.
