Moving blog

No, this is not about touching your heart or making your seethe with emotion. The Slo-Man has finally decided to relocate his blog to make administration easier.

Know all men and women then; those who read, those who skim and those who ignore; that these musings will soon be available at a new address.

So while, dear reader, you wait for this blog, which most find confusing, (what is he talking about?) and / or hard to read (is he able to use less words and shorter sentences? - the correct answer is "no") to move to it's new home ponder on this:

as blogs reach full maturity, are publishing houses keeping up? Are they remodelling their businesses to keep pace with the declining trend in paper based books? Marketing blogs and other online content is not quite the same as marketing a book.

The Slo-Man had an unfinished, or more accurately, un-started, article positing that all occupations eventually face obsolescence and fade away. Maybe he will work on that and make that the first post on the blog's new home.

Till then - find something else to read or ignore.

about integrity

"Disgraced integrity czar walks away with $ 500,000".  


The headline troubled the Slo-Man at multiple levels. 


Firstly, the use of the term "czar" to imply a senior-most position. The media is tempted to use this indiscriminately, with seemingly no regard to the history behind the term. Is the position really as autocratic as the term would imply? This is another instance of connotations being changed. Over time words lose their original meanings and North American driven political correctness has been the driving force behind much change in recent years. Sadly, though not all the changes makes sense, "sex worker" being one that particularly irritates the Slo-Man with it's forced air of desperation.


Secondly, some government apparently had a well-compensated officer charged with monitoring the "integrity", presumably of the staff. What qualifications would someone need for such a position? Would hall monitor for 2 years in high school add any value? How exactly is the integrity officer supposed to execute on her brief? Send out emails and flyers and a website exhorting staff to keep their hands out of the till? How about the integrity officers political masters? Does the officer's influence extend to them too? Most people will not bother to answer that question and the Slo-Man can see the wry and cynical smile on the readers' faces.


Thirdly, for someone with that level and type of brief to be given compensation for doing a bad job, is something that really upsets the Slo-Man. Surely, an integrity officer, responsible for the collective conscience of the government, should be set to a higher standard of accountability? 


And then there is the delicious irony of the situation. "Disgraced" and "integrity czar".


Once again - the Slo-Man shakes his head as yet another instance of his impotence and influence is highlighted. 

The Obsolescence of phrases and the "t-Shirt bra"

The English language evolves continuously, words change their meanings almost from generation to generation. “Sick” used to mean unwell, ill, under the weather. For anyone over the age of 20 it still does. Somewhere, somehow, subtly sentences sustained a serious setback in their construction.

Parsing, clause analyses and the parts of speech are no longer taught as grammar and spelling have taken a backseat to the immediacy and intimacy of the internet. Parsing as a term alone remains as a term understood now by some computer programmers, a term that was replaced by software developer and software engineers. A modern generation of young students would, the Slo-Man expects, be hard-pressed to explain the difference between a gerund and a present participle and who, in a support of “free expression”, never have been enjoined to not split the infinitive.

These are examples of changed meanings or lost meanings, but the Slo-man is concerned here about terms that are no longer generally applicable or commonly usable, phrases that are obsolete because the situations or conditions they describe are no longer extant.

All this was brought to the attention of the Slo-Man by the LLBF, who was visiting after a recent trip to the shopping mall, in itself a concept less than 100 years old. On a cool late summer day in his adoptive city, reminiscent of the advent of the festival season of his far away foster city, waves of nostalgia washed over the LLBF. On such a day as this, the LLBF was wont to remark gently “Ahh, my dear, a nipple in the air, eh?”.

And that brought the Slo-Man memories of an age past and left him lamenting the lapsing of lace lingerie and yet another phrase.