Reuters reports it’s not a return to the days of the Great Depression that NYers fear these days, it’s a return to the 1970s – and not because of disco, Jewish Afros or polyester leisure suits (though those are all excellent reasons):

The 1970s were a low point in city history as a fiscal crisis almost pushed it into bankruptcy, crime rates soared, and homeless people crowded sidewalks as public services crumbled.

Almost a million people fled New York's Mean Streets during the decade for the safer, more stable suburbs, a population decline that took more than 20 years to reverse.

When discussing the current crisis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, now seeking a third term, promises that he will not allow the city to return to the darkness of those days, although he stresses that it faces "giant financial problems." …

[T]here are signs of a city under growing stress, including a rise in homelessness …  and last year's 57 percent spike in bank robberies. …

The budget plan drawn up by New York State Governor David Paterson will cost the city $1.6 billion in cuts and force it to lay off thousands of police officers, firefighters and teachers, Bloomberg warned last week. …

Wall Street's financial industry is one of the city's biggest taxpayers but it has lost more than $36 billion in the last two years and may eventually shrink its work force by a quarter, the mayor said.

That will deprive the city of billions of dollars in lost tax revenues, including the mini-bonanzas it gets when securities firms pay bonuses every year.

Editorial Note: If you don’t remember NYC in the ‘70s (because the decade went by in a drug-hazed blur, you weren’t yet conceived or you lived in the same town as the Partridge family), check out ABC-TV’s “Life On Mars,” which is set in 1973 – “the era of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘The French Connection’ and ‘Serpico,’” co-producer André Nemec tells The New York Times. If “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani decides to run for NY governor, all he needs to do is hold screenings of the show around the state and remind people that he tamed NYC, which everyone had written off as “ungovernable.”  

Florida’s Friendliest Hometown

Though The Villages - which spans three counties with 40,000 homes and more than 70,000 residents - boasts 34 golf courses, nine country clubs, two downtown squares and a slew of restaurants and bars, getting lucky is one of the residents' primary pastimes.

The huge complex began growing rapidly in the mid-1990s, and reported cases of gonorrhea rocketed from 152 to 245, of syphilis rose from 17 to 33, and of chlamydia from 52 to 115 among those 55 and older in Florida from 1995 to 2005.

The state's sexually transmitted disease rate among those over 65 is one of the fastest growing in the country, one report claims.

[Hat Tip: OpinionJournal.com]

Editorial Note: The Stiletto found this video of a couple of members of The Village Twirlers (a Majorette team) performing to “Santa Baby.” They’re limber, have great legs and if they are at all representative of the women who live in The Villages communities, it’s no wonder the men need all the little blue pills they can get their hands on:

Well-Chosen Words: Part X

Like many of [Barack] Obama’s speeches, the Inaugural Address presented, in substance, a blend of classical constitutional and modern egalitarian liberalism. The thing, but never the word. Anyone who knows anything about contemporary political discourse in the United States understands why. …

Over the last two decades a truly eccentric usage has triumphed in American public debate. Liberalism has become a pejorative term denoting — to put the matter a tad frivolously — some unholy marriage of big government and fornication. …

A plausible minimum list of ingredients for 21st century liberalism would include liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism, and some notion of human equality, reason and progress. The mix of ingredients differs from place to place. Whether some distant cousin really belongs to the extended family of liberalisms is a matter of healthy dispute. But somewhere in this contested, evolving combination there is a thing of enduring value.

This has been an American argument, some would say the American argument, for more than 200 years. In fact, the United States is still full of liberals, both progressive or left liberals and, I would insist, conservative or right liberals. Most of them just don’t use the word. Liberalism is the American love that dare not speak its name.

† Supreme Court watchers parse every word out of the justices' mouths to predict which way rulings will break. Here's a quirky example from Law.com:

During oral arguments in a Sixth Amendment case heard at the Supreme Court (pdf) [last week] Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly referred to jailhouse informants by a more colloquial and pejorative term - one that might seem more likely to be used by inmates themselves than by prosecutors or judges. …

Ginsburg used variations of the word “snitch” a total of five times during the argument hour. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. picked up the term once, but it wasn't used by any of the arguing attorneys or the other justices - including Justice Antonin Scalia, from whom unorthodox language is perhaps more expected.

[N]one of the even more colorful synonyms for "snitch" - canary, fink, stool pigeon, rat - were heard at the Court.

† The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger ponders the meaning and implications of Rev. Rick Warren’s affirmation that “We celebrate a hingepoint of history with the inauguration of our first African American president of the United States” during his inaugural invocation:

It fell again to Pastor Warren to find - or create - the right word for the moment … My brief search for a definition of "hinge point" produced nothing, so we must await an official ruling from Bill Safire on the admissibility of Rev. Warren's historic neologism. But a hinge point suggests we may not know in which direction history may swing tomorrow.

† New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles discusses the symbolism and significance of the lyrics to the song “At Last,” to which the Obamas danced at all 10 official inaugural balls:

A good campaigner wields symbols deftly, and Mr. Obama chose brilliantly with “At Last.” It’s an adoring, slow-dance love song with a title that can evoke far more. Politicos can take it to mean the end of the Bush administration and the Democrats taking control. And Americans of all ethnicities can take it as a clear reference to Mr. Obama becoming the first African-American president: a decisive turning point in a history of slavery and racial discrimination. The song treats the moment not with self-righteousness or resentment, but as a long-awaited embrace: “Here we are in heaven/for you are mine at last.”

† Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, who moonlights as the chairman of the usage panel of “The American Heritage Dictionary,” explains why Chief Justice John Roberts mixed up the order of the words when he delivered the oath of office to Barack Obama:

Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully [emphasis, The Stiletto]. …

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? … [T]he wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. …

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. …

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb. 

For previous posts in the “Well-Chosen Words” series, please see the right-hand sidebar.