Dogs don’t make cats (??) — French Expressions Even The French Don't Understand

French is not just the language of France, 

writes Marion Maurin,

but of 29 countries around the world. Check out these French expressions from all over Europe, Africa and the Americas that even the French would struggle to understand.

Waiting 3 to 4 Years for Surgery: The UK's State "Rationing Will Cripple Patients"

Leading surgeon warns that waiting times [in the UK] may swell to years, leaving many people in agony

summarizes Laura Donnelly about the main story on The Daily Telegraph's front page, which, with a tongue in cheek, could be called Bravely Taking Health Care Towards a Glorious Future in the Path of Venezuela.

Growing numbers of patients will be left to endure "crippling pain" as rationing spreads across the [National Health Service], one of Britain's most senior surgeons has warned.

Stephen Cannon, vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said that bans on all but the most urgent treatment would become "commonplace" without major changes to the funding of the health service.

The NHS is in the grip of the worst financial crisis of its history, with rising restrictions on cataract surgery and growing waiting times for hip and knee operations in most areas.

St Helens clinical commissioning group (CCG) in Merseyside took the unprecedented step on Monday of suspending all non-urgent treatment for four months, in an attempt to tackle overspend.

 … Mr Cannon, an orthopaedic surgeon, said such bans would become widespread without a "realistic" increase in funding.  He also called for changes in the way existing funds are spent, to divert more money away from bureaucracy towards front-line care.

Reminder: Barack Obama does not read The Daily Telegraph, in fact the most intelligent and the most outstanding and the most visionary president in modern times reads nothing but the New York Times.

"This is not a one-off, this is a growing problem across the NHS," [Stephen Cannon] said.

"We are deeply concerned, it is bad enough having to put up with crippling arthritis as waiting times get longer, but these sorts of delays can mean the hip crumbling away so the patient can't even take a step. It also means that when patients do have surgery, it is infinitely more complex."

He said: "We could end up going back to the days when patients waited three or four years for operations."

Reminder: Barack Obama does not read The Daily Telegraph, in fact the most intelligent and the most outstanding and the most visionary president in modern times reads nothing but the New York Times.

Three in four CCGs are now imposing restrictions on cataract surgery, limiting it to those in most desperate need, using criteria such as whether the patient has suffered falls as a result of their vision loss.

Mr Cannon … said too much money was being spent on bureaucracy, including on wrangles over which patients would be funded.

Reminder: Barack Obama does not read The Daily Telegraph, in fact the most intelligent and the most outstanding and the most visionary president in modern times reads nothing but the New York Times.

"We are seeing decisions being made purely on a financial basis, when these should be clinical judgments, made in the interest of patients," he said.

"These rationing processes are often adding in an extra layer of bureaucracy, which is using up more resources."

Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association's GP committee, said blanket suspensions of "non-urgent" treatment risked lives.  Diseases such as cancer were often only detected when doctors investigated ailments that had not been identified as urgent, he said.

Reminder: Barack Obama does not read The Daily Telegraph, in fact the most intelligent and the most outstanding and the most visionary president in modern times reads nothing but the New York Times.

But as we can see, the good thing about all the above is that it leads to drama and to crises, which is of course what, in this era of the drama queen, keep the said drama queens alive, and (constantly) at the front of the scene, in the first place, as call multiply for more intervention from said drama queens, and their bureaucrats.

Addendum: In another article, The Daily Telegraph reports British hospitals as saying the NHS needs to “take a reality check” and limit what it funds, in view of the fact that almost 10% of patients who go to the emergency are seen after four (!) hours (an NHS goal was for 95% of emergency patients to be seen within four hours).

"We need a systematic and planned approach to this and we need to build a national consensus about what the priorities are,” he said.

“We can no longer do everything with the money that we have. We have to look at all the options – whether it’s restricting access to some treatments, changing the [waiting] targets, reducing the workforce, letting the deficits slide or deciding that we can no longer keep an Accident & Emergency department open, or that we can’t run two hospitals 20 miles away from each other,” he said.

The senior figure said most hospital chief executives opposed NHS charges for treatment, but many felt that greater rationing of free treatment was required, to prioritise the most essential care.

The data from NHS England shows a near doubling in the numbers of elderly patients stuck in hospital, for want of care at home, or help to get them discharged, in the past five years.

Overall, 115,425 bed days were lost to delayed discharges in June – almost 80 per cent more than the same month five years ago.

Just 90.5 per cent of patients who went to Accident & Emergency departments were seen within four hours, against a target of 95 per cent – the worst June figures on record.

Ambulance response times were also a record low for the time of year, with just 69.2 per cent of the most urgent calls receiving a response within eight minutes, against a target of 75 per cent.

Charities said a funding crisis in social care meant thousands of vulnerable people were being left in hospital, when they should have been cared for in their homes.

Update: cheers to Harrison for pointing out a recurring typo (now fixed)…

It’s always “mammograms this” and “back-alley that,” but never do the pro-abortion activists talk about that thing they’re sucking out of the womb with a shop vac

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terri O’Neill doesn’t care when life begins

writes Benny Huang on Freedom Daily.

As someone who speaks, writes, and advocates incessantly on the abortion issue you’d think she would have given it more thought; but you would be wrong. Professor O’Neill, who is rabidly “pro-choice” (on abortion at least), is blithely unconcerned with when a developing fetus is actually a person deserving of protection from lethal violence.

O’Neill sat for an interview at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia with Jason Rantz, a radio host from Seattle’s KIRO. When the topic turned to abortion she became belligerent, calling out Republicans for being “viciously anti-women” because of their stance on abortion. When Rantz asked her a hypothetical question—whether she would oppose abortion if it could be proven scientifically that a fetus is a human life—she replied: “I don’t care. Of course I would support abortion.”

Yes, that’s pretty much the same attitude I have encountered over and over again among the stridently pro-abortion. They generally refuse to ponder when life begins, a question that isn’t difficult to answer and doesn’t have anything to do with religion. It’s always “mammograms this” and “back-alley that,” but never do they talk about that thing they’re sucking out of the womb with a shop vac.

When I heard Terri O’Neill’s “I don’t care” remark I was reminded of Planned Parenthood’s yearly advice to its fan club about how to discuss abortion over Thanksgiving dinner. For several years in a row the abortion giant has warned that “Debating when life begins…may get you nowhere.”

Yes, that’s true. Once the pro-abortion fanatics concede that there is no meaningful difference between a child five minutes before birth and a child five minutes after birth, the debate is basically over and they lose. They prefer to steer the conversation elsewhere, usually toward non-sequiturs and straw man arguments.

Planned Parenthood had yet more advice for your dinner table. “Instead focus on your shared values and the big picture; for instance, talk about how you believe everyone should be able to afford to go to the doctor, or how the decision about when and whether to become a parent is a personal one.”

Look! Squirrel! Of course procreative decisions are personal but the fact remains that if you’re pregnant that ship has already sailed. The kid already exists and you’re already a parent. The question is whether you and your doctor may legally conspire to snuff out the child’s life.

Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, doesn’t want to talk about when life begins either. Despite overseeing the world’s largest abortion provider she seems to have given the question very little thought. In the wake of last year’s Center for Medical Progress (CMP) undercover videos she appeared on “America with Jose Ramos” to engage in a little damage control. Ramos posed what he erroneously called a “philosophical” question: “For you, when does life start? When does a human being become a human being?”

Richards talked around in circles for about a minute without giving a straight answer so Ramos pressed a little harder. “But why would it be so controversial to say…when do you think life starts?” he asked. “Yeah. Well, I don’t know if it’s controversial,” she replied. “I don’t know that it’s really relevant to the conversation.”

Not relevant to the conversation! Yes, she really said that. The central question of the abortion issue is completely irrelevant to Cecile Richards. I don’t think it would be unfair to summarize her position as “I don’t care”—just like Terri O’Neill’s.
 
“For me, I’m the mother of three children,” Richards continued. “For me, life began when I delivered them. They’ve been probably the most important thing in my life ever since. But that’s my own personal decision.”

Her children’s lives began for her at birth. For some other woman life may begin at another time, earlier or later, but for Cecile Richards her children only became children when they ventured down the birth canal. Before that they were goo or an invasive parasite or something; anything but children. The reality of another person’s humanity is apparently a big mystery which we must all figure out for ourselves—or, more accurately, for other people who happen to be our offspring.

For people who say they want to keep religion out of the debate they sure seem to be stuck on the metaphysical. Their approach is at least “philosophical,” to borrow a word from Jorge Ramos, if not downright religious. They speak as if the genesis of life is a profound mystery, as if no one’s answer is wrong as long as it is sincerely felt and never pushed upon another woman. That’s quite simply insane. Other than the unborn, no one else’s humanity is discerned through the personal feelings of another person.

