ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Latin

strangle and suffocate everything you write

long, pompous nouns that end in -ionlike implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!) -entlike development and fulfillment.

Anglo-Saxon words will set you free express the fundamentals of everyday life: house, home, child, chair, bread, milk, sea, sky, earth, field, grass, road

express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture somebody doing something. Eg: Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement. Before we fixed our money problems.

It no longer rains in America; were experiencing a precipitation probability situation.

a letter to alumni from the head of the New England boarding school

As I walk around the Academy, and see so many gifted students interacting with accomplished, dedicated adults *that means boys and girls talking to teachers] and consider the opportunities for learning that such interpersonal exchanges will yield

facilitation intervention and affordable housing and minimum-density zoning, A major immigrant concern is the affordable housing situation.

New Dominican families on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx cant pay the rent that landlords ask.

As we previously communicated, we completed a systems conversion in late September. Data conversions involve extra processing and reconciliation steps [translation: it took longer than we thought it would to make our office operate better].

We apologize if you were inconvenienced as we completed the verification process [we hope weve got it right now].
Further enhancements will be introduced in the next calendar quarter [were still working on it]. Notice those horrible long Latin words: communicated, conversion,reconciliation, enhancements, verification.

JOHN SAW THE BOYS. The event only happened once. we always know who did what: it was John who activated the verb SAW. A passive-voice sentence would be: THE BOYS WERE SEEN BY JOHN. Its longer. Its weaker: it takes three words (WERE SEEN BY instead of SAW), Its not as exact. How often were the boys seen by John? Every day? Once a week?

Active verbs give momentum to a sentence and push it forward.

passivemomentum is given to a sentence by active verbs and the sentence is pushed forward by them
there is no momentum, no push.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of nature, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

short, active verbs: went, wished, front, see, learn, die, discover
We understand exactly what Thoreau is saying. We also know a lot about himabout his curiosity and his vitality. Think about that: only five words in that long, elegant sentence have more than one syllable. Short is always better than long.

A decision was made to go to the woods because of a desire for a deliberate existence
and for exposure to only the essential facts of life, and for possible instruction in its educational elements, and because of a concern that at the time of my death the absence of a meaningful prior experience would be apprehended.

I went to the woods because became A decision was made. the noun decision added. To see if I could learn what it had to teachtwo terrific verbs, learn and teach; weve all learned and weve all been taughtbecame for possible instruction. Latin nouns that end in i-o-n? Decision. Instruction.

They have no people in them doing something.

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all.
[Look at all those wonderful plain nouns: race, battle, bread, riches, favor, time, chance.]

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right [eleven straight one-syllable words], let us strive on [active verb] to finish the work we are in, to bind up [active verb] the nations wounds, to care [active verb] for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan [specific nouns],to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Over the past three days, my wife Michelle and I have experienced the beauty and dynamism ofIndia and its people. From the majesty of Humayun's Tomb to the advanced technologies that are empowering farmers and women who are the backbone of Indian society. From a Diwali celebration with schoolchildren to the innovators who are fueling India's economic rise. From the university students who will chart India's future, to you-leaders who helped to bring India to this moment of promise. At every stop, we have been welcomed with the hospitality for which Indians have always been known. So to you and the people of India, on behalf of me, Michelle and the American people, please accept our deepest thanks. Bahoot dhanyavad.

So we were honored to visit the residence where Gandhi and King both stayed-Mani Bhavan. We were humbled to pay our respects at Raj Ghat. And I am mindful that I might not be standing before you today, as President of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared with America and the world. An ancient civilization of science and innovation. A fundamental faith in human progress. This is the sturdy foundation upon which you have built ever since that stroke of midnight when the Tricolour was raised over a free and independent India. And despite the skeptics who said that this country was simply too poor, too vast, too diverse to succeed, you surmounted overwhelming odds and became a model to the world.

Dont say currently for now. assistance for help. numerous for many. facilitate for ease. individual [five syllablesfor a person, or a man or a woman. implement for practice prioritiy for important

Dont say anything in writing that you wouldnt comfortably say in conversation.
Writing is talking to someone else on paper or on a screen.

Dos of writing

writing is linear and sequential

Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next? One thought per sentence. Readers only process one thought at a time. Choose a full stop for a comma.

