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Talking and Weeping
Joseph's weeping in today's passage shows how he longed once again to experience fellowship with those who wronged him. One of the marks of sanctification is that we long for broken relationships to be restored, and so we must do ...Read More
Unjust Gain
Examine your work habits. This can include not only your vocation, but your duties at home and at church. In what ways do you cheat those who are in authority over you? If you are in authority, are you fair ...Read More
The King of Sodom
Matthew Henry comments on today's passage: "The people of God must, for their credit's sake, take heed of doing anything that looks wicked or mercenary, or that savors of covetousness and self-seeking." Appearances can be deceiving. We must take care ...Read More
God's Servants the Prophets
The imagery of Amos 3:3–8 indicates that Amos had a message that was so true and sure that he had to proclaim it. He saw disaster coming and had to implore Israel to repent that the Lord's wrath might be ...Read More
Simon Carries the Cross
Simon was compelled to carry Christ's cross, but we who live subsequent to His death and resurrection are called to take up His cross willingly (Luke 9:23). As followers of Jesus, we are to bear the scorn that comes our ...Read More
One Stick in God's Hand
Today the church remains a mixed community. The visible church (the church that we can see) is made up of professing believers who, as far as we know, have faith. But many within our churches do not really trust Christ. ...Read More
Denying Dualism
Have you been attributing power to Satan beyond what the Bible indicates he possesses?Read More
Faith Versus Works
John Calvin comments, "The contradiction between the law and faith lies in the matter of justification," and so the law "has a method of justifying a man which is wholly at variance with faith." It is not that we are ...Read More
Living Under Grace
We will discuss what it means to not be under law in the days ahead. Today, Dr. R.C. Sproul's commentary Romans will help us understand Paul's point: "We are no longer under the law in the sense of being ...Read More
Meet Woman Folly
Often we wonder how people can make foolish decisions that destroy their lives and reputations. The simple answer is that sin is seductive. People chase after folly because they believe its false promises. Let us take care to guard our ...Read More


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News Archive
Crews Repair Vandalized Fence In Sauk Rapids
Crews will once again repair a segment of a fence meant to protect motorists and pedestrians on Highway 10 in Sauk Rapids.
The fence was vandalized twice in less than three weeks. The fence is located along the eastbound lanes of Highway 10, which is about a half mile north of County Road 3. The fence was destroyed and repaired earlier this winter, that repair cost MnDot about five hundred dollars.
This will be the third time in four years that the fence has been torn down. Officials believe this is occurring to allow snowmobiles access to Highway 10.
However, MnDOT installs and maintains fences along high-volume, high-speed roads to protect motorists from wildlife gaining access to the highway, as well as preventing children and others from straying onto a busy segment of Highway 10.
Destruction of state property is a misdemeanor and is punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and 90 days in jail.
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Detours Will Direct Voters To Sauk Rapids Government Center On Election Day Aug. 9
St. Cloud Tech High School's Varsity Dance Team Volunteers At Local Elementary School
Minn. DNR Is Conducting A Drawdown To Lower The Water Level Of A Sartell Lake
St. Cloud Police To Recognize 33rd Annual National Night Out
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subset: commoncrawl


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The company I've always used for stencils has shut down (getstencils.com). Who would you recommend for this service?
If this is your first visit, please click the Sign Up now button to begin the process of creating your account so you can begin posting on our forums! The Sign Up process will only take up about a minute of two of your time.
Type: Posts; User: yard-dart
The company I've always used for stencils has shut down (getstencils.com). Who would you recommend for this service?
I take it that's a NO. A reply, of any kind, would have been nice.
I am the proud owner/user of the Aurora 9, and have been for many years now. I've been waiting to see if Hitec makes an announcement of a higher channel/capacity transmitter. All of the other leading...
Registration is now open on RC FlightDeck
Online registration through RC FlightDeck will open Wednesday, April 23rd. Contact me if you have problems registering.
Awesome, Evan! I was hoping you could make it.
John K.
It's that time again! You are invited to the 2014 North Louisiana Warbird Classic, hosted by Back Of The Bend Flying Club in Monroe, Louisiana. It will be held Memorial Day weekend, May 23rd and...
Be sure to put this one on your calendar! More details to come.
Put this one on your calendar guys! More details to come.
Put in on your calendar guys! More details to come.
Guys, this is must-attend event. Dino, Rex, and GMARC are top-notch hosts and do an excellent job catering to us pilots. This is one of the most pilot-oriented events you will ever attend. They have...
Guys, I don't feel safe around helis when they're 75 feet away, but that's just me. I'm not knocking them at all because I do love to watch them fly. But, while I'm watching, im also planning an...
This is truly a sad situation. Too young to die, but he went out doing what he obviously loved.
Now, I'm going to play devils's advocate. I came on here to learn more of what happened, if there...