Most people, I believe, know in their heart of hearts that abortion is killing. Not all people, of course. There are a few people who don’t know much about biology or haven’t given the issue much thought. These people are easily swayed through relentless propaganda that a fetus is just two microscopic cells and remains in exactly that state until birth when it magically sprouts into a baby.

… But plenty of other people know better—particularly people who are intimately involved in the macabre procedure. These people have no illusions about the humanity of their victims but, like Terri O’Neill and Cecile Richards, they just don’t care. For example, two abortion industry figures seen in last summer’s CMP videos discussed children being born alive before an abortion could be performed. (See the third and sixth videos featuring Savita Ginde and Perrin Larton respectively.) That’s a good thing from their perspective because whole babies are very saleable.

In the third video, “Dr.” Ginde is seen parsing through baby parts in a petri dish. “Was that just the little bits of the skull?” asked the undercover videographer David Daleiden. “Mmm-hmm,” says Ginde. “I only see one leg. Here’s a foot. It’s a baby.”

It’s. A. Baby. She said the word that no Planned Parenthood shill would ever use in a public forum.

For those who insist on denying the humanity of the unborn I would ask that you defer to the experts—namely the people who kill them for a living. Don’t ask them the question on a talking heads show, of course, because they’ll lie. Ask them in the comfort of their own death chambers. When their guard is down, when they think they can trust you, they will drop all pretenses and tell it like it is.

A Planned Parenthood employee in Freehold, New Jersey spilled the beans in 2008 to a young female activist who was conducting an undercover video sting. “Is the baby born alive?” asked the young woman who was pretending to be 22 weeks pregnant. “Usually, for the most part no,” the nurse replied. “But it does happen where it’s still alive.” The young woman asked if such a procedure is really an abortion, to which the employee responded, “No, it’s an actual delivery. But it wouldn’t be able to survive on its own. So eventually the baby does die.”

This is the way people really talk inside abortion clinics. “Fetuses” are suddenly referred to as babies and “tissue” becomes feet and legs.

Abortion is a gruesome procedure that kills the most innocent among us. Most people instinctively know this and none more than the contract killers who perform abortions for a living. Yet the killing goes on and on with no end in sight.

Smart Diplomacy: Knowing who America's, and who the world's, true enemies are

Following a few remarks I read in a discussion on Facebook about how the money provided to Tehran was only Iran's to begin with, I wrote back with four points, as follows:

To provide you with an answer concerning Iran, we need to go back to the Cold War…

1) THE SOVIET UNION & RONALD REAGAN

Back in the 1980s, we heard — both from within the US and from people throughout Europe — what a terrible danger America was, what a danger this reactionary president, this clueless cowboy, represented to the world, why we should instead seek to find understanding with the Soviets, who were no worse than we in the West were, they are peaceful just like (in fact, more than) we are/were (remember the Sting song?), and why can't we all live together?

In other words: The problem was not the Soviets — don't be so silly — the problem was… that horrific peril, the United States of America (or the West in general) — more specifically, those monstrous American conservatives!

And the Gipper calling the USSR an "evil empire" — what a joke!
What a scandal that someone ought to be so backwards-thinking:
Don't The Russians Love Their Children Too?

After the wall came down — during which it turned out that all of Moscow's satellites couldn't get out of the Kremlin's sphere fast enough — Eastern Europe's new governments brought Soviet war plans to light: Poland "published a Warsaw Pact map showing detailed plans for Soviet nuclear strikes against western Europe" (no, not Fox News; the Guardian, the UK's most leftist daily).

One Soviet military map of Denmark had "only" five targets destroyed by nuclear bombs… Others featured 27 to 52 mushroom clouds.

"During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings. The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories … The Soviet map of Chatham also includes the dimensions, carrying capacity, clearance, and even the construction materials of bridges over the River Medway" [Wired]

Most ominously, perhaps, Moscow had published common city maps (not military maps) of main cities for future use — all with the new names that the streets were going to get once they were in commie hands (Karl Marx Straat, l'Avenue Lénine, etc)…

In other words, might not the West's leftists have been wise to show a bit more skepticism with regards to Soviet-signed treaties and to the Kremlin's assurances of peaceful intentions?

2) "SMART DIPLOMACY" & IRAN etc…

What is the point of this?

Well, this brings us to today…

(No, I'm not comparing Reagan to Donald Trump, in no way — no way whatsoever — except perhaps for one detail: to point out that every four years, it turns out that whoever is the Republican nominee is described as a "fascist" and compared to no less than Adolf Hitler; finally, after 70 years, when one single candidate does seem to happen to come close to fitting the bill, it turns out that the electorate is unimpressed, due to the opposition having cried "wolf" too many times.)

