Note: as these two little words have become a perennate issue, I decided to modify the title to reflect the continuing agony.
I used to write a literally challenging column in an organ of the alternative press and kind of miss the opportunity to make sometimes intelligent comments on more and less important local and global events. There is so much verbiage out there however that I am reluctant to rejoin the noise. There are a few, three to be exact, things about some words which I cannot leave without speaking. Language is an obviously dangerous thing. Civil War are two difficult words. One has been going on for years but only a few days ago did allegedly intelligent people notice. Today an oxymoronic intelligence expert testifying in Washington DC about said event opined that the US was not winning "it". I am now reading a discussion by members of the "highest" court in the land that maintaining integration is okay as long as you don't use race as a criterion. As I once wrote as a warning on a final exam for my dumbfounded students: "grammar and spelling counts." At least we all have something in common with our President.