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A famous comedian made popular the statement, “You can’t fix stupid!” God has created people with varying levels of intelligence. Not many are truly stupid. But all human beings are ignorant. Stupidity refers to a basic inability to learn or retain knowledge. Ignorant means “not knowing.” It does not necessarily mean we do not have the capability of knowing, It simple means that we do not yet possess the knowledge.
My Glossary will always be a work in progress. It will be in alphabetical order, with a key word in each phrase being used to order it alphabetically.
For example, I use the phrase, “For those of you in Carthagena, Ohio…” I would put that under the “C’s” as the key word is Carthagena.
When I give the pronunciation, I will boldface the syllable which gets the accent. If there is a secondary syllable which is less accented, I will use the apostrophe (’) to indicate the lesser accent, as in the word Carthagena, pronounced Car’ thuh gene-uh. Or if you actually live in the surrounding area, you are allowed to pronounce it Car’ thuh jin-ee ????
aka: abbreviation for “also known as”. For example, the kingdom of heaven, aka, the kingdom of God.
BM: Babylonian Media
Carthagena: As in, “For those of you in Carthagena, Ohio…” It is a term I use often. It is borrowed and adapted from Rush Limbaugh, who says from time to time, “For those of you in Rio Linda (California)…”
It is a way of letting all readers/listeners “off the hook,” of feeling embarrassed or feeling stupid because they think they might be the only person who doesn’t get it, who doesn’t understand the word, the figure of speech, the rhetorical device, etc. which I am using.
And so everyone else is off the hook, because I choose to single out only the people in Carthagena, Ohio, who—it is implied—don’t get it. I choose that location because (a) it is such a small town. There are only about 26 people there, and the chances of any of them reading/hearing this material is about nil.
Furthermore, (b) I can pick on them because that is the part of Ohio where I was born. So I am, in essence, singling out my own kinfolk. And they can take a joke.
I know for certain that the folks in that rural part of western Ohio are no more stupid than people anywhere else in the country. Over the years, I have made friends in almost all 50 states so I can attest to that with confidence—people are about the same everywhere.
In summary, when I say, “for those of you in Carthagena, Ohio,” it is so that no one feels stupid or that I am being condescending to take a moment to explain a particular word, term, figure of speech, etc.
Lord knows, I have often felt the same way when hearing a speaker or teacher and I feel grateful when he or she takes a moment to explain what they mean by a term which is new to me, or even not new.
For example, for years I thought that the word “peruse” meant to skim over. Then one day, someone explained that it actually means about the opposite. It means to scrutinize, to examine carefully. Glad he took the time to “splain” it to this kid from Carthagena! ????
Darwin awards:
When someone does something so stupid it kills them, hence removing them from humanity’s gene pool and they can no longer reproduce. One example is such as allegedly happened during the current gasoline shortage (in the southeastern US, May 2021). Someone captured a video of a woman on social media as they watched her fill up plastic grocery bags (!!) with gasoline and put them in her trunk! Well, at least they were triple-layered grocery bags, we learned. ???? I hope that was a staged event and that it wasn’t really gasoline, said the guy who thought he was immune to poison ivy at age 44!
Et al. It has a period after the “al” because it is an abbreviation for “alii,” pronounced all-ee-ee. It is a Latin phrase meaning, “and the others,” or “and the rest.” For example, “There are many nations in NATO: France, Germany, Belgium et al.” Another example, “There were twelve sons of Jacob-Israel: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Benjamin, et al.”
Psychotronics: “The United States Psychotronics Association (USPA) defines psychotronics as the science of mind-body-environment relationships, an interdisciplinary science concerned with the interactions of matter, energy, and consciousness.”
It follows then that bending such science into weapons against humanity constitutes crimes of the most grievous nature.
Psyop: Short for psychological operation. (more to come…)
Red-pill(-ed): The “red pill” metaphor is a reference to a scene in the movie, The Matrix, the first of the trilogy, in which the hero, Neo, is given a choice to take a red pill or a blue pill. If he chooses the red pill, he will have veils and layers of ignorance peeled away from his consciousness, and he will see the world as it really is.
Tip: Associate “red” with “reality.” Or he could choose to take the blue pill. But if he does, he will wake up in his bed and remember nothing of the partial awakening he had just experienced. He will, in effect, go back to being unconscious and ignorant of the world as it truly exists—blinded to reality.
Tip: Associate “blue” with “blindness.” The Matrix came out in 1999, but some of us were jolted awake long before that—I myself in 1976. Of course, it is an anachronism to say we were “red pilled” in 1976; nevertheless, it serves us well to use a modern figure of speech to describe what some of us experienced decades before the metaphor came into our vernacular.
Sine qua non: Pronounced “see-nay kwah non.” It is in italics because it is a phrase from a foreign language. This is a Latin phrase which is literally translated, “That not without which.” The literal translation in itself is difficult to understand without some explanation and/or examples of it being used. Simply put, it refers to something or some idea which is absolutely essential in regard to whatever subject is being addressed. For example, “Water is the sine qua non of all human life.” In other words, water is absolutely essential to human life.
Woke: I found this excerpt from a column by William Brooks, opining in The Epoch Times (print edition), April 7, 2021, to be particularly perceptive on the use of this latest buzzword of the Leftists.
QUOTE “Woke” is one of the presently accepted terms employed to celebrate the presumed superiority of the new-Marxist “social justice warrior.”
“Wokeness” is a particularly useful ideological brand for Western Marxists because it allows them to disassociate themselves from inconvenient historical labels such as Bolsheviks, Nazis, Fascists, and Maoists, and confuse opponents by adopting more flattering appellations such as reform liberals, progressives, democratic socialists, anti-fascists, anti-racists, environmentalists, multiculturalists, and so on.
The fundamental premise of the woke is that the non-woke lack the purity of heart and intellectual acuity to understand the unjust nature of our present society or to imagine a design for a more perfect future. A century ago, a remarkably similar movement referred to itself as the “Vanguard of the Proletariat.”
Today, wokeness is highly contagious, especially among narrowly educated, impressionable intellectuals. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many thought the Marxist disease that had claimed so many innocent lives throughout the 20th century was behind us.
But a short 30 years on, it’s back in the form of a variant ideology that has infected almost all of the formative institutions in Western societies. END QUOTE. Source.
A reader of Brooks’ column responded: Wokism is they way by which White people appropriate Black grievance to become part of the victim class. Notice how Whites are more hysterical and indignant than the real supposed victims of injustice. It’s the ultimate theft from Black people.