Foreword, when is a homeland not a homeland?

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Extracts from a speech made by President Bush when signing the Homeland
> Security Act, 2002:

Most words, Edward Sapir pointed out years ago, "like practically all
elements of consciousness, have an associated feeling-tone." 

This feeling-tone, however, is not as a rule an inherent value in the
word itself; it is rather a sentimental growth on the word’s true body,
on its conceptual kernel. Not only may the feeling-tone change from one
age to another (this, of course, is true of the conceptual content as
well), but it varies remarkably from individual to individual according
to the personal associations of each, varies, indeed, from time to time
in a single individual’s consciousness as his experiences mold him and
his moods change. To be sure, there are socially accepted feeling-tones,
or ranges of feeling-tone, for
many words over and above the force of individual association, but they
are exceedingly variable and elusive things at best. They rarely have
the rigidity of the central, primary fact. We all grant, for instance,
that storm, tempest, and hurricane, quite aside from their slight
differences of actual meaning, have distinct feeling-tones, tones that
are felt by all sensitive speakers and readers of English in a roughly
equivalent fashion. Storm, we feel, is a more general and a decidedly
less “magnificent” word than the other two; tempest is not only
associated with the sea but is likely, in
the minds of many, to have obtained a softened glamour from a specific
association with
Shakespeare’s great play; hurricane has a greater forthrightness, a
directer ruthlessness than its synonyms. Yet the individual’s
feeling-tones for these words are likely to vary enormously. 

Now, usually the contrast between referential and emotive language is
based on what Sapir names the "socially accepted ranges of feeling-tone"
and the fact that some words have acquired much more of this aura in
general usage than others. "Homeland" has much more of this emotive
potential than does "hammer" (although, being a carpenter by trade,
"hammer is my favorite word in the whole wide world). When I read the
word "hammer" (in, for example,  Carl Sandburg's famous poem about
religion ..."Today I worship the hammer") I associate the "hammer" with
my childhood, with my years on "decks" swinging and hammering away, with
my father, with my brothers buried in the wall trade center. I make
these associations and I can shut them out. Sometimes I share the
socially accepted feeling-tone, a hammer as working class tool, at other
times I modify or even sharply swing away from it. When I read  "hammer"
in a NY Times article about union carpenter furloughs in NYC my emotions
are excited and some 9-11 pain, like the arthritis in my joints, reminds
me of those painful days when those terrorist bastards bombed my
homeland, but as I continue reading the article the text directs my
attention to its context and away from my pain, eliminating what is
irrelevant from what is to be incorporated into my sense meaning of the
text. To speak of the denotations or connotations of words (Fascism and
Dissident), or to speak of emotive or referential language, therefore,
is only a shortcut for differentiating between the selective way in
which readers handle their responses to verbal symbols. 

Have a Power Bar. 
What's in it? GoodGod! I can't even pronounce half these ingredients. 
Who cares. I twill make you swing a hammer at the speed of light. 

E=mc2

  What was our trust, we trust not;
  What was our faith, we doubt;
  Whether we must or must not,
  We may debate about.

  The soul, perhaps, is a gust of gas
  And wrong is a form of right--
  But we know that Energy equals Mass
  By the square of the Speed of Light.

  What we have known, we know not;
  What we have proved, abjure;
  Life is a tangled bowknot,
  But one thing still is sure.
  Come, little lad; come, little lass--
  Your docile creed recite:
  "We know that Energy equals Mass
  By the square of the Speed of Light,"
                                  


  I have seen
  the old gods go
  and the new gods come

  Day by day
  and year by year
  the idols fall
  and the idols rise

  Today
  I worship the hammer