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Associate Editor John Leo, who suggested and wrote this week's story, first became fascinated with the subject during his college years at the University of Toronto. He was studying modern philosophy at the time, but a chance encounter with a paperback on Freud sent him burrowing through the master's voluminous collected works. Says Leo: "Here were the philosophers playing their bloodless word games, and Freud saying all these amazing things about real life." Now he is convinced that the three greatest thinkers of all time were Aristotle, Freud and Groucho Marx...
...Chairman" is fine, but ''Chairperson" isn't, according to one of the language's most respected arbiters, the Oxford University Press, whose new 770-page paperback dictionary states crisply; "The word chairman may be used of persons of either...
Reflecting the inconsistencies and quirks in usage, the Oxford paperback views "salesman" as exclusively masculine (with "saleswoman" its feminine counterpart). In this case the dictionary also bows uncomplainingly to civil authority, defining without derision the term "salesperson," required by law in nondiscriminatory help-wanted advertising...
...discovers that "uninterested" is given as a second meaning for "disinterested" perks up when Hawkins complains that such a definition "obscures a useful distinction between disinterested (unbiased) and uninterested (not interested)." There will always be an England. Meanwhile a team of editors is getting ready to "Americanize" the new paperback, before issuing it here. It is to be hoped that the American editors will agree with Hawkins that the term "media" is a plural; even in America, it remains incorrect to say that the media is doing anything...
...over the West, Bibles are as handy as the nearest paperback bookstore or hotel room. But for harassed Christians in the Soviet Union, a Bible can cost more than two weeks' wages on the black market. Things are almost as bad, and sometimes worse, in many satellite nations. To fill the deeply felt need of millions, at the height of the cold war freelance couriers began systematic efforts to smuggle books to Christians in Eastern Europe. Today Bible smuggling is carried on by a network of at least 40 Protestant organizations pursuing the world's most extraordinary missionary...