The story of my family name actually sounds like a Norwegian joke; my paternal great-grandfather, I think it was, decided there were too many of his name in the area, decided to take a new one, and fashioned a name that sounds like he quite literally looked around at where he was standing and settled on the first thing he noticed. My favorite, though, is the punch line about how Norway is just as big as Sweden if you flatten out the mountains. Because a friend's mother once wrote a book with a Hungarian-Roma-American who played in a band with a feminist author's son who in turn went on to front an Irish-folk punk band from Minnesota with a habit of scoring eastern-European fiddlers, I did the worldbeat fascination bit in the Nineties that included my introduction to the idea of a white on white erasure in Norway. I'm quite certain the majority would protest that phrasing, but so it goes. Spoiler
What depends on who, and whom. You don't know what was said until you know who said it and to whom. That's just a fact. Jeff Sessions praising the Anglo-American heritage of sheriffs to a convocation of sheriffs is issuing a threat - to them, and to every non-Anglo person in their counties. It's the same basic threat a guy praising the good health and upbringing of one's children is issuing, when he's a mob enforcer and he wants something from you.
Shouldn't need any. A statement is either true or false, no matter who says it. Thanks for identifying yourself.
Meaning derives from context, and is independent of truth or falsehood. Sessions was delivering a threat, much as Ronald Reagan was when he set up his campaign podium near the site of Klan murder and declared his support for "States rights".
It seems willful. As we see, for instance, in #11↑, our neighbor is either incapable of or unwilling to establish and maintain any consistent context. He notes AG Sessions on Anglo-American heritage in law enforcement, and then compares it to examples of Barack Obama discussing Anglo-American heritage in law. Does our neighbor actually not understand the difference? The Anglican heritage of our legal code is well-known; our nation did emerge from the British Empire. Furthermore, was it Justice Breyer who went on to describe the Bowers decision as a mistake? It seems a fair description, though neither was it the first time the Supreme Court, really, really wanting to find a way to do something, reached back to English Common Law for precedent. Meanwhile, the Anglo-American heritage of our law enforcement tradition includes murderous supremacism.
Our law enforcement heritage comes from the same place as our law heritage. Hence the word "sheriff" deriving from Old English.
But not wrong; and not nearly as empty-headed as confusing truth value with meaning. With the difference of having been amended to enable plantation slavery and then Jim Crow, including racial oppression and terrorism defended as Anglo-American heritage.
No confusion. Truth value is apparent, while meaning must be assumed or inferred. Slavery at common law in former colonies of the British Empire developed slowly over centuries, and was characterised by inconsistent decisions and varying rationales for the treatment of slavery, the slave trade, and the rights of slaves and slave owners. Within Britain, until 1807, except for statutes facilitating and taxing the international slave trade, there was virtually no legislative intervention in relation to slaves as property, and accordingly the common law had something of a "free hand" to develop, untrammeled by the "paralysing hand of the Parliamentary draftsmen". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_at_common_law
You confused the one for the other. The topic was meaning, you tried to talk about truth and falsehood as if it were that topic. Meaning is often deduced, and even more often reliably understood - little in the way of assumption or inference is necessarily involved beyond a shared literacy and culture. None of the fellow racial bigots in that audience of sheriffs failed to understand Sessions's little sermon, any more than the racial bigots flocking to Reagan's speeches failed to understand what he meant by States' Rights, welfare queens, and the like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriffs_in_the_United_States#Duties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriffs_in_the_United_States#Election
i like your comment. it invokes quite a fascinating intrigue on the aspect of shared religous ideology as a metaphor for moral social cohesion. if one places preclusionary value at the merit of meaning does it not detract the aspect of perception to be rendered ?
True. Of course, by that measure, our math comes from our Arabian heritage - which is why we use Arabic numerals. So it would be just as accurate to say that US scientists, engineers and mathematicians follow our Arab-American heritage.
In some of the American colonies, for example, it developed in the direction of racial oppression and extreme racial bigotry, including racial segregation and impoverishment enforced by terrorism. Hence the well-known and commonly recognized "Angl0-American" heritage of Jim Crow and racially structured abuse under the law, mediated and implemented and enforced by county sheriff departments. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was named after famous defenders of that Anglo-American heritage, and well known to represent it in his own law enforcement career.