Date corrected
Back Of The Bend Flying Club, in Monroe La, would like to invite everyone to the North La. Warbird Classic, which will be held this weekend (May 24 thru 26). We have a beautiful 600X120 foot, smooth...
I've gone into the transmitter and changed the settings to as low as they will go for the receiver. How do I change the settings in the module?
I am currently running two A123 6.6V 2500mah packs to my receiver. After a couple of flights, my receiver battery alarm starts beeping, as if the voltage is getting low. I can put a load tester to...
I'm wanting to buy a coil for a Quadra 52. If any of you have one you'd be willing to sell, I'm interested in buying it. Thanks, John (318)547-3334
The counter balances are stock. The round gear pods are aftermarket.
I'm running a Quadra 52.
My Skyshark P-40.
I had the smaller ESM Corsair with Sierra retracts. Plane flew great.
Us guys over here in Louisiana would love to come as well, but we too have an event here at home scheduled that weekend. Next year, we'll be planning our first annual Warbird event, probably the...
You obviously didn't read the last sentence of my post.
Theory is, if it will fit, it will work. But, and this is a big but, you don't wan't to have to add any extra weight to the tail to get it to balance. It's always good to add a heavier engine if nose...


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Release Date:
September 1, 2009
Rating: nr - Suitable for Children
The Joker and The Penguin have joined forces to steal Professor Flakey's new flying suit, and the only detective dogged enough to crack the case is a sleuthing pooch named Scooby Doo in this animated teaming of two legendary crime-fighting teams. The only thing more dangerous than a landlocked criminal is one that has taken to the skies, and unless Batman, Robin, and Mystery Inc. can get to the bottom of the case quick, Gotham may not be the only city facing disaster. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
- Genre: Kids and Family
- Category Detective Film, Family-Oriented Adventure
- Theme: Star Detectives
- Studio: Turner Home
- Run Time: 01 hr 22 min
- Language: Spanish , English , French
- Format: DVD
- Release Date: September 1, 2009
other Info.
- Online Item #: 11570731
- Store Item Number (DPCI): 058-10-0246
- Made in the USA or Imported


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Top Definition
The next-best alternative when someone can't spell "denial".
by TGKF March 27, 2003
Trending Now
Not a river in Egypt
When a person denies a proven fact, you just say to him: denile is not a river in Egypt!
by thom February 04, 2004
a state of temporary relief.
My dog brings a endless series of DeNiles.
by George Warren December 17, 2003


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David Never Waited
For Special Dispensations
From God
There are very good reasons David is one of the most popular figures in the Bible.
His story is long and spread out, which means you won't read very far before bumping into him, but more to the point, it's personal. We don't have to wonder what David said or what he thought or how he felt. Many of those details are laid out for us.
It also never gets boring. It's the stuff that inspires movies.
The history extends from 1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2 (42 chapters) and much of it is repeated, with additional detail, in 1 Chronicles. All total, he is the focus of about 70 chapters and since God made timeless promises to David and his descendants, he is mentioned repeatedly throughout the Old and New Testaments afterward.
Additionally, large portions of the Bible were actually written by David and his son, Solomon.
- David is credited with 75 Psalms
- Solomon is credited with 2 Psalms (although he wrote over a thousand), much of Proverbs, Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes.
These portions of the Bible are still read and embraced daily. Psalms and Proverbs are the starting points for many devotions. Saying David is influential is an understatement.
In short, David is the reference point for personal-relationship with God. If you want to know what that relationship feels/looks like, David's your guy.
He's easy to identify with. He's spiritual without being super righteous and human (meaning sinful) without being committed to evil.
If we were to ask people which Bible personality they would like to emulate, David would probably top the list. Who wouldn't want to be the little guy who takes on and defeats Goliath? [Read more…]


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The New York Times
Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whateverby Leslie Savan
View All Available Formats & Editions
In this marvelously original book, three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Leslie Savan offers fascinating insights into why we're all talking the talk—Duh; Bring it on!; Bling; Whatever!—and what this reveals about America today. Savan traces the paths that phrases like these travel from obscure slang to pop stardom, selling everything from cars (ads for VWs, Mitsubishis, and Mercurys all pitch them as "no-brainer"s) to wars (finding WMD in Iraq was to be a "slam dunk"). Real people create these catchy phrases, but once media, politics, and businesses broadcast them, they burst out of our mouths as celebrity words, newly glamorous and powerful. Witty, fun, and full of thought-provoking stories about the origins of popular expressions, Slam Dunks and No-Brainers is for everyone who loves the mysteries of language.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Editorial Reviews
The New York Times
Product Details
- 9780307264329
- Publisher:
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date:
- 10/04/2005
- Sold by:
- Random House
- Format:
- NOOK Book
- Pages:
- 320
- Sales rank:
- 871,054
- File size:
Read an Excerpt
Here's the Deal
From the tough-guy kick ass to the airless opt, from the high-strung Hel-lo?! to the laidback hey, from the withering whatever to the triumphant Yesss!, an army of brave new words is occupying our social life with coast-to-coast attitude. The catchwords, phrases, inflections, and quickie concepts that Americans seem unable to communicate without have grown into a verbal kudzu, overlaying regional differences with a national (even an international) pop accent that tells us more about how we think than we think.