No, I'm not addressing Donald Trump at all here; I'm talking about the most intelligent president ever to grace the Oval Office with his presence and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's second-to-none smart diplomacy…

Of course, hasn't the above been the apologizer-in-chief's main contention for 8 years: that nobody is America's enemy, nobody is the world's enemy, except for… America itself, specifically its despicable conservative extremists?

And so we cozy up to countries like Cuba and Iran; don't the Cubans and the Iranians love their children too?

And again we hear the same type of refrain;
Oh, Obama's Iran move is no big deal; remember, it was Iran's money to begin with; it was just unfrozen; the Iranian nuclear program has been stopped.

This is The Russians Love Their Children Too narrative.

This is again the "it's all (or mostly) America's fault" scenario.

We must try to understand the Iranians, for America (and/or the West) was — illegally (!) — keeping Iran's money, suggesting that the only thing Iran's leaders wanted to do was use it like Western governments use it, building schools and hospitals, etc…

Reminder: the Iranian régime's assets were frozen for a very specific reason: because the Mullahs took over 50 diplomatic personnel (never mind whose country they belonged to) hostage in the late 1970s. During which time the ayatollahs, and the masses, chanted Death to America and Death to the West — cries that continue with as much alacrity today as they have done, continuously, for 40 to 50 years… In all that time, the ayatollahs have not hesitated to provide support for terrorists in the West, while their nation, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, has showed no more concern for diplomatic niceties with Western governments and, indeed, a total lack of respect for same…

Besides, people who don't trust the Bushes, Ted Cruz, and… Ronald Reagan and their ilk suddenly become deeply trusting when it concerns foreign leaders, whether they be from Havana (believe us, Cuba has a far better education system than under Batista) or from Tehran (no nuclear weapons — we promise):

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA’S NEWEST, FRIENDLIEST, MOST CURIOUS ALLIES:
“Cops have caught ‘hostile’ Iranian snoops shooting pictures and video at key city sites at least six times since 9/11 — twice the number previously reported.” Not to mention “a man named Mohammed Alavi was arrested for providing Iran with the floor plan of America’s largest nuclear power plant.”
Gosh, someone should tell Ben Rhodes and John Kerry about this stuff. I’m sure the president would want to know. [Instapundit]

As for Iran's nuclear program having been stopped, where have we heard that before? Oh right, in the 1990s, when another non-warmongering president in the White House sent a previous non-warmongering president to Pyongyang to "successfully" negotiate the end of North Korea's nukes.

Fast-forward to January 2016, when Kim Jong-un boasted that Pyongyang had just detonated its first hydrogen bomb…

If the New York Post is to be believed,

For all this, thank Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. North Korea couldn’t have done it without their gullibility.

Back in 1994, President Clinton prepared to confront North Korea over CIA reports it had built nuclear warheads and its subsequent threats to engulf Japan and South Korea in “a sea of fire.”

Enter self-appointed peacemaker Carter: The ex-prez scurried off to Pyongyang and negotiated a sellout deal that gave North Korea two new reactors and $5 billion in aid in return for a promise to quit seeking nukes.

Clinton embraced this appeasement as achieving “an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula” — with compliance verified by international inspectors. Carter wound up winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his dubious efforts.

But in 2002, the North Koreans ’fessed up: They’d begun violating the accord on Day One. Four years later, Pyongyang detonated its first nuke.

In other words, 12 years after this historic deal, Pyongyang showed that it had never had any to follow the piece of paper it duly signed, whether in spirit or in letter — and, as it were, that it had never had any respect for America or, for that matter, for any of America's politicians, especially the two presidents involved in the deal.

Are we allowed to ask the following question: What does the Iran deal bode for, say, 2028?

And how does it feel to get lectured by a Saudi citizen?

Saudi Prince Bandar: The U.S. nuclear pact with North Korea failed. The Iran deal is worse.
“Writing for the London-based Arabic news Web site Elaph, Badar suggests that President Obama is knowingly making a bad deal, while President Bill Clinton had made a deal with North Korea with the best intentions and the best information he had. . . . The Saudi prince says the new Iran deal and other developments in the region have led him to conclude that a phrase first used by Henry Kissinger – ‘America’s enemies should fear America, but America’s friends should fear America more’ – is correct.”  [Instapundit]

Meanwhile, Cuba was never asked to release a single political prisoner (indeed, Americans were told that they have lessons to learn from the Castro brothers' single-party political system) while Iran's Green Movement was allowed to be ruthlessly suppressed in 2009 with not a peep from the White House.

