Elder Advice has a nagging suspicion that the holiday season is over.
Elder Advice is deflated too. It has been unseasonably warm in Canada. Many have been scanning the skies anxiously this first week of the New Year, in hope of good news. That there will soon be snow. Mostly for Justin to take a walk in. But also because we would like some things to be frozen in 2024. Grocery prices and the Antarctic, for example.
And the New Year is already providing the customary complement of bad news/good news.
Bad news: the federal government is hiring. Everyone. Literally. This past year’s report of Canada’s Public Service Commission, says the bloated public service now employs 357,247 people - a breathtaking 40 per cent increase over 2014-15 fiscal year when Justin took over control and prophetically announced: “You can't run a government from one single person”. Clearly. And that number does not include the rheams of consultants and others providing outsourced services to his government. Really. This is good news however, for the increasing number of unemployed former U.S. university presidents. Who should all submit their resumes. Especially those like Claudine Gay, who have proved they are unable to answer a simple question1 or to resist taking credit for the work of others2. Canada prefers its civil servants to be disabled in those ways.
More bad news: the qualifications for the Order of Canada remain modest, even by Canadian standards. This past year, the Order was given to a hooker. A rug hooker if you insist on being technical. Ostensibly for advances in rug hooking. Now, unless those advances cure cancer, Elder Advice has concern about the nation’s highest civilian honour going to those demonstrating only a feel for wool strips and pulling loops. Although I suppose it may simply have been an error and the Advisory Council actually intended to confer the Order on one of the many deserving recipients in the nation’s capital who pull the rug out from under us, and the wool over our eyes. Anyway, the good news is that there is a chance Elder Advice’s own celebrated craft skills in the making of clothespin trivets and mason jar succulents will be officially recognized someday.
Even more bad news: Elder Advice received a call on January 1st from the English language. It pleaded to be rescued in 2024.
Now, my late father railed for decades against the rampant misuse and overuse of the word “like” by everyone under the age of 30. And the use of phrases like “very unique”. “It is either unique or it is not; there are no degrees of uniqueness”, he protested. To which I can only respond: “Nothing could be more certain than that”. Like many prescriptive grammarians he also bemoaned that, similar to the subjunctive mood, the pronoun "whom" seemed to be circling the linguistic drain. Other than in the haughty pronouncement: “To Whom it may Concern”. But these problems are insignificant compared to the crisis that led to the January 2nd call. Which should concern whomever.
We are unfailingly precise in the use of language when it comes to trivial matters. The words employed for garden implements, for example, are very specific even when those implements are largely suitable for the same task. Even if we did not have specific encouragement to do so, we habitually call a spade a spade. Except when it is a shovel. The increasingly vague and now deliberate abuse of important words however, is another matter entirely.
“Genocide” – if I hear that word misused one more time, I will become genocidal. Of course, I meant “homicidal.” “Genocide” is the combination of intent and action taken to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. What happened to Jews in the Holocaust was genocide. What happened to the Tutsi and moderate Hutu populations in Rwanda was genocide. What happened to the Rohingya people in Burma was genocide. What is happening to indigenous people in Canada or ordinary Palestinians in Gaza is not genocide. That is not to say what is happening is not awful. It is just not genocide.
The Ukrainians are “victims”. The estimated 50 million actual slaves living in the world today are victims. The boy left orphaned in the 2021 anti-Muslim attack in London, Ontario by Nathaniel Veltman, now convicted of first-degree murder, is a victim. A person who is not sent a meeting agenda in advance, or who is asked where they are from, is not a victim.
We need need to stop allowing the word “inclusion” to be used to describe policies and actions which deliberately exclude people. And we need to deliver the word “equity”, which means “fairness”, from the clutches of those who distort it to mean “equality of outcomes.”
Elder Advice? At a time when large, misguided swaths of the population insist that speech is “violence” and that cancellation is the appropriate punishment for those who fail to recite politically approved formulae in precisely the right order - a time when even children are constantly admonished to “use their words” as opposed to lashing out, whether at a sibling or a bully who is literally attacking them - surely the use of the right words and the avoidance of word inflation and distortion are important. Let 2024 will be the year we recapture the English language from those who intentionally abuse it.
Because Elder Advice suspects the last thing we will need this year is for words to fail us.
The Question? "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment?"
Multiple instances of plagiarism have been identified in her 1997 PhD. dissertation, including near-verbatim copying and bizarrely, copying of another author’s Acknowledgements.
Great again Tim! Your advice is exactly the same as mine, but without plagiarism.