Peter

For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (“forced residence,” domestic corvee, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. (Jacob Hale, Are Lesbians Women? Hypatia, 03/1/1996, p. 94.)…

The [James Bond] formula remains stirring but not shaken. Bond still astonishes headwaiters with his raffine tastes, fondles weapons and women with equal ardor and moves with eerie confidence though a world of constant, cosmic peril. … The only evil talent his enemies lack is an ability to aim straight when shooting at him. “Do you lose as gracefully as you win?” one arch-scoundrel asks Bond. “I don’t know,” Bond shrugs elegantly. “I’ve never lost.” (Frank Lidz, 007 Has Moved Smoothly Through the Last 35 Years, The Dallas Morning News, 12/30/1997, p. 12C.)…

It was, after all, public officials who gave us “safe haven” during the Persian Gulf War. Someone apparently grafted the “safe” from “safe harbor” (not all harbors are safe) onto “haven” (by definition, a safe place). The creation of this obnoxious pleonasm … illustrates the bureaucrat’s familiar combination of self-importance, pretension, and ignorance. (John E. McIntyre, Words That Survive the Test of Time, The Christian Science Monitor, 12/30/1999, p. 11.)…

Down with the infidels of multiculturalism … condoms for kiddies … [and] two mommies. … Religion arms the faithful with a comprehensive strategy for living; denying religion leaves the nullifidians in a personal void, which they try to fill with the litany of their moral confusion, composed in the cords of dissonance. (Paul Heusinger [letter writer], Down With the PC Crowd and its Multiculturalism, Sun-Sentinel [Fort Lauderdale, FL], 01/14/1994.)…

[This term derives from the evening before May Day, believed during medieval times to be the night that witches celebrate Sabbath. The German word “Walpurgisnacht” is sometimes used instead.] ❚ I love New York … but I have thoroughly lost patience with the self-congratulatory myth, trumpeted ad nauseam since the recent blackout, that New York is a changed city since 9/11. … The latest piece of “evidence” offered on behalf of the city’s transformation is the near-absence of looting in comparison to the 1977 blackout — a Walpurgis Night that produced more than 3,700 arrests, 1,600 ransacked stores and 1,000 fires. (Susan Jacoby, I Want to Wake Up in the City That Can Get Over Itself, The Washington Post, 08/24/2003, p. B5.)…