THE FINANCIAL PAGE

GREEDY GEEZERS?
by James Surowiecki
NOVEMBER 22, 2010

As shellackings go, the 2010 election was as comprehensive as it gets. Democrats lost among women, men, high-school graduates, college graduates, Catholics, Protestants, and so on. But there was one demographic group whose repudiation was especially influential: senior citizens. In the 2006 midterm election, seniors split their vote evenly between House Democrats and Republicans. This time, they went for Republicans by a twenty-one-point margin. The impact of that swing was magnified by the fact that seniors, always pretty reliable midterm voters, were particularly fired up: nearly a quarter of the votes cast were from people over sixty-five. The election has been termed the revolt of the middle class. But it might more accurately be called the revolt of the retired. Why were seniors so furious with the Democrats? The weak economy and the huge deficits didnt help, but retirees have actually been hit less hard by the financial crisis than other Americans. The real sticking point was health-care reform, which the elderly didnt like from the start.

While the Affordable Care Act was being debated, most seniors opposed it, and even after the law was passed Gallup found that sixty per cent of them thought it was bad. You sometimes hear (generally from Republicans) that the health-care bill is wildly unpopular. The truth is that, in every age group but oneseniorsa plurality of voters want to keep the bill intact. Misinformation about death panels and so on had something to do with seniors hostility. But the real reason is that it feels to them as if health-care reform will come at their expense, since the new law will slow the growth in Medicare spending over the next decade. It wont actually cut current spending, as Republicans claimed in campaign ads, but between now and 2019 total Medicare outlays will be half a trillion dollars less than previously projected. Never mind that this number includes cost savings from more efficient care, or that the bill has a host of provisions that benefit seniorsmost notably the closing of the infamous drug-benefit doughnut hole, which had left people responsible for thousands of dollars in prescription-drug costs. The idea that the government might try to restrain Medicare spending was enough to turn seniors against the bill.

Theres a colossal irony here: the very people who currently enjoy the benefits of a subsidized, government-run insurance system are intent on keeping others from getting the same treatment. In part, this is because seniors think of Medicare as an entitlementsomething that they have a right to because they paid for it, via Medicare taxesand decry the new bill as a giveaway. This is a myth: seniors today get far more out of Medicare than they ever put in, which means that their medical care is paid for by current taxpayers. Theres nothing wrong with this: the U.S. is rich enough so that the elderly shouldnt have to worry about having health insurance; before Medicare, roughly half of them didnt have it. But the subsidies that seniors get arent fundamentally different from the ones that the Affordable Care Act will offer some thirty million Americans who dont have insurance. Opposing the new law while reaping the benefits of Medicare is essentially saying, Ive got minegood luck getting yours. Current sentiment among seniors seems like a classic example of an effect that the economist Benjamin Friedman identified in his magisterial book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth: in hard times voters get more selfish. Historically, Friedman notes, times of stagnation have been times of reaction, with voters bent on protecting their own interests, hostile to outsiders, and less interested in social welfare. In boom times, by contrast, societies typically become more open, more inclusive, and more generous; think, in the U.S., of the myriad reforms of the Progressive Era, or of the nineteen-sixties, when Medicare, Medicaid, civil-rights legislation, and immigration reform were all introduced.

This isnt a hard-and-fast rule; Social Security, after all, was created during the Great Depression. But Friedman suggests that the Depressions effects were so deep and widespread that it created a sense of social solidarity. The current crisis, bad as it is, isnt severe enough to do that; instead, it has tended to drive people apart, with economically anxious voters trying to hold on to what they have. These days, the notion that we cant afford to expand the safety net sounds plausible, because everyones feeling poor. By contrast, when Medicare was first proposed, in the boom times of the nineteen-sixties, Republicans made little headway trying to fend it off, despite using arguments remarkably similar to the ones theyre now advancing in support of health-care repeal. In this environment, its understandable that seniors want to pull the ladder up in order to protect their benefits, just as other voters dont want to pay for any more stimulus spending, even if millions of Americans are unemployed.

To be sure, the Obama Administration didnt pitch health-care reform as well as it might have: its emphasis on the way the bill would bend the cost curve was heard by seniors as slash Medicare. But the Democrats loss of support among the elderly was more a matter of economic fundamentals than of political framing. If the economy were growing briskly, Its unlikely that the health-care bill would have become so politically toxic. And, with Republicans now looking to roll back parts of the bill, what happens to health care in the long term may depend a lot on what happens to the economy in the short term.

THE FINANCIAL PAGE BACK-OFFICE BLUES by James SurowieckiNOVEMBER 8, 2010 In the late nineteen-sixties, Wall Street was crippled by an unlikely nemesis: unfinished paperwork. Thanks to a booming stock market, trading volume had soared in the course of the decade; between 1960 and 1968, the number of shares traded daily quadrupled. This Should have been wonderful news for brokerage housesmore trades mean more commissionsbut it ended up wrecking many of them instead. Because brokerages were slow to add workers and update back-office operations, they were literally buried beneath all the new businessoffices were full of stock certificates, and trade documents were stacked halfway to the ceiling. Amid the chaos, dividend checks went unsent, trades were credited to the wrong accounts, and fraud spread; hundreds of millions of dollars in securities were stolen. And since the firms often didnt process trades quickly enough, billions of dollars worth of transactions a month were simply cancelled. In 1968, the stock market started closing one day a week to let firms catch up on their work, but the brokerages bookkeeping woes caught up to them first, and more than a hundred firms went under. It took yearsand the passage of an investor-protection billfor the abate.Youd think the Street would have learned its lesson. Instead, its now threatened by an even bigger back-office crisis: Foreclosuregate.

Banks, faced with a flood of delinquent mortgages resulting from the bad loans they made during the housing bubble, have done exactly what the brokerages did forty years ago: theyve cut corners. Theyve foreclosed on homes without having the proper documentation, and relied on unqualified people to sign affidavits attesting to things they didnt knowso-called robosigners. In a few cases, they seem to have actually tossed people who didnt have mortgages out of their homes. As a result, federal regulators and attorneys general in all fifty states are now investigating. And, in the weeks since the scandal first erupted, other issues have appeared, calling into question the legitimacy of the way mortgages were packaged and sold, and raising the possibility that the banks might have to buy back piles of bad mortgages. Forecasts of catastrophe, Armageddon, and apocalypse have now become routine. Theres no doubt that its a brutal mess. The banks have been servicing mortgages and chasing delinquents with the same carelessness and indifference to due process that they demonstrated when they underwrote and securitized the mortgages in the first place. A foreclosing bank should be able, at a minimum, to produce the original mortgage note to demonstrate that it has the right to foreclose. But many banks have been unwilling or unable to do so. The same goes for other documentation: in a study of seventeen hundred cases of foreclosure in bankruptcy, Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of Iowa, found that necessary documents were missing in more than half of them. Servicing mortgages well means hiring and training lots of workers to help customers, modify loans, and insure that documents are in order. But that costs money, and since mortgage servicing is already a low-margin business, banks have preferred to do things on the cheap, which is an open invitation to trouble, including fraud. To those responsible, a bit of sloppy paperwork probably seemed like no big deal, but when youre talking about taking away peoples homes paperwork and due process should matter quite a bit.

All the same, the widespread proclamations of Armageddon seem overblown. The banks behavior has been appalling, but the crisis probably wont be fatal for them, however much some of them might deserve that. Criminal charges are likely, and justified. And judges are already looking more skeptically at banks legal claims. But we arent going to see a Jubilee for debtors. The actual debts are almost all real, and the records of most of them presumably exist somewhere. So some financial institution will eventually end up with the right to foreclose, even though getting there will be expensive and time-consuming. And while banks may suffer considerable losseshaving to spend tens of billions of dollars to buy back mortgages that violated the warranties they made to investorsforcing them to do this will take a long time, and enable them to spread the pain out over years. Nor is the uproar going to lead millions of homeowners to stop paying their mortgages. Predictions of catastrophe are understandablethe memory of the banking crisis is fresh, and it seems like poetic justicebut were probably not going to see apocalypse redux. Indeed, theres a chance that in the long run the banks travails could make things better for the economy, not worse. For a start, all the sand in the gears of the foreclosure mills will make it easier for delinquent borrowers to stay in their homesnot so bad an outcome, in economic terms, as the banks would have us believe. There are eleven months of existing-home inventory for sale right now; dumping another million foreclosed homes onto the market hardly seems economically essential. More important, making foreclosures tougher to get and more expensive to process could push banks to get serious about modifying mortgages, which at this point is the best route to getting the housing market back in reasonable shape. Up to now, its often been easier and cheaper for banks to foreclose, and mortgage servicers commonly make more in foreclosure than in modification. But being forced to follow the law before foreclosing, and having the threat of criminal investigation over their heads, may change that calculus.

(More government pressure wouldnt hurt, either.) The back-office crisis of the nineteensixties compelled Wall Street to do a better job of protecting and serving investors. Itd be fitting if Foreclosuregate ended up doing the same for homeowners.