Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
Carl Hitchens - tracking the self …
2014
Back in the day, when I was a young man growing up in Washington,
DC …
I’m writing “DC” in the preferred way of the CMOS (Chicago Manuel of Style) and the MLA (Modern Language Association) pros, who’ve decided this federal capital district (District of Columbia), which contains the halls of Congress, should be initialed like the mailing addresses of our states: two capital letters without any punctuation. Even though “D.C.” is the proper way and has not been granted statehood for its 646,449 Washingtonians, the CMOS’s and MLA’s self-anointed adjudicators of all things grammatical, insist that D.C. be written incorrectly to be correct. Such is the disdain of those “in the know.”
… young African American men would good-naturedly accost an attractive woman passing by on the street saying, “Hey Baby, can I get that numba?” And more appropriately, the same request would be made when a mutual flirtation was happening with a sweet honey at a social venue. So when President Obama gave his speech yesterday
announcing that 7.1 million people had signed up under the Affordable Care Act, it made me think of growing up in D.C.
Skeptical right-wingers and left-wingers had wanted his “numbas.” Well, there you go. So now let’s flirt with some common sense, Congress. Let’s move on to feeding some children, giving women equal pay, passing emergency unemployment insurance while putting people back to work, passing immigration reform over ill-deformed boondoggling, getting rid of un-prosecuted rape in the military (that’s a short list), and finally putting Benghazi to bed.
Health by the Numba
4/2/14