We keep hearing about the sins of America and of the West. Everyday "evidence" that show that women are allegedly not equal and the ignominy of a couple of U.S. bakers refusing to bake a cake for a wedding that they (rightly or otherwise) do not agree with; all the while, not a peep about Iranians engaging in honor killings and hanging homosexuals from cranes or throwing them off the rooftops of high-rises. (Well, maybe it's not a double standard; apparently, the standard is that the only country that must always, constantly, be demonized is America—or the West broadly depicted.)

3) THE ADMINISTRATION'S "SMART DIPLOMACY" ADVISER & THE PRESS

Must we ignore the New York Times magazine's interview with Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications — or as they dub him, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru,” who all but tells the Grady Lady that their reporting — and that the news we all of us read to stay informed — is basically worthless?

Lee Smith:

In Rhodes's "narrative" about the Iran deal, negotiations started when the ostensibly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president, providing an opening for the administration to reach out in friendship. In reality, as [the NYT's David Samuels] gets administration officials to admit, negotiations began when "hardliner" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still president. It was Rhodes who framed the Iran deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an "echo chamber" in the press.

"In the spring of last year," Samuels writes that

legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. "We created an echo chamber," [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say."

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America's future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. "In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this," he said. "We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked." He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. "We drove them crazy," he said of the deal's opponents.

Gleefully blowing raspberries at U.S. conservatives: another example of geniuses knowing who America's, and who the world's, true enemies are!

And isn't that what Obama's policies, domestic as well as foreign, have been all about for the past eight years?

Should we ignore that with Obama's "peace in our time" in his second inaugural address, the Nobel Peace Prize winner echoed Chamberlain's hailing the Munich agreement with der Führer in 1938? Perhaps it doesn't matter, you think…

 … as William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection writes about Obama's maximum Kinsley-esque gaffe, "Obamaphiles can’t have it both ways. "Either, as they say, he’s the most brilliant speech writer ever who carefully crafts his texts to bring forward historical analogies — in which case he used the phrase deliberately which is frightening – or he’s way overblown and did it without realizing the significance."

4) SMART DIPLOMACY & RUSSIA

And this brings us back to the Soviet Union — or, rather, to Russia…

How has this wonderful new "smart diplomacy" worked out?

How about that Obama and Hillary reset with Russia (now that Russian warplanes buzz U.S. Navy vessels)?

Eight years ago we were told that once the crazy cowboy was out of office, and with someone of Obama's stature in the White House, the world (including Iran and North Korea) would respect America again and a new dawn of peace would arise…

Four years ago, Mitt Romney was mocked by Obama — and rebuked by, among others, the New York Times — for calling Russia America's "No. 1 geopolitical foe." "The 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back" sneered Barack Obama, "because, y'know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

(Reminder: Back during the 2008 election campaign, the foolish Sarah Palin was vilified for saying another incredibly dimwitted thing, that the election of a pacifist like Barack Obama to the White House "would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next." Gratefully, more intelligent people than the clueless Republicans, like those writing for Foreign Policy, were around in 2008 to remind everybody that in fact, such an invasion was, and is, "an extremely far-fetched scenario.")

Besides Ukraine (are we also going to be told that, like the billions of dollars were Iran's to begin with, the Crimea was/is Russian land? How about the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe?), here are some other headlines from the past 18 months, all from the New York Times or from (left-leaning) mainstream media newspapers:

• An American Military Convoy in Europe Aims to Reassure Allies

• Steeling for Battle in Poland Against a Newly Aggressive Russia

• Poles Steel for Battle, Fearing Russia Will March on Them Next

• Norway Reverts to Cold War Mode as Russian Air Patrols Spike

• NATO to Expand Military Presence in Europe to Deter Russians

• A new appraisal names the United States as one of the threats to Russia's national security for the first time

• Russia to increase nuclear arsenal as U.S. plans more firepower in Europe

• Welcome to Cold War 2.0 The risk of the Kremlin rolling the dice against NATO is real

And don't get us started on China and its saber-rattling in the South China Sea — a Major Chinese state paper just called for a military strike on Australian ships that enter the South China Sea — or on Turkey, which, following the coup (or disguised purge), is operating a rapprochement with Russia and seems as likely as not to pull out from NATO in the near future…

