Joel Mathis

This is the Facebook status of a friend. I'm so angry on her behalf that I can barely hold back the tears. I've just had a conversation with my son. He's a good kid. But he lives in this stupid, fallen, fucked-up world. We told him Never touch a girl or woman without her permission. Never call her names. Never act disrespectfully in any way to a girl or woman. There will be times when it might seem like the fun thing to do. When you see other boys acting that way. That doesn't make it right. There will be peer pressure. Resist. And talk to us, if you will. I realize that there's only so much we can do. He spends so much time in this stupid, fallen, fucked-up world already without us. So it's imperative that we use the remaining time to affirm, and reaffirm, and reaffirm again, what those values are. Look at Donald Trump, son. Do the exact opposite.

Via Andrew Sullivan , linguist Mark Lieberman gets into the Kathleen Parker "Obama is a woman" column that got me so irritated yesterday. Parker suggested that the number of "passive voice" sentence constructions during his big oil speech were proof that he lacked a certain "rhetorical testosterone." Lieberman makes an observation similar to one I made: The first thing to say is that there isn't the slightest evidence that passive-voice constructions are "feminine". Right. But if Parker does want to play that game, well, there's some unsettling evidence: Women don't use the passive voice more than men, and among male writers, number of passive-voice constructions doesn't appear to have any relationship at all to real or perceived manliness. The "passive is girly" prejudice seems to be purely due to the connotations of (other senses of) the term passive, misinterpreted by people who in any case mostly wouldn't r