The Year in Double Takes.

AuthorOlson, Walter

Did they really say that?

This column is being written at year's end, a good time to round up the unused highlights from the past 12 months' file of double takes--news stories I had to recheck because it seemed so unlikely that they were real, along with quotes that left me wondering, "Could anybody have meant to say that?"

We may as well start our tour in Ontario, where last fall The Boston Globe and other newspapers reported a new milestone in sensitivity: The Central Experimental Farm, a government-run farm museum, had decided to stop giving cows human names like Elsie and Bessie because such names "might give offense to women." Said museum director Genevieve Ste.-Marie: "Some people are...sensitive to finding their name on an animal. I am, for example. Let's say you came in and found your name on a cow, and you thought the cow was and ugly." Names like Clover, Rhubarb, and Buttercup were still deemed OK, with borderline cases such as Daisy being decided on a "cow-by-cow basis." (Also cited as acceptable was "Bossy.") After a flood of comment came in from an astounded public, virtually none of it supportive of the policy, the museum reversed itself.

From Britain, meanwhile, comes a fresh advance in the ever-popular art of grousing about how modern technology has wrecked an idealized past. You've already heard ad infinitum about how the structure of modern life artificially isolates us all and destroys family and community togetherness, what with all those one- and two-child families, sprawling suburbs, and auto-based work patterns, to say nothing of the nature-defying evils of biotechology and the accursed Internet. But now British writer Peter Hitchens, in his new book The Abolition of Britain, identifies an even more sinister culprit to be added to the list. "The spread of central heating and double glazing," he writes, "has allowed even close-knit families to avoid each other's company in well-warmed houses, rather than huddling round a single hearth forced into unwanted companionship, and so compelled to adapt to each other's foibles and become more social, less selfish beings." Hitchens, whose brother is the better-known leftist writer Christopher Hitchens, is a Tory and traditionalist conservative from whom much is clearly going to be heard in the future (about the past).

What is it, anyway, with these British conservatives? Noted history writer Paul Johnson (Modern Times, A History of the American People) boasts a considerable...

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