Word of the Week: to “downromney”

downromney:  a (very) transitive verb.

[etymology:  From down- (as in downsize; also as in Down’s syndrome,  which anyone who would seriously vote for this guy  must be suffering from) + Mitt Romney, an early 21^st-century corporate raider] :  to seize a healthy company using wads of borrowed cash, somehow making the victim rather than the raider responsible for the resultant debt; debt-service subsequently bankrupts the company and the workers are fired.
Note:  This maneuver differs from the traditional ‘downsizing’ in that, in that case, management at least made a show of shedding crocodile tears over the workers thrown out the door;  whereas when workers get downromneyed, they are given to understand that they are themselves to blame for their miserable fate, and that the crushing of the working class is part of a historical process of “Creative Destruction”, in which they should feel honored to be permitted to play a part.)

THIS IS NOT A CAPTION (since the cartoon itself already has two)

Bonus fun !
Test your Downromney IQ !
Take this simple quiz:  http://www.romneygekko.com/quiz/

[Update 4 January 2012]

It turns out that the threat may extend beyond private-sector potential takeover targets.

A friend who teaches at a public high school (a Christian, a social conservative, and the holder of a doctorate), writes that he is himself worried about the possibility of being downromneyed -- his union protection being a frail reed  in the face of relentless reactionary attack :

What I'm concerned about is that within two years education has evolved to find a way to get rid of well paid people like me and my wife and replaced us with mere functionaries that take attendance while kids supposedly teach themselves online. That's seriously where it may be headed--and fast. And I think that the politicians who are calling for educational reform are already poised and invested in the companies that will pop up over night to provide this online "instruction" in place of unionized teachers.

So, I will keep this job as long as I can. But I can't not be looking around frantically at the same time, because if Romney is elected president, this will happen in months, not decades.

We’ve heard murmurings of this extraordinarily ill-advised idea of replacing classroom teaching with remote-access digitized solipsism.  It essentially gives up on the idea of community, socialization, or the Social Contract.  And yes, it’s being driven by entrepreneurs and their procurement-department enablers.

[Breaking update here.]

[Update 5 January 2012]

Remarkably, such humorous-polemical neologistic proposals can succeed wildly.   Just Google “santorum”.  You will not believe what tops the list:

http://spreadingsantorum.com/

Try it yourself.

A well-researched account of this escapade may be consulted here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism

“Busy, busy, busy,” as Bokonon used to say …

[Update 9 Jan 2012]

Romney: ‘I like being able to fire people who provide services to me’

In fact, it gives him a warm feeling all over.

Which side are you on ??

[Update 12 Jan 2012]  We're having fun here... but to be fair :
Here's a well-written and more balanced account of all this:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-private-equity-20120112,0,2710198,print.story

Just so you know -- We do enjoy our satire on this site, but no we do not literally believe that Mittney “Mitt” Romney is actually, zoologically, taxonomically  a blood-sucking maggot.  That was simply a figure of  speech -- a simile, if you like.  In point of fact,  Willard “My Name is Not Willard” Romney  is not  strictly speaking  a maggot of any description, neither blood-sucking nor pus-licking.  For one thing a maggot (as all of you know who paid attention in biology class) is a larva of the order Diptera;  whereas Mitt “Willard” Romney is, quite definitely, a carnivore.   (Order Carnivora.)

[Update 15 Jan 2012]
Some quite interesting and damning testimony from an unexpected source -- a fellow Wall Street moneyman:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-romney-ran-bain-capital-his-word-was-not-his-bond/2012/01/12/gIQACvQxwP_print.html

[Update 26 Feb 2012] Labor-baiter:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-labor-20120226,0,7725322.story

Help Dr Justice Get His Yacht ! !

An Emotional Appeal

Can you imagine life without a yacht ?  I can’t.   Just picking up signals here from such outstanding/upstanding leaders as Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, for whom the 99% are like dirt beneath the toenails.  For them, only the 1% count -- and that’s actually something of a euphemism, the real club being limited to a handful of guys who Skullandkeyed at Yale  and prepped at Choate.  And the only way anyone can be any good (on this view) is for everyone to have a yacht that is bigger than anyone else's.  (There may be a subtle paradox in this scheme;  our logicians are working on it.)

