Words Worth Noting - April 16, 2023

“There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there and we can sing together, and shake our heads over all the meanness in the Used-To-Be.”

The last words of Buster Scruggs as he approaches heaven with his harp and the duet fades out, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Words Worth Noting - April 15, 2023

“the decade that taste forgot”

Regarding the 1970s, and attributed to “one journalist” by David P. Deavel in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) (in a piece saying the late Fr. James V. Schall “never succumbed to the 1970s habit too many of his Jesuit confreres had of wearing the intellectual and spiritual (not to mention sartorial) clothing of that decade”.

Words Worth Noting - April 13, 2023

“The best prophet of the future is the past.”

Lord Byron (whose advice I only take cautiously and in small amounts, to be sure), apparently in a letter written January 28, 1828 though my efforts to track it down did not lead to a confirmed specific attribution.

Words Worth Noting - April 12, 2023

Claiming a special French “right to idleness”, radical eco-feminist Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said hard work was “essentially a Right-wing value”.

The Telegraph November 14, 2022 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/14/french-have-got-even-lazier-study-shows-vast-majority-happy/]; I trust she did not overstrain herself writing that admission disguised as a boast.

Words Worth Noting - April 11, 2023

“Boomers, we know, didn’t appreciate getting long in the tooth. They’re the ones who started this whole fight against Old. But as a Gen Xer, I have to assume it’s worse for us. Our entire gestalt is built around an aura of disaffected youth. There is no natural progression for that energy into middle age. I don’t see us easing into words like ‘seasoned’ or ‘mature.’ Millennials will no doubt take their own kind of offense to aging when it’s their turn, but that is not our cross to bear.”

Pamela Paul “Wait, Who Did You Say Is Middle-Aged?” opinion piece in New York Times October 16, 2022