Excuse me if, while comparing the international scene between 2008 and 2016, one might tend to raise a voice of doubt that the world (never mind the Middle East alone) has become anything close to safer, much less remaining just as safe, or that America, and America's president, aka the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is/are more respected than under the "crazy cowboy" and other previous administrations…

To conclude with the subject with which this comment opened:

Incidentally, it's not just Americans who are enamored — rightly or otherwise — of Ronald Reagan, the man who Polandin 1964 said that there is a simple way to have peace — you can surrender. (The Gipper might have added that the way to make the surrender palatable was to pretend that we are always to blame, to convince the people that the fault is invariably ours…)

There is a bust of a world leader in Budapest; there is another memorial in Prague; in Poland, there is not one statue of this world leader — there are two. It is not Mikhail Gorbachev; nor is it Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi. It is a US president and that president is neither John "Mr. cool personified" Kennedy nor Jimmy "détente with the Soviets" Carter nor Barack "détente with every single one of clueless America's alleged enemies" Obama…

For some reason, they are all memorials to a former Hollywood actor…

Forget that ‘Avoid the passive’ rule: It’s for kids

Warnings against the passive have in fact been getting increasingly extreme for about a hundred years

writes Geoffrey Pullum (for the evidence, see the Lingua Franca blogger's article “Fear and Loathing of the English Passive“; thanks to Eugene Volokh).

So when I encounter a book that’s a bit better than the average, as I recently did, it’s only fair that I should comment. The Handbook of Good English (1982), by Edward D. Johnson,  also known as The Washington Square Press Handbook of Good English, is a bit more sensible on the topic than most works addressed to the general public in the past half century.

Johnson does begin by serving up a small portion of the usual unappetizing gruel, perhaps because he felt it was incumbent on any usage writer to do so. The usual half-truths are repeated: that actives are “simple and direct” (some are, some aren’t); that the passive “takes more words than the active” (marginally true sometimes, but often false); and that it “can be cumbersome and distracting” (he makes it sound like an elephant, or a deep-sea diving suit). But then things improve, as he goes on to explain that the passive “has its legitimate uses.”

“Don’t be afraid of the passive voice,” he says firmly. Adults “can forget that ‘Avoid the passive’ rule”: It’s for kids. “The passive voice is respectable, is capable of expressing shades of meaning that the active voice cannot express, and is sometimes more compact and direct than the active voice.”

When does the passive express a shade of meaning that the active doesn’t? In what could be called the finger-pointing use of long passives. A passive with a by-phrase lays stress on the agent. In The money was stolen by a man, judging from those footprints, Johnson points out, the passive ensures that the agent (a man) is at the end of its clause, where it naturally receives stress. The active (a man stole the money) would be stylistically worse.

And when is the passive more compact and direct? One class of such cases comprises Johnson’s “trouble-saving passive.” If you were to take a sentence like Smith was arrested, indicted, and found guilty, but the money was never recovered and try to wrestle it into the active voice, as so many writing guides insist you should, you would have to find subjects for all the active verb phrases.

You’d need subjects for arrested Smith (the police department? the county sheriff?), and indicted him (a grand jury, as in the U.S.? the Crown Prosecution Service, as in Britain?), and for found him guilty (a judge? a trial jury?), and for recovered the money (the detectives? some bank or post office? the people whose cash had been stolen?). Implementing this pointless and clumsy elaboration would make the sentence nearly twice as long.

Johnson also notes the utility of what he calls “the pussyfooting passive,” which he says “is essential in journalism” because “often the writer does not know who did something or is not free to say who did it, but he wants to say it was done.”

This is all true. In fact it seems hardly fair to call it pussyfooting. Consider the Wikipedia article on John F. Kennedy: Section 7 begins: “President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas … “; “he was shot once in the back,” and so on. Using an active with Lee Harvey Oswald as the subject at this point would be a distracting and pointless anachronism (Oswald has no place in the narrative of the shooting and the minutes following it). The passive is exactly the right choice.

Elsewhere, Geoffrey Pullum concludes:

 … this is where modern American writing instruction has brought us. Totally unmotivated warnings against sentences that have nothing wrong with them are handed out by people who (unwittingly) often use such sentences more than the people they criticize. … It’s the blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger.

• Related: 5 Punctuation Marks That Look Nothing Like They Used To
• 10 Obscure Punctuation Marks That Should Really Get More Play
• Did the Serial Comma Take a Hit?
• The Case Against the Misuse and Overuse of [Square] Brackets (and Parentheses)