What makes a word a pop word? First of all, we're not talking mere clichés. Most pop phrases are indeed clichés—that is, hackneyed or trite. But a pop phrase packs more rhetorical oomph and social punch than a conventional cliché. It's the difference, say, between It's as plain as the nose on your face and Duh, between old hat and so five minutes ago. Pop is the elite corps of clichés.
Nor is the pop vocabulary simply a collection of slang. Some pop phrases, like bling bling or fashionista, may technically be slang, or "nonstandard" and probably transient English. But most pop speech today is made up of perfectly ordinary and permanent words, like don't go there and hello. It's how our tongues twist them that changes everything.
Here's my definition: Pop language is, most obviously, verbal expression that is widely popular and is part of popular culture. Beyond that, it's language that pops out of its surround; conveys more attitude than literal meaning; pulses with a sense of an invisible chorus speaking it, too; and, when properly inflected, pulls attention, and probably consensus, its way. (And if it does most of the above, it gives you a reward: a satisfying "pop.")
There have always been popular catchphrases, of course, and in the everyday jungle of small talk, they've always been used as verbal machetes, proven tools for cutting through confusion—as well as for showing off, fitting in, dishing dirt, shutting someone up, flirting, and fighting. But today, as the media repeat and glamorize buzzphrases constantly, the ability to spout a catchy word or two has become a more highly valued skill—a social equalizer, a sign that you, too, share the up-to-date American personality.
Or, to put that in pop: These phrases are our go-to guys—whether flashing bling or singing "Ka-ching!," they get the job done.
And everybody has them working. Coming off a spate of fund-raisers in 2003, George W. Bush appeared on The Tonight Show and joked to Leno about the audience: "These folks didn't pay five grand apiece to get in here? I'm outta here!" As John Kerry took the controls of a helicopter on a campaign hop in Iowa, he shouted, "Rock 'n' roll!" And, of course, both men said (Bush of Iraqi insurgents, Kerry of Bush's attacks on his record), "Bring 'em on!" As it turns out, AARP-eligible presidential candidates are not so far removed, ideal-American-personality-wise, from babelicious Gen X actresses, like Cameron Diaz, who told Demi Moore in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, "Bring it on, bitch!"
Light, self-conscious, and theatrical, chockful of put-downs and exaggerated inflections, today's pop talk projects a personality that has mastered the simulation of conversation. It's a sort of air guitar for the lips, seeking not so much communication as a confirmation that . . . hey, we're cool.
Human communication may seem to hold greater possibilities than that, but the first obligation of pop language is not to help us plumb life's mysteries but to establish that you recognize and can characterize any pre-characterized thing or situation. A famous person not looking up to par? Someone somewhere will say, "Bad hair day." A familiar name escapes you? I'm having a senior moment. Did you something dumb? "What was I thinking?" Producing the right phrase at the right time reassures us: I'm awake, it says. I connect.
The pop response can be punched in from Seattle to Waco, from the Laundromat to the New York Stock Exchange. Each modular phrase is part of a franchise deal, whose terms are the same everywhere. When I say "No way" and you say "Way," we may be exchanging a nod of appreciation for our mutual acquaintance with Wayne and Garth or Bill and Ted (assuming we're old enough to remember those characters), but we are also reducing each other to interchangeable parts, minor guest stars in that moment's passing sitcom.
Though pop ripples with such ironic attitude, irony is not the only attitude the language conveys. The desirable mass personality is not so one-dimensional: Sometimes it's a baseball-capped, down-to-earth regular guy, trading in roadkill, goin' south, and I owe you. At other times it's socially earnest, talking up community, giving back, empowerment, and, in general, its issues. Or its voice might suddenly turn all corporate cubicle with bottom lines, agendas, and win-wins, asking people it meets, And you are? The same person who forms an "L" with his hand and places it on his forehead to call someone "Loser" can probably, when necessary, switch-hit to a morally upright It's the right thing to do. These catchphrases (and occasional gestures) may play on different teams, but they all have one thing in common: the ability to be neatly snapped into place, thereby releasing a little waft of some attitude.
And the attitude—or, more precisely, the platitude as attitude—is emboldened by the knowledge that, if properly phrased, it will resonate with millions. Whether biting or benign, what all pop phrases have in common is the roar of a phantom crowd: They always speak of other people having spoken them. It's as if the words came with built-in applause signs and laugh tracks. And keeping us on track, they provoke in us click responses, the sort of electronic-entertainment tic we twitch and jerk with more often lately. We hear too much information, your worst nightmare, or (my worst nightmare) Duh, and we immediately sense the power structure of the moment. In fact, we may subconsciously applaud such speakers because they've hypertexted our little lives right into Desperate Housewives, American Idol, or whatever piece of media currently holds life's sparkle.