So, how is poor Dr Justice ever to get his yacht?     )* sob *(

We ran this past our Economic Logic department, and they came back with a nifty solution:

 => Simply become very very rich !

Ahh… you ask (a stickler for details);  but how is that to come about.

Obviously, not by working; that’s for chumps; here’s why:

http://www.whatmittpays.com/

So how?

=> Simple.  Just sell millions upon millions of books.

Ahhhh, you add, with a knowing look:  And how do you go about that?

Again, simple.  

The best way is to run in the Republican Presidential primary.  Your wild & wacky behavior will ensure enormous publicity and consequent sales, long after your joke campaign is over.

But what about the rest of us?

Ahhh….  Simplicity itself.

=>  Just ensure that millions of people watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

No-one who watches that video can help buying  a copy -- two, ten copies -- of that rollicking funnovel, Murphy on the Mount.

AHHHhhhhhhhhhh, you say (sly one), and how do you propose to manage that  ??

We-ll … That’s where you come in -- all of you -- my faithful fans -- standing there upstandingly in the farms and fields, gazing out to the horizon -- squall comin’ in …. better get them cows backina barn...

=>  Simply click on that link and “Like” the video !  YouTube tots those stats up, and, before you know it, you’ve got a yacht.

A clever method.  Patent pending.

A Golden Opportunity for Unemployed Youth

Out of work?  Been laid off -- outsourced  -- downromneyed ?   Fret no more !

You may soon have an opportunity to put on a uniform (though it will not actually be visible beneath the chemsuit) and invade a distant land;   to die -- well, not specifically for your own country, but for a country -- That Which Must Not Be Named.

Mouthwatering details here.

Generous survivor benefits !!

What did you learn in school?

Intergalactic Ontology Festival

As you may be aware, today is Transgalactic Ontology Day, a.k.a. Take-Your-Doppelgänger-to-Work day.

In celebration of this joyous occasion, we offer updated and refurbished versions of our own classic contributions to this area of frenzied public interest  (currently, we are given to understand, being memorized and chanted by legions of Tibetan monks):

Ontology tout court

Ontology of Biology

Ontology of Physics

Ontology of Logic and Set Theory

So, dance and frolic on this joyful day.  But remember -- Lucubration and driving don’t mix !!

Driving Mlle. Daisy

An interesting witness  to the transAtlantic cultural divide:  reaction to the megahit film “Les Intouchables”:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-france-untouchables-20120102,0,6120197.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/movies/intouchables-is-a-magnet-for-french-moviegoers.html

 

That you (if American) have personally never heard of this film, is further evidence of the divide.

(Et pour nos lecteurs francophones:  le titre de cette note  fait allusion au film américain “Driving Miss Daisy”, comparable du point de vue sociologique.)

French accounts:

http://www.francesoir.fr/actu/intouchables-triomphe-2011-ecrase-harry-potter-tintin-et-twilight-168993.html

http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/221221-intouchables-un-film-raciste-pour-variety-pas-vu-d-afrique.html

http://recherche.lefigaro.fr/recherche/access/lefigaro_fr.php?archive=BszTm8dCk78atGCYonbyznOugp2IfNCuDOnmy7XgRwQKHtiGvIT7I5ngw8Lauz42u2IGtjAq08M%3D

The Personal Equation

I wrote to this site’s official Art Director and Latinist (he wears both hats), commending his idea of having prepended a personal commentary to Detective Murphy’s vocal performance of a passage from  Murphy on the Mount.  in the following video

©2012, Lingua Sacra Publishing

He responded:

> Having my own face intro is part of my theory that people ultimately love...people. Any human contact these days should have a response.

What follows was to be a personal private letter in response to that hypothesis, to someone  who, for security reasons, I shall refer to only as “Dr. K”.   But as he is at present out of comms, deployed deep behind enemy lines and taking some pretty heavy incoming, the only way to get him this message is to post it up on the Internet for all to see -- everyone has connectivity these days, even people in caves and trenches.  (My mother, now in her 90s,  is the sole known exception to this rule.)

