Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

To review, in the case on Kansas' ratification of the Child Labor Law constitutional amendment, the Justices appear to have taken three distinct votes. All nine justices voted in each of the first two cases. In the third, on the issue of whether the Lt Gov. of a state constitutes a legislator in the sense contemplated in the US Constitution, the justices split evenly, presumably 4-4. And, not to keep you in suspense beyond necessity, the missing justice was ... James McReynolds. Always listed as one of the infamous "horsemen" of anti-New Deal jurisprudence whose vote was predictable. In this case his vote must definitionally have been the swing vote. Coleman v. Miller  was the last case to be decided in the term. The term has lasted too long for McReynolds' taste, and when he believed it had been decided (though the Is had not been dotted) he took off on his summer break. The other Justices decided that a third vote was necessary only after his departure, and ...

I love a good headline.  And I don't mean by this the usual examples, "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and so forth. I mean headlines where there is a central word that doubles as both verb and adjective, especially when the meaning shifts. I vaguely recall an example that said something like this: "FBI Links Bomb Plot, Sleeper Cell." The writer of the headline presumably meant that the FBI had discovered facts that connected a bomb plot to a particular "sleeper cell." If you presume that "links" is a verb, that flows nicely. But what if it is an adjective, telling us something about the bomb plot? If the headline writer reads his paper's sports section now and then, he knows that "links" is often employed as a synonym for the sport of golf, or more specifically for the lay-out of a course. Thus, perhaps the FBI has created a deep undercover sleeper cell that plans a strike against somebody's favorite "links...

James Dodson, who once taught writing at Hollins University , in Virginia, has more recently written  and Vintage has now published, a book with the grand title AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE. Those of us with an interest in US antebellum political history will naturally read that title and expect a discussion of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. But the subtitle is more informative: SAM SNEAD, BYRON NELSON, BEN HOGAN, AND THE MODERN AGE OF GOLF. Also an interesting subject. The New York Times tells me this "is a fascinating biography of three gifted, unusual men...." It also brings to my own mind some family history. My mother and her brother, when they were kids, used to make up stories to amuse each other about a fictional character called Sam Snead, a Paul Bunyan type figure. They simply adopted the name "Sam Snead" because the sound of it amused them and fit this purpose. Some time later, as I understand the tale, Mom was with my still-much-in-the-future Dad, and the...