When I first started working as a disability examiner for Social Security, we had no desktop computers, just Wang terminals; nor could we communicate via email, just intraoffice messaging whose default was “reply all.” Hence, I established a wide reputation for pedantry early on. The topic was one on which I have often pontificated in the intervening thirty-plus years. One of the system administrators reached outside his bailiwick and sent the following message to everyone at Disability Determination Services; I still don’t know if it was meant as a challenge or a request for information:
Who said, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”?
And here was the presumptuous reply of the newly-trained disability specialist who got herself fired a few years later for her fairly consistent audacity over time:
No one. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A FOOLISH consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” [emphasis mine]. Those are two very different ideas.
I confess that I was so ready with the retort because a high school classmate had burned Emerson’s words onto my brain when she asked Mr. Crawford, our teacher in freshman accelerated English, “What does Emerson mean when he says that consistency is the hemoglobin of little minds?” Now that I think of her question more carefully, I realize that her howler actually contains an astute metaphor of its own. But I digress. Actually, I haven’t even begun the topic from which this extended rabbit trail would be a potential digression! So I’ll proceed apace. Continue reading
As I began to ponder the year soon coming to a close, it seemed necessary and fitting that I end the longest hiatus of my blog-writing career with a brief narration of the project–now complete–that has consumed my life for the last four years. During that time, I have focused much of my attention on the effort to commemorate, both personally and professionally, the centenary of World War I. Not coincidentally, I last posted here on November 11, one hundred years after the Armistice ending the ghastly war that gave us the map, the context, and even the vocabulary by which we still understand the ensuing century. As that project came to its logical conclusion during those frenzied days of early November, I realized that I could take the time to breathe, to collect my energies, and to move onto as-yet undetermined paths. So today, I am taking the opportunity to review this project as it came to fruition in 2018–focusing primarily on the last few events that provided me with a sense of fulfillment like no other. 
From July to November 1917, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was a shell-shocked second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, under the care of W. H. R. Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital. There, he became close friends with Siegfried Sassoon, who became his poetic mentor and helped him revise the following poem, one of his most memorable: