The Oxford English Dictionary has gone where no proper, upstanding British etymologist has gone before. It’s hired an American editor in an American city to root out American words. Jesse Sheidlower is the new OED editor, for Yankspeak. He believes the OED is too narrowly identified with literary, highbrow language and he’s made it his mission to find American words in unusual places.

So in addition to scouring the letters of old Puritans, he studies everything he can get his hands on — movie scripts, tapes of “The Sopranos,” rap music, massage magazines, sports broadcasts, even a 1970’s rock ‘n roll essay called, “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.” You can thank Jesse Sheidlower for entries like ‘Ma and Pa store’, ‘chowhound’ and ‘master of the universe’. That is, if you value the OED more for many Menckenesque additions: like, mack, whack, jiggy, or whatever.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jesse Sheidlower, American editor of the OED

The Archer Daniels Midland corporation calls itself America’s Supermarket to the World, but did you know that the giant food producer was bagged a few years ago in the worst shoplifting case in history? From a high-level ADM mole who wore an FBI wire for two and a half years, we know now that company was involved in a massive price fixing scam with its Japanese competitors that netted the company millions of dollars in unjust profits.

The FBI tapes are damning: top executives brazenly discussed screwing their customers; plotted to skirt U.S. trade laws; and also peppered their conversations with lewd and bigoted references to colleagues and employees. The New York Times investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald tells the ADM story as a whodunnit, a page-turner that reveals how the FBI mole himself ended up doing more time than the corrupt corporate leaders he helped nab.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Kurt Eichenwald, Author of “The Informant”

The Battlefield Band from Glascow, Scotland doesn’t do Braveheart re-enactments. It has fought and won a battle in Scotland though – the one between traditionalists and pop musicians. The old Scottish bagpipe culture is basically ceremonial and formal. Bagpipes accompanied Scots’ clans in battle, the coronation of clan chiefs and the mourning of the dead.

This Battlefield Band has taken some of the solemn drone out of the bagpipe and added synthesizers, drums and guitars to give it a new sound. You’re as likely to hear them perform reels about Jesse Ventura as about Jenny of the Brays. The Batties are riding the wave of a Scottish invasion that began in the early 1990’s with books like “Trainspotting”, movies like “Rob Roy” and musicians like Belle and Sebastian.

As Mike Meyers likes to say: “If it’s not Scottish it’s crap.” We’re peeking up the kilts of Scotish music with the Battlefield Band, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The Battlefield Band (John McCusker, Alan Reid, Karine Polwart, and Mike Katz)

“The dog ate my homework.” It’s the classic excuse that some parents are now encouraging their kids to use. A homework revolution is in the making. Parents are mad as hell and say their kids are not going to take so many assignments after a long day in the schoolhouse. The debate over homework is something like the debate over toilet training: lots of opinions, lots of instinct, no crystal clear conclusions.

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time homework in the United States was considered bad for your health. A letter writer to the New York Times in 1935 claimed it was “directly responsible for more undernourished, nervous, bespectacled, round shouldered children than you can possibly imagine.” All that changed when the Russians beat the Americans into space.

Since then students’ backpacks have grown to backbreaking proportions. Did you do your homework last night?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

In the political campaign that’s suddenly about issues again, tax cuts are the core of it. The candidates will tell you that the tax debate this year is about the philosophies of Al Gore and George W. Bush. But this is cost/benefit politics: about who gets what and how? Funny thing: the popular tax cut fervor of previous years has died down.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Campaign 2000 might better be a fight over how to spend the budget surplus. Maybe it’s habit but the candidates still feel compelled to talk tax cuts, with telling differences. Al Gore, in the Clinton mode, advocates targeted tweaking of the tax code, for the educational benefits, say. George Bush says that cutting Federal income tax rates was his main motive for running in the first place.

Gore has also taken a perilous pledge to lift the last special burden on the super-rich, the estate tax that he calls the death tax. The tax debate may be the place to see just who wants to do what to whom.

Guests:

Paul Krugman, professor of economics, Princeton and columnist for The New York Times

Robert Kuttner, editor-in-chief of American Prospect magazine

Gregory Mankiw, professor of economics at Harvard, and columnist for Fortune magazine.

