The I's Have It

February 24, 2009

By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER and STEWART KELLERMAN, from http://www.nytimes.com/

WHEN President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics.
Grammar junkies.
Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.”
The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use “I” as a subject and “me” as an object, whether the pronoun appears by itself or in a twosome. Thus every “I” in those quotes ought to be a “me.”
So should the president go stand in a corner of the Oval Office (if he can find one) and contemplate the error of his ways? Not so fast.
For centuries, it was perfectly acceptable to use either “I” or “me” as the object of a verb or preposition, especially after “and.” Literature is full of examples. Here’s Shakespeare, in “The Merchant of Venice”: “All debts are cleared between you and I.” And here’s Lord Byron, complaining to his half-sister about the English town of Southwell, “which, between you and I, I wish was swallowed up by an earthquake, provided my eloquent mother was not in it.”
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that language mavens began kvetching about “I” and “me.” The first kvetch cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage came from a commencement address in 1846. In 1869, Richard Meade Bache included it in his book “Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech.”
Why did these 19th-century wordies insist “I” is “I” and “me” is “me”? They were probably influenced by Latin, with its rigid treatment of subject and object pronouns. For whatever reason, their approach stuck — at least in the rule books.
Then, why do so many scofflaws keep using “I” instead of “me”? Perhaps it’s because they were scolded as children for saying things like “Me want candy” instead of “I want candy,” so they began to think “I” was somehow more socially acceptable. Or maybe it’s because they were admonished against “it’s me.” Anybody who’s had “it is I” drummed into his head is likely to avoid “me” on principle, even when it’s right. The term for this linguistic phenomenon is “hypercorrection.”
A related crime that Mr. Obama stands accused of is using “myself” to dodge the “I”-versus-“me” issue, as when he spoke last November of “a substantive conversation between myself and the president.” The standard practice here is to use “myself” for emphasis or to refer to the speaker (“I’ll do it myself”), not merely as a substitute for “me.” But some language authorities accept a looser usage, and point out that “myself” has been regularly used in place of “me” since Anglo-Saxon days.
Our 44th president isn’t the first occupant of the White House to suffer from pronounitis. Nos. 43 and 42 were similarly afflicted. The symptoms: “for Laura and I,” “invited Hillary and I,” and so on. (For the record, Nos. 41 and 40 had no problem with the objective case, regularly using “Barbara and me” or “Nancy and me” when appropriate.)
But an educated speaker is expected to keep his pronouns in line. Here, then, is a tip, Mr. President. Nobody chooses the wrong pronoun when it’s standing on its own. If you’re tempted to say “for Michelle and I” in tonight’s speech, just mentally omit Michelle (sorry, Mrs. Obama), and you’ll get it right. And no one will get on your case.

Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman are the authors of the forthcoming “Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.”

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.
By Jonathan Jarvis.

This project was completed as part of Jonathan Jarvis' thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Visit jdjarvis.com


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Full Transcript:

It’s a worldwide financial fiasco involving the terms you’ve probably heard like sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, frozen credit markets and credit default swaps. Who’s affected? Everyone.
How did it happen? Here’s how. The credit crisis brings two groups of people together: home owners and investors. Home owners represent their mortgages and investors represent their money. These mortgages represent houses and this money represents large institutions like pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign funds, mutual funds, etc. These groups are brought together through the financial system, a bunch of banks and brokers commonly known as Wall Street. Although it may not seem like it, these banks on Wall Street are closely connected to these houses on Main Street.
To understand how, let’s start at the beginning. Years ago, the investors are sitting on their pile of money looking for a good investment to turn into more money. Traditionally, they go to the US Federal Reserve where they buy Treasury Bills, believed to be the safest investment but on the wake of the dot.com bust and September 11th, Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan lowers interest rate to only 1% to keep the economy strong. 1% is a very low return on investment so the investors say “no, thanks.”
On the flipside, this means banks on Wall Street can borrow from the Fed for only 1%. Add to that general surpluses from Japan, China and the Middle East and there’s an abundance of cheap credit. This makes borrowing money easy for banks and causes them to go crazy with…leverage.
Leverage is borrowing money to amplify the outcome of a deal. Here’s how it works: in a normal deal someone with $10,000 dollars buys a box for $10,000 dollars, even sells them to someone else for $11,000 dollars for a $1,000-dollar profit, a good deal. But using leverage, someone with $10,000 dollars would go borrow $990,000 more dollars, giving him $1,000,000 in hand. Then he goes and buys 100 boxes with his $1,000,000 dollars and sells them to someone else for $1,100,000 dollars. Then he pays back his $990,000 plus $10,000 in interest, and after his initial $10,000, he’s left with a $90,000-dollar profit versus the other guy’s $1,000. Leverage turns good deals into great deals. This is a major way banks make their money.
So Wall Street takes out a ton of credit, makes great deals and grows tremendously rich and then pays it back. The investors see this and want a piece of the action and this gives Wall Street an idea: They can connect the investors to the home owners through mortgages. Here’s how it works: a family wants a house so they save for a down payment and contact the mortgage broker. The mortgage broker connects the family to a lender who gives them a mortgage; the broker makes a nice commission. The family buys a house, becomes home owners. This is great for them because housing prices have been rising practically forever, everything works out nicely.
One day, the lender gets a call from an investment banker who wants to buy the mortgage; the lender sells it to him for a very nice fee, the investment banker then borrows millions of dollars and buys thousands more mortgages and puts them into a nice little box. This means that every month he gets the payment from the home owners of all the mortgages in the box, and then he fixes his banker wizards on it to work their financial magic which is basically cutting it into three slices: “Safe, Ok and Risky”. They pack the slices back up in the box and call it the collateralized debt obligation or CDO. A CDO works like three cascading trays: as money comes in the top tray fills first then spills over into the middle and whatever is left into the bottom, the money comes from home owners paying off their mortgages. If some owners don’t pay and default on their mortgage, less money comes in and the bottom tray may not get filled. This makes the bottom tray riskier and the top tray safer. To compensate for the higher risk, the bottom tray receives a higher rate of return while the top receives a lower but still nice return. To make the top even safer, banks will insure it for a small fee called the credit default swap. The banks do all this work so the credit rating agencies will stamp the top slice as a safe triple-A rated investment, the highest safest investment there is. The OK slice is triple B, still pretty good and they don’t bother to rate the riskiest slice. Because of the triple-A rating, the investment banker can sell the safe slice to the investors who only want safe investments; he sells the ok slice to other bankers and the risky slices to hedge funds or other risk takers. The investment banker makes millions, he then repays this loans. Finally the investors have found a good investment for their money, much better than the 1% Treasury Bills.
They’re so pleased that they want more CDO slices so the investment banker calls up the lender wanting more mortgages, the lender calls up the broker for more home owners but the broker can’t find anyone. Everyone that qualifies for a mortgage already has one. But they have an idea: when home owners default on their mortgage, the lender gets the house and houses are always increasing in value. Since they’re covered in the home owners default, lenders can start adding risk to new mortgages not requiring down payments, no proof of income, no documents at all and that’s exactly what they did. So instead of lending to responsible home owners called prime mortgages, they started to get, well, less responsible. These are sub-prime mortgages.
This is the turning point. So just like always, the mortgage broker connects the family with the lender and the mortgage, making his commission. The family buys a big house. The lender sells the mortgage to the investment banker who turns it into a CDO and sells slices to the investors and others. This actually works out nicely for everyone and makes them all rich. No one was worried because as soon as they sold the mortgage to the next guy, it was his problem. If the home owners went to default, they didn’t care; they were selling off their risk to the next guy and making millions, like playing hot potato with a time bomb. Not surprisingly, the home owners default on their mortgage which at this moment is owned by the banker. This means forecloses on one of his monthly payment turns into a house. No big deal, he puts it up for sale but more and more his monthly payments turn into houses. Now there are so many houses for sale in the market creating more supply than there is demand and housing prices aren’t rising anymore, in fact, they plummet.
This creates an interesting problem for home owners still paying their mortgages: as all the houses in their neighborhood go up for sale, the value of their house goes down and they start to wonder why they’re paying back the $300,000-dollar mortgage when the house is now worth only $90,000 dollars. They decide that it doesn’t make sense to continue paying even though they can afford to, and they walk away from their house. Default rates sweep the country and prices plummet. Now the investment banker is basically holding a box full of worthless houses. He calls up his buddy the investor to sell his CDO but the investor isn’t stupid and says “no, thanks”. He knows that the stream of money isn’t even a dripper anymore. The banker tries to sell to everyone but nobody wants to buy his bomb. He’s freaking out because he borrowed millions, sometimes billions of dollars to buy this bomb and he can’t pay it back. Whatever he tries, he can’t get rid of it.
But he’s not the only one: the investors have already bought thousands of these bombs. The lender calls up trying to sell his mortgage but the banker won’t buy it and the broker is out of work. The whole financial system is frozen and things get dark…
Everybody starts going bankrupt. But that’s not all: the investor calls up the home owner and tells him that his investments are worthless. And you can begin to see how the crisis flows in a cycle. Welcome to the crisis of credit.