Brave New Words
Hey, lady, lighten up. It just feels good to grab the mot juste; there's a rush, a ride, and a whirl. And, OK, some pop talk is on the predictable side, but what's so wrong with knowing how someone will finish a sentence? At least it makes us feel that we know what's going on in the world.
It's true, pop can be just plain fun, and it's always supremely useful. Coinages like yuppie, glitterati, and red state/blue state help organize the world, setting up reassuring stepping stones through the raging currents of affairs. These stones may amount to little more than hardened stereotypes, but without them, how could we navigate postmodern life? The very term road rage, for instance, has made us more aware of the phenomenon, probably saved a few lives: Do you want to be a red-faced, veins-popping-out-of-your-skull road-rage warrior who kills children in order to get one car ahead on the highway? Now that road rage has a handy label, we may believe that violence on the road occurs more often than it actually does, as one study has suggested. However, workplace rage, air rage (angry airline passengers), sideline rage (uncontrollable parents or coaches at children's sports games), and roid rage (steroid-induced aggression) apparently really have increased. Whether a trend is smaller or larger than the coinage that describes it, it's the words themselves that are all the rage.
Pop speech is a form of entertainment that almost anyone can perform. It connects people instantly. It can keep conversations bobbing with humor and work against our taking ourselves too seriously. It's nothing if not accessible.
But while pop language is fun, useful, and free, it is so in the same way that advertising-supported media is fun, useful, and "free": It requires subtle social and political trade-offs. And so I come not to praise pop, but to ask, What do we lose and gain in the deal?
A friend of mine who rewrites movie scripts is often told to add certain phrases to "punch them up," he says. "It's like McDonald's discovered that people have three basic tastes—sweet, salty, and fat—and therefore it never has to create foods for more subtle tastes." Yesss! (the spoonful of sugar in so many movies) takes care of positive, overcoming-the-odds feelings, while Hel-lo?! covers dealing with idiots, I don't think so can stop a fool in his tracks, and so on.
This is the main trade-off: Pop's prefab repartee can serve as thought replacement. Get over it. Not ready for prime time. It's a no-brainer. Repeated and mentally applauded over years, pop language carves tunnels that ideas expressed otherwise are too fat to fit through. Whatever point a speaker is making, it gains acceptance not on its merits, but on how familiarly it's presented and how efficiently tongue snaps into groove. It's as if each of these phrases were itself a no-brainer.
Which leads to the questions: Does a buzz-loaded repertoire displace thinking with a pleasant buzz? Are we, in fact, talking about some kind of syllabic soma?
As the late Neil Postman wrote in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Aldous Huxley painted a more probable future in Brave New World than George Orwell did in 1984, because, over the long run, pleasure is more likely than fear to produce compliant citizens. In "Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history," Postman wrote. "As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. . . . Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."
Today, there are clearly attempts by the government and corporations to conceal truth and to insist, as Newspeak did, that War Is Peace and Ignorance Is Strength—but rarely in so many words. Such harsh notes don't jibe with our vernacular. Much more effective is the let-me-entertain-you language of the mass media; it bubbles and bops, tickles and cajoles until we come to adore it. I'm not saying that pop language is a tranquilizing drug with totalitarian side effects, like Huxley's soma. In its ability to break through obfuscation, which it does every day, pop can be a powerful force for truth. But in its ability to divert thought and numb our imaginations with commercial confetti, pop can also be a force that drowns the truth in "a sea of irrelevance."
Way/No Way
The pleasure of pop derives from our intimate, id-ridden relationship with media and marketing. The continual flow between the way "real people" talk and mass media that mine their speech in order to better sell things (products, arguments, "personalities") creates commercial-flavored norms that real people then absorb. Pop language both reflects and shapes those norms, with all their unspoken values and expectations.
That's what this book is about. What it's not about is collecting gaffes or other evidence for the grammar police (there's an overworked phrase). And while I will occasionally cover word origins and first-recorded uses, this book is not really about them either.
And jargon? Get outta here. Unlike the jargon that binds relatively small groups (be they skateboarders or day traders, instant-message junkies or ink-stained wretches), true pop pops for everyone, regardless of age, race, class, region, or occupation.
Pop lingo is usually stereotyped as coming out of the mouths of media-savvy adolescents, Gen Xers, or Boomers, but pop permeates us all. Militia men, gangsta rappers, soccer moms, and all of their children traffic in Yeah, right, Not even close, and You just don't get it. Even a low hipness level is no longer a barrier. In spots for the U.S. Mint, a very downtown George Washington was out hawking the new "golden dollar" with the refrain that "It's so money." Suck has global reach. Cool is simply galactic.