Before Elmore Leonard’s 37th book “Pagan Babies” even hit the bookshelves, it was in production in Hollywood. Tinsel Town is in love with his rogues’ gallery and their hip, funny dialogue in movies like “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight”. Leonard read Hemingway to learn how to leave things out and moved quickly from writing and copying to scratching out westerns for pulp magazines. When that genre dried up, he switched to thrillers populated by grifters and drifters on the fringes of society who are invariably involved in dizzying layers of scams and cons.

His double-crossing petty crooks and whores achieve a kind of seedy glory as they cruise the mean streets of Detroit or Miami Beach. They dwell in the moral murk of revenge and redemption that drives the plot and leaves you cheering for the bad guys. Elmore Leonard, who may just be the greatest living crime writer, is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Elmore Leonard

Say “religious fundamentalist” and a lot of people conjure up an image of an abortion clinic bomber or a gun-toting terrorist in a mosque. But not every fundamentalist is an extremist by a long shot.

Most are militantly pious law abiding citizens who reject modern society – The Jewish man in Israel who like his 17th century Polish ancestors wears black and won’t allow contemporary literature into his home. The Baptist mother in America who won’t allow her kids to go to the movies, or the Shiite Muslim woman in Iran who won’t show more then her eyes in public.

At the turn of the new century the great religions of the world each have these passionate minorities with a common, vaguely connected impulse to make sacred again what they see as an increasingly secular, scientific, and skeptical world. What’s not so sacred to them is pluralism, democracy, or the separation of church and state. Karen Armstrong’s reading of the new fundamentalism is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ford and Carnegie, make room for Gates and Bezos, and the legions of newly-minted dot-com gazillionaires in their wake. There are two and a half million millionaires in America, and they want to give their money away.

The same entrepreneurs and innovators who have helped fuel America’s record-breaking economic surge are bringing their bankable business acumen to the world of philanthropy. The trick is to give the money away as imaginatively, as experimentally, as riskily, as they made it. And it’s not easy. Entrepreneurial philanthropists want serious business plans, real accountability, good management teams, and a solid growth strategy.

With tactics and lingo from Wall Street, they are creating and investing in venture charities run by social entrepreneurs. But the habits and incentives learned in money-making take funny turns in non-profit world. We’re doing due diligence on Venture Philanthropy this hour on the Connection.

Guests:

Michael Bronner, UPromise Inc, David Rockefeller Jr., Vanessa Kirsch, New Profit Inc, Paul Shoemaker, Social Venture Partners

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet in the history of the English language. With poems about Miles Standish, Hiawatha, Evangeline, Paul Revere, he gave America its public mythology and he taught it to Europe, too. Longfellow’s poems were the favorite of Harvard Scholars and common farmers, he sold more books than any other poet, and his birthday became a national celebration.

He was the first American to get an honorary degree from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the only non-Brit to have a plaque in poet’s corner at Westminster Abbey, the poet whose works were set to music by composers like Liszt, Elgar, Mendelssohn, and Ives.

Longfellow was an abolitionist who wrote impassioned poems against slavery and a scholar whose translation of Dante was a bench-mark of 19th century intellectual life. The question is, why was he ever forgotten? We’re talking about Longfellow, America’s Poet, this hour on The Connection
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

J.D. McClatchy, Poet, Chancellor of American Academy of Poets, editor of Modern Library’s Longfellow book

and John Hollander, Poet, Professor of English Lit. Yale University

You could say the human rights slogan that came out of Seattle last year was “Just Do It”. The message from all those WTO protesters to the corporate sweatshop world was that it pays to take care of your workers – it pays to give them fair wages, reasonable working hours, a safe environment, and the right to unionize.

During this presidential campaign season, Ralph Nader is using populist rhetoric that reflects a kind of growing anti-corporate vogue, a fear of what increasingly unregulated global markets are doing to factory workers from China to Bolivia. Demonstrations and media blitzes against the Nike’s, Starbucks’, and Gap’s of the world seem to be catching the attention of shareholders and CEOs, but the real question is: can the companies taking their manufacturing overseas uphold labor standards and their own profits at the same time? Human Rights and Bottom Lines are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlie Derber, Boston College Professor