Doris O'Brien is a retired college Speech teacher and banker. She has published two books of humor (Up or Down With Women's Liberation and Humor Me a Little) and for many years contributed light verse to the Pepper 'n Salt column of the Wall Street Journal. She is an avid writer of letters to the editors.
Doris celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary in the same year she welcomed her first grandchild. She now lives in Pasadena with a great view of the San Gabriel mountains — and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.
She can be reached by e-mail: witsendob at (@) gmail.com
What England Did to Help Their Economy: Half-Price Food For The Month of August
From 3 to 31 August, the English received a 50% discount when they ate in at restaurants that are registered with the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme. They did not need a voucher to use this scheme and they could use it at the same time as other offers and discounts. There was no minimum spend. The Eat Out to Help Out scheme aimed to help protect the jobs of the hospitality industry's 1.8 million employees by encouraging people to safely return to their local restaurants, cafes and pubs where social-distancing rules allow. more »
UC Berkeley Demographers: COVID-19 is Likely to Shorten the Average US Lifespan in 2020 By About a Year; "Those are real people, not abstract statistics"
Their findings, published online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, conclude that 1 million deaths in 2020 would cut three years off the average US life expectancy, while 250,000 deaths would reduce lifespans by about a year. That said, without the societal efforts that have occurred to lessen the impact of COVID-19, there could have been 2 million deaths projected by the end of 2020, a reduction of the average US lifespan by five years, the researchers pointed out. more »
Jo Freeman Writes: The Political Parentage of Kamala Harris
Jo Freeman writes about Kamala Harris’ political parentage: She has said that she is a child of the civil rights movement because her parents participated in demonstrations while they were grad students at Berkeley in the early 1960s. In fact, her political parents were Burton Machine and the Women's Liberation Movement. If Joe Biden is inaugurated as President in January, the people first and second in line for succession will both be progeny of the Burton machine and both be women. more »
“Housewife” to “Hussy”; A Revisit To Grammarphobia: From Domestic to Disreputable
The word “housewife” was spelled “husewif” when it showed up in Sawles Warde, an early Middle English homily written around 1200: “Inwið beoð his hinen in se moni mislich þonc to cwemen wel þe husewif aȝein godes wille” (“Indoors, both his servants have a great many miserable thoughts about how to please the housewife against God’s will”). The OED says “housewife” originally meant pretty much what it does today: “A (typically married) woman whose main occupation is managing the general running of a household, such as caring for her family, performing domestic tasks, etc.” However, the dictionary has this interesting note: “There is some evidence that in Middle English the word housewife in the general sense ‘housekeeper’ could be applied to both men and women.” Oxford provides an example of “hussy” used this way in Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740): “So I … dropt purposely my Hussy.” more »
