The Rumors Fly

There are often nasty rumors being circulated, often by emails, about candidates in both parties. Don't be gullible folks! Don't let your imagination run away with things! People who spread many of these vicious stories do so because there are other folks out there somewhere who believe, or who want to believe, the worst about some of the candidates they're opposing. Just use some common sense, as you can't always easily prove or disprove some of this nonsense. Most of you may already be familiar with the old question posed to a guy: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" As you can see, either a "yes" or a "no" answer gets the guy in trouble! (If your mind is running a bit slow today, if he says "Yes," that means he HAD BEEN beating his wife. If he says "No," he's still beating her!)

The country is in dire straights, and we need to focus on the issues at hand, not on a bunch of nonsense, rumor, or innuendo. Don't let your self esteem get in the way, either. Too often, some folks let a candidate, or a political party, become so much a part of their very life, that they can't see the forest for the trees. Don't get to the point where you say, "Oh people in my party would NEVER do a thing like that!" Often times, rumors spread by the party operatives themselves are designed to do two things: 1) energize their core supporters who want terribly to believe any bad story about the opposing party's candidate or, 2) get what are now called "low information voters." The idea with this is, while some people LOVE politics, to the point that they "live, eat, sleep" politics, most Americans pay much more fleeting and casual attention to what's going on in politics, and still others, maybe because they work a lot, come home and take care of the kids, fix dinner, and then sit down and watch the news for a few minutes (or just maybe, YIKES, could it be, some just don't like much about politics!!!), only get snippets of what's going on in politics. What ever the reason, the political operatives throw out nasty stories about the opposition hoping to at least get the attention of these folks, often in 30 second ads, and that with their low attention to political goings on, that these stories will stay fixed in their minds, (and with low attention also comes the possibility that they will never hear the stories debunked) and then come election day....

Now I know, if you lean leftward, you may not like the Wall Street Journal, and if you lean rightward, you may not like the New York Times (or maybe ANY of the media), but while some writers may have an agenda, the more reputable publications aren't just out knowingly spreading lies about people they don't agree with. So, beware false emails and even false websites claiming to have real articles, or emails that appear to have "rewritten" an article, rather than supplying the actual article. To be quite honest, I wouldn't even be opening up ANY of these kinds of emails to start with, as viruses and such can be accompanying the email. Just delete!!! Further, the perpetrators count on you forwarding this stuff to others, thus spreading the rumor ever farther. Don't be part of the problem!

Why there has even been a nasty rumor about me!!! It has REALLY got me ticked off, too! The rumor has it that I love the top income people in the country!!! Now, you don't have to check to verify that one. You should know BS when you hear it! (Below is a word history)

Word History:
Wood-This word originally meant "tree, group of trees; that is, forest." Eventually, the notion developed about it meaning "the actual substance of a tree," which is what has carried over to modern times. Old English had widu/wudu (No, not voodoo!), which came from Old Germanic "widuz." Old High German had "witu" and Old Norse (which is North Germanic) had "vidr." The Old Germanic word went back to Indo European "widhu," which meant "tree, wood." Welsh, a Celtic language (Celtic is an Indo European language, related to English, but a bit more distantly on the English "family tree."), has "gwydd," which means "trees." Swedish, Nowegian and Danish (all North Germanic languages) have "ved," also meaning "wood." Why our closest relatives, German and Dutch, don't use the word in some form is unknown to me, but I'm sure there's an explanation by linguists.

There's another "wood" in English, but it is now obsolete. It is NOT connected to the above word. It meant " very insane/ mad/frenzied." (Okay, no remarks, or I'll get "mad!") In Old English is was spelled" wod," and modern German has "Wut," which means "rage, anger, fury." Old Germanic had "woth," and this came from Indo European "wat," which had a connotation of "mental excitement."