You bet!

"You bet" is an expression that means 'certainly', 'absolutely', 'of course', 'surely'.


"Are you coming to the party?"

"You bet!"

deal with

Do business with someone. Take care of a problem. Manage a situation.

I prefer to deal with her if possible
I like dealing with this company
How would you deal with this problem?
The committee will deal with this problem
She has to deal with difficult customers at work
How to deal with depression?
Tips for dealing with difficult people

on a roll

When you go through a period of success or good luck. Also when you talk nonstop for a period of time.

Don't stop me now. I'm on a roll.

Things are going great for Larry. He's on a roll now.

We won five games in a row and it was obvious we were on a roll.

She's been on a roll since taking that course on sales techniques.

Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

An interview with Stewart Friedman, Professor, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
From harvardbusiness.org



Interview transcript:

Hello I’m Paul Michael, director of content for harvardbusiness.org and I’m delighted to be joined today by Stew Freedman. Stew, is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Be a better leader, have a richer life” and the book “Total Leadership”.


PM: Stew thanks for joining us today.

SF: Thanks for having me Paul, great to be here.

PM: Our pleasure. Ok our goal for today is to help our audience become better leaders by simultaneously excelling in four areas of their life, work, home, community and self.

SF: Right.

PM: So let’s begin by allowing me to play devil's advocate. We’re talking about work here. Why do we care about the other three areas?

SF: Why care about your family, the society and your private self, your mind and body and spirit when your primary focus is work? Well, the most important reason is that these other parts of your life affect your work so how things are going at work when your private sphere of mind, body and spirit and your sense of contribution to society or to your friendship networks, your social groups, all that affects your performance at work. And one of the things that we’ve found is that the more you can bring the whole person in, the more energy, the more productivity, the more commitment, loyalty and focus you’ll have at work. So it makes business sense to account for the whole person’s interests and passions.

PM: Is that we’re talking about here your work-life balance or there’s something more to it than that?

SF: A lot of people talk about work-life balance. Many more people today than when I’ve first started addressing this issue twenty years ago in my first summer …. and it’s become a very present issue in many different sectors of our society and abroad and there’s a lot of important reasons for that. But balance is the wrong metaphor.

Balance is the wrong metaphor because it implies trade-offs, it implies that you’ve got to give up one part of your life to have success in another part. And what I want to encourage people to do, is to see the possibility of what I call 'four-way wins' which requires that you use leadership to better integrate the different parts of your life, all four, work, home, community and self; and to generate the support that you need from the key people around you for making change, creating meaningful, sustainable change in how, where and when you get things done so that is better for you and better for the different people in the different parts of your life. And what I find is that when you do that, when you take an approach that is not about trading off or balancing but rather integrating in an intelligent way that fits your life, your world: that actually works.

PM: So help me out here. I, like a lot of members of our audience, I’m sure was brought up with a mentality that these are bad trade-offs but you do have to be willing to sacrifice in one area to excel in another. So let’s get specific here. Help us understand how to take that lead to this new mentality.