By definition, jargon doesn't have such demographic reach, though some jargon may eventually move on to broader status. And so, while I will discuss "mini-pop" lingoes from which mass-pop may derive (such as hip-hop slang or the corporate patois), this book isn't a compendium of various group jargons. The focus here is on words that have already reached general circulation; that float, perhaps for years, in the mainstream; and that function as verbal viruses, spreading through the media and flying off our tongues before we even know it.
Vox-Office Hits
But a viral quality only partly describes pop language. After all, as William Burroughs said, all language is a virus. Perhaps the better metaphor is that these are celebrity words, the stars of our sentences. Amid the fractured, fuzzy notions and mumbled grunts of everyday verbal intercourse, a snappy catchphrase practically steps out of the limo and onto the red carpet, a confident grin gracing its flash-lit face.
Skillfully applied, the celebrity word can temporarily stun us—much the way seeing a famous person does—and make us more likely to buy whatever it's saying or selling.
Take George Tenet's now infamous remark that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a "slam dunk," as reported in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack. On December 21, 2002, Tenet and his top deputy at the CIA, John McLaughlin, went to the Oval Office, where McLaughlin gave a detailed intelligence briefing to Bush, Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. It's not clear whether all the charts, photos, and intercepts convinced anyone in the room that Iraqi WMD actually existed. But apparently more to the point, the presentation failed to persuade anyone that the evidence would persuade the public. "In terms of marketing," Woodward wrote, the briefing was "a flop." Bush complained that "Joe Public" wouldn't understand it, and asked, "[T]his is the best we've got?" "From the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office," Woodward continued, "Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. 'It's a slam dunk case!' " he said. Bush asked how confident he was, and the director of the CIA, a Georgetown basketball fan, repeated the arms gesture, saying "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!" Bush later told Woodward that "McLaughlin's presentation 'wouldn't have stood the test of time,' but Tenet's reassurance, 'That was very important.' "
Just three weeks later, another pop phrase helped the White House make its case for war in Iraq. Woodward describes the scene in the vice president's West Wing office on January 11, 2003. The vice president had gathered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Myers to meet with Bandar bin Sultan, chief representative of the Saudi monarchy in the U.S. and a longtime friend of the Bush family. Bandar was reluctant to use his influence to win the support of Saudi Arabia for the invasion of Iraq without assurances that the U.S. would definitely get rid of Saddam after having failed to do so in 1991.
"What is the chance of Saddam surviving this?" Bandar asked. He believed Hussein was intent on killing everyone involved at a high level with the 1991 Persian Gulf War, including himself.
Rumsfeld and Myers didn't answer.
"Saddam, this time, will be out, period?" Bandar asked skeptically. "What will happen to him?"
Cheney, who had been quiet as usual, replied, "Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast."
. . . "I am convinced now that this is something I can take to my Prince Abdullah," Bandar said, "and think I can convince him."
. . . [After Bandar left] Rumsfeld voiced some concern about the vice president's "toast" remark. "Jesus Christ, what was that all about, Dick?"
"I didn't want to leave any doubt in his mind what we're planning to do," Cheney said.
As the interchanges show, Cheney not only can wield a pop phrase, but he is fully aware of the language's power and deliberately uses it. All the other props in the scene—the West Wing office, the military brass, even a map of the attack plans marked top secret noforn (meaning no foreigners were supposed to see them)—failed to persuade the prince. But when the Vice President of the United States reached for the same swaggering phrase used by Bill Murray in Ghostbusters to signal an attack on the evil Sumerian goddess Gozer—Murray shouted, "This chick is toast!"—well, that was the kind of talk the Arabian prince could understand.
The impressive thing about international celebrity words is that not only can they create consensus for war, they're just as useful for the little guy on the homefront. By tossing off It's show time!, or Who's your daddy?, or declaring this or that dictator is toast, we can all assert power and attitude. A vocabulary studded with high-profile words allows people to feel special, individualistic, above the crowd—and, simultaneously, very much part of the crowd, drawing power from the knowledge that they're speaking the same language as millions of other clued-in individuals.
Not all celebrity words are equal, of course. Some famous phrases are Frank Sinatra, resonant and long-lasting; some are Beck, experimental fusion rockers that at one point seemed to sum up the moment; more than a few are Norma Desmond, has-beens that nevertheless have a hold on our imaginations. The popularity and potency of a word—its vox office, you might say—exist on a spectrum.
