Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 26, 2009 is:
dead hand • \DED-HAND\ • noun

1 : an inalienable possession of property by a church or corporation

*2 : the oppressive influence of the past

Felix’s Example Sentence:

The spread of mass media available to individuals, on the internet and on talk radio, has again made heavy the dead hand of bigotries past, from racism to religious extremism

Did you know?

Does “dead hand” make you picture a pale dismembered hand creeping slowly toward its next unsuspecting victim? If so, you’re in for a surprise — but not a scary one. “Dead hand” is a literal translation of the etymology of an older English word, “mortmain,” which comes from the Old French words “morte” (meaning “dead”) and “main” (meaning “hand”). In very unspooky terms, the words describe property that is left to a company, church, or charity in perpetuity. The “oppressive past influence” sense of both “mortmain” and “dead hand” developed from the idea of the dead exercising posthumous control over their property by dictating how it must be used after they die.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Mockingbird…Again

I posted the other day on an article in the current New Yorker on the flawed liberalism of the character Atticus Finch. Tonight, wheeling through the cable channels, I stopped on yet another airing of the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird. Beloved Babs and I watched the whole movie, again, for the innumerable iteration in each of our movie experiences.

The movie works magnificently as a dramatic and emotional experience. The cavils I had, and Malcolm Gladwell explored in his NY article, remain. Two new things, or old things revisited, occured to me. First, the emotional impact of the movie owes much to the evocation of childhood and the first realization by Jem and Scout of the darker side of their expanding world. The book and the movie may each be described as a prot0-bildungsroman for the young children. A painful experience of racism and its consequences mark Jem and Scout, following the trial, conviction and killing of Tom Robinson.

The second thing that occured to me as we watched the movie was that Mockingbird, along with Gone with the Wind, mark the polarities of film treatments of the South, and specifically the question of race. Both movies are iconic as achievements in drama, filmmaking and emotional impact. Both are flawed when compared to historical facts. GWTW romanticizes slavery and slaveholders. TKAM sentimentalizes what Malcolm Gladwell called “Jim Crow liberalism.” The fact that Margaret Mitchell’s novel was written in the same decade as the fictional events of Harper Lee’s work is satisfyingly apt.

Anachronism

Like most other Southerners growing up during the early and middle stages of the civil rights struggle, I underwent many adjustments in my attitudes from 1950 to 1960. From a segregated society to the beginnings of mixing with those of color, I became aware of the peculiarity of the customs under which I had formed my opinions of colored folk. Journalism, mostly national but in one instance local, made me aware of how the rest of the country did not resemble the South.

I came to know that the statements I heard daily on the differences between the races and the necessity of segregation were terribly flawed and at bottom, evil. A challenge to my concepts of respect for my elders, these thoughts re-framed my ideas, though I was circumspect in sharing these changes with my parents. My parents were moderate for the times, and enforced respectful treatment by their children of the colored help they, my grandparents, and other family members employed. To utter “nigger,” even out of  the hearing of colored people, was at least equal to the “F” word. My father became involved with a biracial group of businessmen, politicians and ministers who hammered out compromises and phased-in desegregation of public places and eventually the schools.