SF: It starts with being real which means understanding what really matters to you. There are really a couple of really fun and interesting ways of doing that: looking at your core values, looking at your future, what’s the legacy you want to leave for the world twenty years hence. What are the most important parts of your life today in terms of work, home, community and self? So you take the 'four-way view' and see which of these parts are really most important to me and where do I focus my time and attention and how are things going in each of the different domains. So all that is part of being real, what really matters.

The second piece be whole is about understanding the needs and interests. What I call the performance expectations of the key stakeholders, the most important people in your life. See, you think about and write about who the most important people are and what your mutual expectations are, at work, in the community and for yourself in terms of your own mental health, physical health and spiritual growth and development and leisure. And see, you have a new perspective on where now can I create sustainable change? Where now can I experiment with how to bring the different parts together in a way that produces a four-way win? so that’s a third part: the innovator.

Act with creativity by experimenting with how you do things and so the fun part is experimenting. So, what kind of experiments do people do? Well, they range from changing the where and when of getting things done, what I call time-shifting or replacing, working at home a day a week for example, or in a more micro scale, focus on concentrating experiments where you ah…shut off your Blackberry from the hours of 6 to 10 pm a couple of nights a week, and see what benefit that brings for the different domains of your life, the different areas, or there’s the example that I write about in the article…ah a man who was new to his community and was working in a financial services company, wanted to become a high potential for executive promotion in his company and also wanted to join a community board that would involve his fiancée who is very interested in community service activities and would also connect him more closer with his sister who is a special education teacher so his experiment was to join this community board and to extend his network in a professional context in the community. Of course the bank saw that as it was good for them and it was also good for his family as well as for himself and his community. So those are some examples.

PM: Great, we’ve got something here and begins with introspection, reflection, discussion with others, finding that gap between who you are, who you want to be, and experimentation.

SF: Right, so when I talk to people months and years down the road about what they take away from this process. It’s less about the impact of a particular experiment than it is on their capacity to lead change in all the different parts of their life. And that’s really a primary goal of this approach.

PM: Stew Freedman, thanks very much.

SF: Thank you.

To learn more about how to put Stew’s ideas into practice you can visit his website totalleadership.org

RAT RACE

A way of life in modern society, characterized by people competing with each other for power and money.

The rat race is a term often used to describe work, particularly excessive work. In general terms, if one works too much, one is in the rat race.


He decided to get out of the rat race, and went to work on a farm.

I'd love to get out of the rat race and buy a house in some remote part of the countryside.

He is tired of living in the rat race every day and plans to quit his job soon and do something else.

New York Times Backstory: Bolivia's lithium reserves

New York Times' Simón Romero on Bolivia's massive reserve of lithium, the mineral needed to power electric vehicles.

This is Backstory, a daily conversation with New York Times reporters on the stories they’re covering. I’m Jane Bornemeier, editor of New York Times Radio. Today I’m talking to Simón Romero about Bolivia and its new found strategic grandeur as the owner of almost half the world’s supply of lithium. Lithium of course is the mineral that’s needed to power the batteries of the next generation’s electric vehicles.

JB: Simón thanks so much for talking to me today.

SR: Jane it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JB: Did Bolivia just now hop upon this knowledge that it has this large store of lithium?

SR: Well, actually this history of Bolivia’s lithium reserves is fascinating. It goes back years, in fact, decades. Back in the early 90’s there was a sort of original frenzy around the lithium reserves and there was a concession that was extended to an American company called Lithco at the time and it didn’t quite turn out as expected. There was a national opposition to developing these reserves at that time and it lied dormant, and while that happened other countries moved forward to tap their own reserves like Chile and Argentina and also China with a large salt flat in Tibet, so now Bolivia is really realizing that is playing catch-up.

JB: And what prompted the country to change its mind to...I guess...how to deal with lithium?

SR: Well, the market conditions have evolved incredibly quickly in the past year or so, with a lot of attention on the electric car industry and developing batteries that can store more power using lithium. You have companies like GM, Ford, BMW, Mitsubishi that are fast developing, you know, electric car prototypes that’ll be available in the market in about a year so those cars present a huge new market opportunity for countries with lithium reserves to develop them and to provide them to the automobile industry.

