More ‘isms’ rearing their ugly heads
November 19th, 2008 at 12:49pm Georgette Braun
“Socialism” was the word conservatives smeared around Obama during the presidential campaign.
Now that he’s been elected, today’s nasty “isms” are “protectionism” and “isolationism,” describing Obama shifting trade policies.
Me thinks less alarmism and more realism would foster more patriotism. Don’t you?
Entry Filed under: obama
2 Comments Add your own
1. Pat Cunningham | November 19th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Geo: How many “isms” can you name? There are thousands of words ending in “ism” and thousands of others to which you can add the suffix “ism.” Just consider, for example, that Catholicism might experience schism over the simplisms in its catechism.
Then there’s the word in which “ism” appears in the middle: “melisma,” which is a plague upon music these days. According to Wikipedia, melisma, “commonly known as vocal runs or simply runs…is the technique of changing the note (pitch) of a single syllable of text while it is being sung.”
When it’s not done right, melisma is just an act of vocally showing off to no good effect.
In an essay a few years ago in the Atlantic Monthly, music critic Francis Davis had this to say about melisma:
“The new singers don’t necessarily all sound alike, but they tend to resemble one another in mistaking vocal calisthenics for improvisation. Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, and the hopefuls on American Idol are ruining pop singing with their overuse of melisma, a style of ornamentation that Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and other soul singers brought with them from gospel in the 1950s and 1960s. For the great soul singers, holding on to a syllable and stretching it out over several notes was a way of suggesting that something had grabbed them and wouldn’t let go; whether it was the Holy Ghost or lust depended on the song. Carey and the others are just showing off their pipes, even though they have much less to flaunt. The jazz version of this is riffing like a horn, and although this is supposedly the mark of the jazz singer, it’s a problem, because delivering lyrics requires making literal as well as musical sense.”
2. Georgette Braun | November 19th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
“Ho-O-o-o-o-o-O-o-o-o-o-O-o-o-o-O-lyismcow!”
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