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Readers write: Copacetic colloquialisms, and profit over lives

Letters to the editor for the Feb. 22, 2021 weekly magazine. Readers discuss flapper slang and the cost of mismanaged healthcare systems.

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Staff
  • By Monitor readers Correspondent

Copacetic colloquialisms

Regarding “Flappers said ‘baloney!’ to idea that slang was for men” in the Dec. 14, 2020, Monitor Weekly: Oh, what fun memories Melissa Mohr’s column stirred up for me. I was born in the late 1920s, so I grew up hearing my folks and their friends use “flapper slang.” I figured it was just normal English. 

I’m now living in a large retirement building and will occasionally use “the cat’s pajamas” or “the bee’s knees” or “the cat’s meow” – which always makes someone say with delight, “Oh, I haven’t heard that for years!” 

In 1922, there was even “A Flapper’s Dictionary,” and that’s not “baloney!” Flapper slang is fun and refreshingly different from today’s colloquialisms. Right? Right.

Carolyn Hill
Portland, Oregon

Profit over lives

The article “Romanian documentary chases Oscar, and the truth” by Kit Gillet in the Dec. 14, 2020, Monitor Weekly keeps flashing through my mind as I read about ambulances lined up – sometimes for hours – outside Los Angeles hospitals. 

The failings of the Romanian health care system become painfully clear in “Collective,” which focused on the aftermath of a nightclub fire that killed 64 people in October 2015.

In another Romanian film, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (reviewed by Peter Rainer in the Monitor in 2006), an elderly man near death is taken from hospital to hospital as he searches for one that will admit him. The story illustrates that people in power are callously unwilling to improve health care systems.

That these two films were made more than a decade apart reinforces what Romanian health minister and “Collective” subject Vlad Voiculescu avers in his interview with the Monitor: How “so little has changed” and that “every minute spent to change this is a minute well spent, an investment in the things that really matter.”

It is a cautionary tale not only for Romania, but also the United States and any other countries that would prioritize profit and politics above the health of their population. 

Colleen McGovern
Englewood, Colorado

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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