People who know my reading tastes know that I absolutely adore Andrea Dworkin. Therefore I took a great interest in the Guardian’s publication of an article by Louise Armstrong declaring Andrea a true feminist icon much more so than the pop-glam roster offered up by Elaine Showalter. Armstrong argues that Dworkin’s power continues to be that she is entirely media-unfriendly and therefore her presence is (unlike, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s) unsanitized, dangerous, and polarizing. Which is precisely what a radical opponent to male supremacy ought to be. She may not be widely liked, but she will not shut up and she keeps people talking about male violence and its pervasiveness.

Great line for the day: I laughed out loud when I read

So strong a signifier has Dworkin’s name become that it is dragged in, higgledy-piggledy, whenever the speaker/author wishes to dump poo on advocacy with which he/she disagrees. I have seen her name yanked in out of left field, in the New York Times, for example, to say that an author displays an Andrea Dworkin-like attitude toward the genetic alteration of apples.

William Safire is so much better when he is in his crotchety conservative persona commenting on language than when he is in his crotchety conservative persona commenting on politics. For example, see this great invective against the use of the verbalized arch pause (er, um, ahem) to signify Here comes a little witticism, you ninny [NY Times]. People who have talked to me or read my online squibs enough should know that I myself indulge in the occasional er, um, or well. Personally, I try to restrict it to the (apparently British) usage of the pause as a way to understate or state that an answer is obvious or embarrassing. Nevertheless, I’ll be on the lookout for overuse of the Look, I made a pun! usage from here on out.

The New York Times has published an interesting article on gender differences in e-mail communications. Not surprisingly, males and females tend to show pretty much the same communication patterns in e-mails as they do normally: men tend to be more taciturn, instrumental, and transactional. Women tend to be more voluble, open, and relational. This dovetails interestingly with other findings that corporate CEOs, the quintessential alpha males, are are very terse in their e-mails whereas lower-ranking workers tend to be more formal. I suspect that this has more to do with tersity being a male behavior, and therefore valued, than tersity being valued, and therefore becoming a male behavior. In either case, though, there may be some hope yet: some researchers have also found that the disinhibiting effects of e-mail actually help some men communicate intimacies and feelings that they’d never communicate face-to-face.