JB: Where exactly in Bolivia do these reserves lie? Are there in mountains areas? I mean... how do you extract lithium?

SR: Ha! It’s an incredibly, remote and beautiful place in Bolivia where the lithium is found. It’s a place called Salar de Uyuni and it’s a salt desert, an incredibly big salt desert which I believe I think to be the world’s largest salt flat. You have to drive about 11 hours from La Paz to southern Bolivia. It’s a really, a stunning drive in some ways, you know, along dirt roads and you end up in a tiny little town called Uyuni, and then you drive more, you drive two more hours you know into the salt flat onto the margin of the salt desert and they’re building a facility there, where they’re processing the lithium or they hope to process the lithium by the end of this year. This is a place that’s incredibly underdeveloped, you know, up until know, there are still people who live there extracting the salt, earning next to nothing. Some of them are Quechua-speaking Indians and they…they actually, you know, carry back salt blocks that they put on llama caravans and they take to warmer regions to trade for maize. So the development of the lithium industry, if it materializes, is likely to change life a lot in that part of Bolivia.

JB: And just to be sure it’s clear, the lithium is extracted, it’s a metal, it’s extracted from the ground?

SR: That’s right, it’s a metal, it’s a mineral and you have to mine it from under the salt flat. It’s in a brine apparently, and it’s not a simple process and it’s not an inexpensive process either. Apparently the altitude in Bolivia makes it even more difficult so it really, you know, remains to be seen whether Bolivia can quickly develop the expertise and have the resources to create a large lithium producing and processing industry.

JB: Well, that kind of leaves a question I was going to ask you which is... Is this going to be done by a private industry in Bolivia or is the government involved in some way or who would actually do this work?

SR: Well, you know, that’s really a key question. In the past year there’s been a real nationalist sentiment building around the lithium resource in Bolivia. You have the creation of this pivot plat to start tapping the lithium reserve in the Salar de Uyuni and you have a state mining corporation that is really taking care of that project. Sort of in the background through all of this you have a handful of private companies, you have Mitsubishi and Sumitomo of Japan, you have Bolloré of France that apparently met with Bolivian government with the hope of eventually taking part in the extracting process or perhaps taking part in industrializing the lithium or processing it or making batteries from it. There’s certainly a lot of interest of the private sector but certainly it’s not entirely clear what type of role they can play and, you know, one has to remember that Bolivia is going through a great deal of political change at this point. You know, Bolivian President Evo Morales is a nationalist, you know, he’s just easily had a new Constitution approved that expands the state’s power to a certain grade of control over certain parts of the economy. He’s nationalized the oil and gas industry, he’s creating a new national airline, he’s just created a new daily newspaper that’s controlled by the government so it seems that Bolivia would really like to control this resource on its own if it could.

JB: Are lithium stores thought to be being depleted elsewhere in the world? Is that what makes Bolivia’s supply of lithium so much more important?

SR: Well, you know, according to United States geological survey, you know, Bolivia has the largest reserve base in the world, about half of the lithium everywhere. You have other countries with large lithium reserves such as Chile, Argentina, there’s China, there’s…you know a couple of smaller reserves in places like Zimbabwe, Brazil and of course a much tinier amount in the United States itself which it’s long been the world’s largest lithium producer up until recently. So that is, you know you just have a limited number of countries with, you know, accessible lithium deposits and one of those countries is Bolivia of course and it happens to be one of the poorest, least developed countries in Latin America and, you know, going through sort of this revolutionary process of change and, you know, it’s really going to be interesting to see how it works out for them.

JB: Simón thanks so much for your time.

SR: Sure Jane, it’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

And that was The Times’ Simón Romero on the nascent lithium industry that may mean a brighter future for Bolivia. For New York Times Radio I’m Jane Bornemeier. I’ll be back again tomorrow with another edition of Backstory. To subscribe to the Backstory Podcast go to nytimes.com/podcast and you can also find us on iTunes.