One way you know you’re on soft ground in an argument is to hear something like His supporters are all nuts, or Her policies won’t help anyone. In conversations that are trying honestly to get somewhere, to test one’s opinions against the thoughts of others, generalities like these are as dangerous as a riptide that …
Author Archives: rultimo
He and I, Him and Me
If I happen to say to someone, Tom visits him more than me, what exactly do I mean? That Tom takes the time to see him more often than I do, or that Tom visits him more often than Tom visits me? What is at issue here is the grammatical technicality called case, which it …
What Is a Proven Fact?
A government official said commandingly in a public address the other day that his decisions would be based only on proven facts. I was happy to know that and I appreciated his resolve, but the phrase proven facts caught my attention. Why does a fact need to be proven? And for that matter, what exactly …
Just So
What is the difference between being exact and being fastidious? Although it is high counsel to aim for our natural voice when we write, we often forget that writing lacks what speaking essentially represents: our presence. The distinctions and emphases we make with the tone and rhythm of our voice, with our gestures and grimaces …
Time and Tense
Strange to say, we live in time but we don’t really know what time is. Imagine trying to define it for someone. It is probably safe to assume that most of us in our ordinary, workaday consciousness sense a persisting present moment, with a past before and a future after—past, present, future in a line …