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It’s about time
Are you feeling more rested this week? Do you notice your watch running a smidgen fast? Maybe it’s because of the leap-second added by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on New Year’s Eve.
A few of us may take comfort knowing that our clocks are back in sync with the earth’s relative positive to the sun, and find it reassuring that all the cosmic gears and cogs are once again in perfect alignment. The rest of us couldn’t care less.
Does it really matter?
Well, yes; it just might.
There are two ways to look at time. First, as a convenient touchstone for organizing our lives. Without some universal standard for tracking our days and our hours, imagine the trouble we would have arranging our affairs and interactions.
But you can also make the case that time really does mean something.
Swearing makes you smarter. REALLY?
Experts have revealed [that] the use of profanity can in fact be a sign of a smart person.
This provocative assertion opened a recent article in the Daily Mail. The problem is, it’s not true.
Of course, that’s not the only problem. There’s also the problem of sloppy reporting, which comes from sloppy thinking, which comes from sloppy language. Which is what this story is really all about.
The alleged correlation between profanity and intelligence was inferred from a study concluding that people who know more curse words also know more words in general. Ipso facto, people who curse are smarter than people who don’t.
How much swearing do you suppose goes on at the Daily Mail?
Or you could ask a different question: Why should anyone take the Daily Mail seriously?
That’s a fair point. But the story also appeared in the Washington Post which, although avoiding the spurious equation between foul mouths and intelligence, still could not resist the lure of this equally misleading headline:
Why it’s a good sign if you curse. It isn’t. Which is clear from the Post article itself.
Of Doors and Windows
When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.
No, I didn’t make that up. Julie Andrews says it in The Sound of Music. Half a century later, it may sound trite, but with the drama and trauma of this American election cycle finally behind us, it sure feels appropriate.
With uncharacteristic unity, liberals and conservatives alike long ago attained consensus that the ideological pendulum was never going to swing back again. The polling data had us all convinced that Hillary Clinton would continue the policies of our Visionary-In-Chief, opening up America’s borders, tearing down real and figurative walls, and redistributing wealth while running up debt toward the 15-figure mark.
Some welcomed this as advancement down the highway to Utopia. Some lamented it as racing headlong toward the abyss. But all that’s behind us now. The door to the past is closed. Where the window to the future will lead, only time will tell.
Be that as it may, a few thousand years before Julie Andrews, King Solomon offered his own observations about open doors. With respect to wisdom, he said:
Fortunate is the one who listens for me, attentively waiting by my doors day by day, keeping watch by my doorposts and entryways. For whoever finds me finds life…
From Solomon’s perspective, when a door closes, it likely means we have to work harder to find a way in.
After all, what is a door?
Click here to read the whole essay, from this month’s issue of The Wagon Magazine.
Yonason Goldson 