Having studied Reader’s Digest in her youth, Ammo Grrrll recalls that that IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER! (And it pays to save our culture!). She writes:
I was raised in a small rural Minnesota town, with two college-educated parents (my mother, two years of Teachers College; my Dad, a Pharmacy Degree on the G.I. Bill). Though my parents were both plenty smart, they were not big recreational readers. They were just too darned busy. Daddy worked six days a week in his drugstore from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., when he delivered prescriptions to the elderly who could not come pick them up and then came home to our inadvertently fashionably late supper. He was also open every fourth Sunday.
Mama had but three children, which was a pathetic effort for the ’50’s, but her house was immaculate, and her delicious meals were from scratch. Three a day. We never ate out. Near as I could tell, her HOBBY was vacuuming. Any free time was taken up by PTA, church committees and services, community service and neighborliness. It was a wonderful life.
We literally had no books in our home except the Bible, a condition I later learned I shared with Abraham Lincoln, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice. But my mother had seen to it that I learned to read at a young age and always bought me the great Golden Books. Just parenthetically, those included the now outré Little Black Sambo, which was one of my favorites. Even at three years old I could figure out that Little Black Sambo was CLEVER and BRAVE to outwit the tiger. No racism learned there and I’m not sorry I loved that book and nobody can make me be. (Sambo was, in any event, East Indian, not African.) Buy your grandkids all the older, non-Disney Golden Books you can find before they become unavailable. (The books, not your grandkids, although I put nothing past the Left.)
Later, when I turned into a voracious reader, I checked out three books a week from both the school library and the public library. (God bless Andrew Carnegie, PBUH.) That was the limit in grade school, Lord only knows why. Our class went to the grade school library once a week where – prepare to be shocked! – the librarian, a stern, shushy but dedicated middle-aged matron in modest attire read aloud to us. At no time did we learn a thing about her sex life while she read To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. But, of course, Dr. Seuss is taboo now as well.
In sixth grade, our wonderful young teacher himself read us chapters of Little House On The Prairie and we would beg for another chapter, which we would get if we promised to study our spelling words over the weekend. Oopsie – Laura Ingalls Wilder joins the others in the Literary Gulag for noticing that not all Indians were nice to white people or other Indians.
We had two magazines in our home – Field and Stream, which did not interest me, and Reader’s Digest, which I devoured from cover to cover. When I babysat at other people’s houses and learned that it was evidently legal to PURCHASE books, I noticed their shelves held many “condensed” versions of famous books. The people I babysat for would kindly allow me to take them home and return them the next time I babysat.
The day every month when Reader’s Digest arrived was special. I LOVED the Laughter Is The Best Medicine section and probably had my first “standup” seed planted reading those jokes and anecdotes. But my very favorite page was “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power.” I used to take the tests first, memorize my new words, and then have my Papa drill me on them, pretending I had never seen them before in my life.
Hey, my sister was the “pretty one,” so I had to be the “smart one.” Sadly, my sister was smart too, so I eventually moved on to being “the funny one.” My brother was THE ONLY BOY. AND THE BABY, so he occupied two prime slots. A comedian friend of mine, also named Susan, had a bit in her act that I will paraphrase here. “I am the third of four girls in our family. We finally got a baby brother, whose given name is Frankie, but because of his relative weight and importance in the family, we just called him The Baby Jesus.”
Anyway, circling back to the topic of Word Power, Dave Chapelle has pointed out when he was called a “TERF”: “They make up words to win arguments.” Read an article in any academic journal these days and it’s mostly psychobabble, gibberish and virtue-signaling buzzwords as if to beg, “Please don’t fire ME – I’m down with the programme!”
Well, at least two can play that game. Let’s learn four new words today. Use them in a sentence three times we were told as kids, and the new words are “yours.” So here we go:
Our first new word today is my updated version of Agoraphobia. Agora is literally “the marketplace” in Greek. The common definition is a crippling mental illness in which the sufferer is afraid to venture out to the “marketplace” or wider world, much like today’s wussie-pants college students who need safe spaces, free from unapproved opinions. When I was in college, a “safe space” was somewhere you could possibly get a little privacy, if you take my meaning. With no car, and no coed dorms, those spaces were few and far between.
But MY new definition of Agoraphobia is: “the Leftists’ fear of the MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS, in which, in a fair fight, their failed Marxism cannot possibly compete without shouting down conservative speakers, driving the speaker from the public square, and, ideally, getting the proponents of those ideas fired, bankrupted, jailed or killed.”
Well done, Mao and Stalin!! Virtually ALL Leftists suffer greatly from Agoraphobia. Gosh, I’m old enough to remember when if you didn’t like a speaker or entertainer, you just DIDN’T GO.
The second offering is Klaus-trophobia: “The fear of Klaus Schwab and the Eurotrash New Fascist Climatistas in Davos plotting the ruination of all that’s good.”
Germany seems to be trying for the hat trick in wiping out Civilization. If they can’t gas people this time around, maybe they can at least take away our gas stoves. And our food, electricity, and fuel. That should do it. RESIST!! Use it in a sentence? “When the elite weenies head in their private jets for Davos, planning to make me eat crickets, it gives me Klaus-trophobia.”
Word #3 is Bi-sexual: the implicit admission that there are two and only two sexes. Neener, neener. Hey, don’t blame ME – it’s right in your Alphabet Soup.
Our final new word: Youth-enization: Some discouraging polls suggest the two latest generations of young people swallow whole, not only the Climate Change grift and the Equity disgrace, but every deranged sexual notion that comes down the pike. If they also have learned to hate America and her founding ideals, America itself will be extinguished either by war or just gradual, peaceful euthanization, a la the iconic frog that starts out in a pot in the cold water and eventually boils. Here’s our sentence: “To prevent youth-enization, conservative parents should home-school their kids or try to find a sane private school, and they should elect sane School Boards.”
But I don’t want to leave you on that sad thought. I happen to be more optimistic than usual about the Sleeping Giant that is Common Sense Normalcy, finally putting down its collective iPhone, noticing that a lot of bad stuff has happened since they started taking selfies and posting pictures of their food on Facebook. People are waking up to fight back. The Target boycott and the spontaneous reaction to the Bud Light Derangement give me great hope.
But even more so, I read an article in our little magazine from Maricopa (the Dusty Little Village, not the wretched vote-swiping County). The cover photo features four smiling young graduates in colorful caps and gowns representing different local schools. The young men are standing behind the young women who are seated, probably a hideous transgression of some kind right there. A handsome Hispanic young man has his arm around a smiley, handsome black teen, and they each have a gentle hand on the shoulder of the seated young ladies, hopefully with Notarized permission. One girl is Hispanic and the other is white.
They are four of the 20 Outstanding Seniors from public and Charter Schools. They did not have to game the system to come up with a “diverse” group of nominated scholars. Unlike, say, Sanctuary city Martha’s Vineyard, that IS the makeup of not only our schools, but our town. The little bios the seniors wrote are impressive and inspiring. Hey, PL Boys, the young black kid named Elijah (it’s about time!) moved here four years ago from Chicago and has been accepted at Dartmouth. He intends to study pre-med along with Africana studies.
Never give up. Never give in. Do not allow the loons to massacre the vocabulary or define the terms.
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