Good Stuff

Today’s mail con­tained some good but very dif­fer­ent stuff.

Good­ness is love in action, love with its hand to the plow.
‑James Hamilton

I found lots of good­ness this morn­ing in the com­ments fol­low­ing the pic­ture post last night—thank you 🙂

Anoth­er word that’s total­ly new to me! I love it when that happens!

betise (bay-TEEZ) noun, plur­al betis­es (bay-TEEZ)
1. Stu­pid­i­ty, foolishness.
2. A fool­ish remark or action.

[From French bêtise (stu­pid­i­ty, non­sense), from bête (fool­ish, beast),
from Old French beste (beast), from Latin bes­tia. A relat­ed French term
is bête noire (lit­er­al­ly, black beast), some­thing or some­one dread­ed or
avoid­ed.]

“Pub­lic account­abil­i­ty of min­is­ters and senior civ­il ser­vants has, to put
it mild­ly, been relaxed. If some­thing goes bad­ly wrong, the min­is­ter in
whose orbit the betise has occurred rarely makes a pub­lic apol­o­gy, let
alone resigns.”
Europe: What’s Wrong With Nepo­tism, Any­way?, The Econ­o­mist (Lon­don),
Mar 20, 1999.

“We say Eng­lish; they say lan­guage arts. There are some resemblances
between the two tongues, and ‘The Expos­i­to­ry Mode of Dis­course’ warns
against over­do­ing the con­junc­tions — a betise tech­ni­cal­ly known,
appar­ent­ly, as an ‘on and on’ — and tells us that the run-on sen­tence is
still regard­ed as seri­ous error.”
James Gill, When the Jar­gon is Impen­e­tra­ble, The Times-Picayune (New
Orleans, Louisiana), May 21, 1995.