And let's not forget that the pop tongue is made up of more than individual phrases. Much of it is structural and damn near indestructible, coming in forms like Top 10 lists, Befores and Afters, quickie quizzes ending in "All of the above," hyphenated suffixes (-friendly, -driven, -based, -free, -proof, -challenged, -ready, -gate), or (a favorite of mine) hyphenated adjectives, like "veins-popping-out-of-your-skull road rage." Pop appears in clever deviations from common constructions, as in this late-nineties headline promoting the pistol-packing-chick TV series La Femme Nikita: "36-24-.45." Or in extremely concise plays on words, like the line that reportedly sold a movie script about a genetically engineered dog running amuck: "Jaws with paws." And pop arrives purely in rhythms, such as saving the punchiest word or image for the end of a sentence, unlike this one.
In spoken pop, the inflection is often crucial. Sometimes it's as obvious as a drawn-out syllable and an interrogative note (Hel-lo?!) or a flat affect (Yeah, right). But it may be more complex. A housewife to a "smart" dishwasher in a GE spot: "If you're so smart, how come you're doing the dishes?" Dishwasher (with Jack Benny timing): "I hate when she says that."
And speaking of spoken, whether pop words appear primarily in speech or primarily in writing, they tend to start spoken, like dilio (or dillio or dilly). A kind of ironic, goateed Latino for deal (and as such, on the esoteric side of the pop spectrum), dilio started as spoken, moved to Hollywood ("Jessica, you are the real dilio!" a producer of the Fox show Dark Angel told its star, Jessica Alba, in accepting a People's Choice Award), but now resides mostly in blogdom. (Dark Angel, meanwhile, was canceled.)
But even if most pop begins as speech, it eventually swings both ways—we write what we say. Duh and I don't think so, such big oral sluggers, appear in writing because they long ago reached the level of household phrases. When a word has truly arrived, a reader has only to silently supply the right inflection, something you'll frequently be called upon to do in this book.
Call me crazy, but I anticipate a few gotchas! from readers.
One is that you'll catch me discussing phrases that seem passé. And you will, because, along with everything else this book isn't about, it isn't about the latest buzzwords or those that are (to use a passé but still pop phrase) on the cutting edge. Even if I were trying to be up to the moment, I couldn't, since of course I'm writing all this long before it will be published.
But more important, I think that people love to declare a little too much that some catchphrase is hot or not. No one can really know what's the very latest except within one's own relatively small circles. When the map is larger, national, what's so last millennium and what's the next big thing become an utter blur. Trends overlap, shrink, bulge, and shrink again.
Even people who make a living tracking word usage don't agree. Yadda, yadda, yadda made it into the 1996 Random House Webster's College Dictionary because the editor then in charge of new words there, Jesse Sheidlower, was convinced of its staying power, according to The New York Times. But the editor in chief of Webster's New World College Dictionary, Michael Agnes, found yadda's usage declining and blocked it. Furthermore, wrote the Times, "when the editors of four dictionaries provided their unabridged new word lists for comparison, there was no overlap."
Not only is it impossible to always keep up-to-date, but the compulsion to do so can make you look like a fool. In 1992 The New York Times's Style section published a glossary of what was supposed to be grunge slang. The newest term for a loser, for instance, was "cob nobbler." "Swingin' on the flippity flop" meant hanging out. "Tom-Tom Club" was code for uncool outsiders. It was a hoax, the words fabricated by a young record company sales rep in Seattle. When word of the joke got out, the Times editors must have felt like real "lame-stains" (uncool people).
Not only can always riding the cutting edge produce some nasty burns, it's much less interesting than understanding the long-lasting stuff. Many of our favorite words don't go out of style so much as, their fifteen minutes of fame past, they become our mental default system—which is exactly what I find intriguing about language that's pop, whether or not it also happens to be "hot."
It's not a word's freshness date that makes it pop but its degree of persuasive power. Senior pop phrases—like fifteen minutes of fame—may well be clichés, but they still discharge more jolt than nonpop clichés. Whether a phrase is two months old or two hundred years old, whether it's zesty or mild, it counts as pop in my book as long as most of us and most media rely on its audience-drawing power to sell and persuade.
After all, formerly "hot" terms like chill, dis, and bottom line are still going strong after a generation or two. Gimme a break was no spring chicken when the sitcom Gimme a Break! first aired, in 1981. But in a pinch, it's still a phrase of choice. Regarding Abu Ghraib, a Newsweek letter to the editor read, "The media are screaming bloody murder after seeing a few prisoners in naked poses? Give me a break."
No way/Way sounds so 1989 slacker, but its call-and-response rings to this day. In an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a woman sees her guy transformed and exclaims, "No way!" The Fab Five, watching her on video, cry in unison, "Way!"
In order to reach such Mick Jaggeresque longevity, pop words may have to endure several phrase phases. If a phrase makes it big, like, for instance, Go for it, it might be followed by a period of soft ridicule for overuse. If it survives that, it wins the right to be repeated, but only with irony (for a while, many of us couldn't say Go for it any other way). If it survives that, it gets stronger, like a Raid-resistant roach—and it sheds the irony and begins to seem as indispensable as, say, Do the math or 24/7. That is, the phrase becomes a thought, or more accurately, a stand-in for a thought. Given the right circumstances, we almost cannot not say it.
