On Friday, Hugh Hewitt wrote of John Kerry:

Americans don't tolerate posers, especially posers who keep changing the pose.

Of course, if there's one thing Americans find more intolerable than a poser, it's a poseur.

It's odd that the French spelling is so common even in English, despite the fact that we have a perfectly adequate English form. So much more common that the American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition) actually defines 'poser' as meaning 'poseur', with no further explanation. Apparently there's something peculiarly French about the whole idea of being "One who affects a particular attribute, attitude, or identity to impress or influence others", which is what we find when we go to 'poseur'.

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*Most French words and phrases commonly used in English -- camembert, ratatouille, bouillabaise (I had to look up the spelling of that one), je ne sais quoi, ménage à trois -- have no vernacular equivalent. Those that do are usually shorter and more convenient and often provide usefully differentiated shades of meaning, e.g. café vs. coffeeshop or resumé vs. curriculum vitae. In the last example the French form is actually less pretentious. Of course, the non-French form is polysyllabic Latin rather than simple Anglo-Saxon. I don't suppose Angles and Saxons put much stock in paper credentials when hiring.

Francesco Petrarca (1346):

Divine favour has freed me from most human passions, but one insatiable lust remains which hitherto I have been neither able nor willing to master. I cannot get enough books. Perhaps I already have more than I need; but it is with books as it is with other things: success in acquisition spurs the desire to find still more. Books, indeed, have a special charm. Gold, silver, gems, purple raiment, a house of marble, a well-tilled field, paintings, a steed with splendid trappings: things such as these give us only a silent and superficial pleasure. Books delight us profoundly, they speak to us, they give us good counsel, they enter into an intimate companionship with us.

This is from a letter written in 1346. If anyone has the original text, presumably either Latin or Italian, I would appreciate a copy. An exact date would be almost as good. I only know this from an advertisement of The Petrarch Press, xeroxed by a friend many years ago. A friend, I should say, who has gone even further down the road from bibliophilia to biblioholism.

The list of desirable things needs only a little revision for contemporaries: most of us would rather have a Porsche or a Rolls Royce than even the finest steed, and most of us wouldn't be caught dead wearing purple clothes, which are no more expensive than other colors today if we do want them.

In a recent 'Best of PL', Power Line noted the 'visceral hatred' of many on the Left for George W. Bush. The word 'viscera' comes from the Latin word for 'guts': viscera, plural like 'guts', pronounced 'whisker-uh'. I wonder if in some cases this 'visceral' hatred is like penis envy: do some opponents hate Bush because he has viscera, and they don't?

In today's Bleat, James Lileks wrote:

Buying things makes me happy. I go to the store, I buy humus, I come home, eat the humus: I am happy. You could say it’s the eating, not the buying, that makes me happy; perhaps. But the fact that I can buy the humus instead of make My Woman spend all day slaving over . . . over . . . a hot humus maker, whatever, makes me happy. And it’s not just plain humus the store sells – they have ten varieties from two different companies, each chasing that narrow slice of discriminating humus-client who is willing to take a chance on the new humus with lime and basil. I have more humus options than a 19th century Turkish sultan.

Someone must have tipped him off, or perhaps he reread the piece after a good night's sleep, but he has now corrected the paragraph to read 'hummus' instead of 'humus' throughout.

Quite rightly, too. Although Dictionary.com gives 'humus' as one possible spelling for the tasty chickpea dip, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists only 'hummus', 'hoummos', 'houmous', and 'humous'. Since 'humus' (pronounced HYOO-mus) is the only possible spelling -- it comes straight from Latin -- for "The organic constituent of soil, formed by the decomposition of plant materials" (SOED), it seems best not to spell 'hummus' that way, whatever Dictionary.com may say. Especially not for those of us who read Lileks over breakfast.

The motto on INDC Journal's donation button is:

Support Moonbat Research

Before I contribute to such a worthy cause, I need to know one thing: This research doesn't involve vivisection, does it? My moral principles will not allow me to contribute unless it does.

Both, actually.

Irving Kristol once remarked (Commentary 54.5, November 1972): "The decline of belief in personal immortality has been the most important political fact of the last one hundred years."

Some years later, The New Republic misquoted this as referring to "The decline of belief in personal immorality" (emphasis added, of course). I can't prove it, since I have no idea of the author or date (1980s or early '90s?) and the article doesn't seem to be on the web, but I remember thinking at the time "Yeah, that too -- they would tend to go together". Pedant that I am, I even used the phrase pari passu. Was I right? Are believers in personal immortality more likely to think they need to work on improving their general moral behavior, while non-believers work on their abs or their sex lives or their bank accounts or just sit around feeling they're plenty good enough as is?