So, if you’re not Keith, don’t read this, as it reveals our Secret Plans.

~ ~ ~ ~

Yes.  Just as a corporation needs a logo or (better yet) a mascot, so as to fix itself simply and indelibly in the public mind (witness the brilliant Mr Peanut), so the public presentation of an (ultimately-unknowable) person  requires a Persona.

The Persona that is slowly developing at WDJ -- I mean, not as a writer, but as a character in my own occasional soties -- seems to be that of a donnish, bemused naif, given to self-ironic grandiosity (a delicate pose to maintain, since in real life I am more like Bernard Riemann and Jack Bauer rolled into one).   You too have been cultivating a Persona: professorial, patient -- again quite a feat to pull off, since in reality you are a compound of two warriors, John Henry Newman plus James Bond, with the cocktail replaced by the wineglass.

Murphy, meanwhile, with time on his hands since hardly anybody is buying his BOOKS (hinthinthint), is developing into a sort of Forest Gump of early-20^th-century American labor history -- hanging out with One-Tooth Scully, reliving the great strikes, and watching our nation evolve and devolve, more in sorrow than in anger (though with a healthy dollop of Wrath).  Coming up:  Murphy chilling with Bob La Follette, back in their hobo days, in preparation for your upcoming novel.

The ultimate result of all this, a child could predict:

(1)  People start to follow the adventures of such characters as Dr J,  Dr K, and MXM, for their own sakes, the way you’d follow TinTin.

(2) Their interest piqued, they buy tons & tons of our books, mugs, sweatshirts…

(3)  We become very, very rich.

(4)  World Domination.

Orthoëpy of “monotony” (Word-of-the-Day)

Please turn to page  58 of Paul Halmos, Introduction to Hilbert Space (1951, 2^nd edn. 1957) -- or, if you happen not to have your copy handy, here is the relevant quote:

Theorem.  If E is a finitely-additive, projection-valued set-function on the class of all measurable subsets of a measurable space, then E is monotone and subtractive.

.

Proof.  That E is subtractive is trivial;  monotony follows from 29.3.

Now of course -- you already knew that.   But the point here is rather the status of this interesting word monotony -- in particular, how to pronounce it in this case.

Familiar to everyone is monotony, the noun of monotonous, pronounced respectively and in parallel, mon-OT-on-ee and mon-OT-on-us.  But the adjective here, though cognate, is quite different:  monotone, pronounced MON-o-tone :  meaning:  increasing (bzw. decreasing) and never decreasing (bzw. increasing).  Alles klar?

The question then is:  How do we pronounce its associated noun? 

Now, I have never actually heard the term in speech, despite having sat through many a math-class.  The adjective is more usual than the noun, and the noun, when it does come up, is usually monotonicity  (mon-o-tone-ISS-it-ee) -- though strictly, this is the noun of monotonic (mon-o-TON-ik), not of monotone.  So how to pronounce this technical term “monotony” we have never heard in this meaning?    Every fibre of my being cries out, that we must pronounce it  MON-o-tone-ee.

The word is, thus, a homograph, with different pronunciations for its two (related) senses.

Compare and contrast  the situation with the words homology, pronounced ho-MOL-o-jee  in both the mathematical and the general sense;  versus homotopy, which has only a mathematical sense, and which is always pronounced HO-mo-top-ee.  Linguistically, this is an odd situation, since, semantically, homology and homotopy are very closely related, and one would expect their pronunciation-patterns  to march in step.

(See what you’ve been missing, by not majoring in math?  Don’t let your children make the same mistake !)

[Update, Juli 2012]  Someone just accessed this post with the searchstring

          alles klar pronunciation

Geht in Ordnung!
AH-less KLAHR.

The sense meant  is something between "Is that clear?"  and "Any questions?"
Intended  as gently  ironic...

The Sorrow and the Pity

Miserere nobis, domine.