The thrill is gone; been there, done that; same old, same old. But that's neither here nor there, because if a phrase has the right stuff, it doesn't merely express an idea, it owns the motha'.
Meanwhile, an entire class of pop phrases exists solely to separate the au courant from the passé. Among the still reasonably vogue phrases that help indicate whether a phrase or a fashion continues to be in vogue are the so's—so over, so five minutes ago, and so on. I can swear I saw a fashion headline years ago that read, "So Over Is So Over," but that's so not true. Half in, half out among the vogue-on-vogue phrases are in/out; That was then, this is now; Same old, same old.
"I'll write people off if they use a slang expression whose shelf life has expired," writer Merrill Markoe said in the preface of the 1997 book Buzzwords. "One little 'been there, done that' or 'I give good phone' and I tune out everything else that person says." Yet, seven years later, been there was, if not flying off the shelves, still being stocked. "A lot of people feel like, 'I've been there, done that. I've met everybody there is to meet. I'll take a break,' " an advertising consultant said about online dating when the trend began to plateau.
On I give good phone, Markoe is right: it's history. Thousands of phrases, pop or otherwise, serve their purpose and simply die. But I can't agree with others who declare that it's history is toast. Toast has more burn and conveys total destruction (which is probably why Cheney chose it to predict Saddam's fate). But history expresses a finality of its own. Advertising and journalism have found that no one pays attention if you say something is different or changed—the old thing should at least get badly bruised. In a story about changes on the PBS show NOW, The Washington Times wrote, as David Brancacci replaced Bill Moyers, "Then there's the show's handsome blue-and-green hued set: It's history." Likewise, if we are to believe a spot for the satellite TV company DirecTV, "Cable is history." Maybe our fixation on "What's Next" and "Who's Next" (as publications love to title technology and people stories) prevents us from seeing that history, along with other aging pop, repeats itself, as history does.
The second gotcha! I anticipate is that readers will assume that I assume that we talk this way all the time, when obviously we don't. Unlike the characters in the movie Clueless, where the comedy turned largely on an overdeveloped fluency in buzz- speak, most of us are not talking pop 24/7. These phrases occur with widely varying frequency, tending to surface when our own individual personality needs a charge from the group one. For many of us that is when we're trying to impress someone or during an argument: When logic is weak weaponry or is just too difficult to grasp, phrase-fighting busts out. For others, suck or whatever emerges most freely during small talk, or perhaps when speaking with someone you are afraid won't be stimulated by more pedestrian patter. "Gimme five!" dozens of (white) grandfathers say to young children, though they probably wouldn't say it to a peer. A good, I don't know, 93 to 97 percent of the time we don't talk pop—but looking at why we do when we do and how it affects communication is my focus.
Lastly, readers will see me using many of the buzzwords, inflections, structures, and writers' tricks of the trade that are this book's very target, and you might think I'm a hypocrite or just blind to my own dependency on pop language (not to mention more conventional clichés or turns of speech).
Sure, I could claim I sprinkle on the pop in order to illustrate what I'm criticizing. And I do, but that's only part of it. I'm clearly using some pop as a joke or as an elbow in the ribs. The reasons for the rest of it may not be so clear because I may not be aware of it myself—it has slipped under my radar. Some phrases, like slipped under my radar, are just so ingrained and right to the point that I figure, Why fight them?
It is difficult to speak without some pop in the voice. I can no more completely avoid it than I can avoid the phrases and rhythms that most every parent uses with a baby ("Are you my boy?" "Who's the silly willy?"), a language that is nearly universal because the impulses are.
But it is also true that I'm just as determined to entertain you as most writers are. We try to hide the premeditation of it all with the breezy tone that's encoded in the pop vocabulary. After all, if we don't immediately connect, if we don't use words that push your buttons, we fear we will bore you and not get assignments.
In fact, noticing my own strong temptation to use these phrases, in writing and speech, is what made me want to write about them in the first place. What is their pull on me, and why do I resist? (My resistance, at least, probably has something to do with where I grew up as a teenager: a spanking new subdivision in suburban St. Louis that was named—because the developers didn't bulldoze every sapling in sight—Nottingham Among the Trees.)
And while we're on the subject of me, I should lay out my prejudices: There are some pop locutions that I like and others I bristle at every time. As you might by now suspect, I like road rage but hate I don't think so. (Maybe because I believe a lot of road rage is caused by people who say I don't think so.) There are phrases I wish I could stop using, but can't, like like, you know, while others I feel ridiculous saying, like cool. Blah, blah, blah—can't think without it; I find it funny and oddly cozy. Yadda, yadda, yadda, however, won't leave my lips. I have a soft spot for, and a dependency on, pop words that describe aspects of pop culture (and that seem to come in couplets): sound bite, shelf life, shrink-wrapped, industrial-strength, freeze-dried, freeze-frame, and flash-freeze. Essential to writing this book is dumb down—it is a box outside of which I cannot think. But other words of this ilk, such as phone tag and wiggle room, are just too cute for moi. The culture is one that I, and many writers, are embarrassingly addicted to.
And so it is definitely a self-conscious challenge to write about overused locutions while using some myself. I'm torn between wanting to write in lively, accessible language and cringing at the possibility that I'm digging those thought grooves a little deeper.
There's no completely avoiding pop language, because it goes beyond the words themselves. It evolves from the way the world works—in any era, the popular language is the most powerful means of persuasion we can collectively dream up, and I will use it to try to persuade you that I shouldn't always use it to persuade you.
This dilemma should lead, throughout the book, to a look at the very nature of language: Is everything we say a semi- programmed turn of speech? Are new combinations of old idioms the only original forms of speech left to us? How does one communicate without resorting to the words and rhythms of the moment?
But first, the biggest gotcha!: Wasn't it always thus?
From the Hardcover edition.
Meet the Author
Leslie Savan wrote a column about advertising and commercial culture for The Village Voice for thirteen years. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1991, 1992, and 1997. In 1996 she was named one of "The Top Ten Media Heroes" by the Institute for Alternative Journalism. She has been a commentator for Fresh Air and has appeared on the ABC and CBS national newscasts, NPR, and The O'Reilly Factor. She has written for The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Mademoiselle, and Salon, among other publications. Her essays have been reprinted in numerous textbooks and anthologies. Her previous book, The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture, is a collection of her columns.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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This book thought me how to play basket ball its amazing. The 51 pages of lessons.


text: Hi, Sorry for a late reply. >>> christopher@... seems to think that: >I'm using Jan Borsodi's beast of a .emacs which is available here: > >http://www.dotemacs.de/dotfiles/JanBorsodi/JanBorsodi.emacs.html > >I has its own regexs for parsing all kinds of stuff, and I was wondering >if it could be simplified by using semantic. I'm think of slowly >reworking Jan's configuration to use semantic instead. I suspect that it >would reduce a lot of his parsing code, but I'm not sure what type of >information is available. For instance Jan's code can insert #includes by Semantic provides tag lists, and can provide tags for what is under point. A tag has a name, data type, list of class members (for classes) or argument lists (functions.) Looking at the above provided link, this is similar to what many functions in that .emacs file do. >scanning the top of the c++ file. He does this with a pretty brute force >mechanism. The JDE has a similar function that uses semantic to do some of the work. I think the code is basically: 1) find all the includes 2) transform them (sort, insert, expand, etc) 3) delete the found tags 4) insert new code from the tags >I was also wondering if semantic could be used for font-lock highlighting. I could, but there is no infrastructure for it. >Jan's configuration is really dialed in for qmake, and I would like to >extend it work with cmake which is my preferred project manager... [ ... ] semantic can parse Makefiles. I don't know how that relates to q or c make. Once something is parsed, it is easy to delete, move, and transform the tags in the buffer. Eric -- Eric Ludlam: zappo@..., eric@... Home: http://www.ludlam.net Siege: http://www.siege-engine.com Emacs: http://cedet.sourceforge.net GNU: http://www.gnu.org


text:
Choosing a licensing mode
Updated: January 21, 2005
Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2
Choosing a licensing mode
Products in the Windows Server 2003 family support two licensing modes:
Per Device or Per User
Per Server
The following diagram illustrates the two modes:
If you choose the Per Device or Per User mode, each device or user that accesses a server running a product in the Windows Server 2003 family requires a separate Client Access License (CAL). With one CAL, a particular device or user can connect to any number of servers running products in the Windows Server 2003 family. This is the most commonly used licensing method for companies with more than one server running products in the Windows Server 2003 family.
In contrast, Per Server licensing means that each concurrent connection to this server requires a separate CAL. In other words, this server can support a fixed number of connections at any one time. For example, if you select the Per Server client licensing mode with five licenses, this server could have five concurrent connections at any one time (if each client requires one connection, this is five clients at any one time). The clients using the connections do not need any additional licenses.
The Per Server licensing mode is often preferred by small companies with only one server. It is also useful for Internet or remote access servers where the client computers might not be licensed as network clients for products in the Windows Server 2003 family. You can specify a maximum number of concurrent server connections and reject any additional logon requests.
If you are unsure which mode to use, choose Per Server, because you can change once from Per Server mode to Per Device or Per User mode at no cost. For more information about licensing and licensing modes, see Licensing overview and the Licensing Checklists for licensing.
If you use Terminal Server, you need to take additional steps to set up and activate Terminal Server Licensing. For more information, see Terminal Server Licensing.