Back here on the trailing edge, some may be slow to react to the ever changing pattern of news. So forgive me if it's a bit late in the day (as it were) for commenting on immigration to the USA. I won't bore you with all the facts that demonstrate – and theories that postulate – that everyone in any of the Americas is an immigrant. Let's take that as a given. But let's not take as a given that the USA was built without opportunism and imperialism, OK? The French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, all fought each other and themselves for the spoils. And many of the earlier immigrants, from the North American plains tribes to the Incas, used the imperialist Europeans to help them fight each other (poor choice of allies, but oh well...).

So nobody was any rose, OK? At least not when it comes to opportunism and imperialism. And I can't see that – since then – any of us has learned much from our own experience or that of our forebears. Scratch that, we appear to have learned a lot, but maybe mostly the wrong lessons. At least, I can't see that I've studied up very much on what our religions and ethical belief systems appear to value of human behavior. At least not when it comes to practicing what those systems say about human rights or free enterprise economy. I reject human slavery while buying products made in sweat shops in countries where workers earn pennies a day – and buying them from US transportation and retail sales enterprises that cheat their employees out of the basic worker rights, which U.S. laws are supposed to assure. I buy – and tout – healthy, organically grown food while realizing that, if the whole world produced food that way, half the world would starve even faster than it is now. I whine about having to pay more than $1,000 per month for health insurance for a family of two while most of the U.S. population has little or no access to that care. And while we argue about the small percentage of illegal aliens who should or shouldn't have access to healthcare, instead of arguing about whether U.S. citizens should have that access.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world seems divided into the more-healthy-than-the-average-US-citizen (case in point: all other things being equal, a baby born in Cuba is more likely to survive its first year of life than a baby born in the USA) and the mortally unhealthy. I could go on, but it's too depressing. The readership would dwindle. (What readership?) Perhaps this all goes without saying anyway, given that our ancestors were all human...up to a point...and so are we.

It just seems to me that it's pretty cheeky of some of us to decide that our rights, morals, or antecedents are any better than those of any of the rest of us. Or that we have a right to refuse something of someone who snuck across a barren, dangerous piece of ground (and whose ancestors may have been on this continent the longest – or not) based on the idea that our desire to own and acquire more than that sneaking someone has is more "right" than that someone's desire to own and acquire more than another someone who didn't try a risky exodus. This kind of thinking is not only cheeky, it's confusing. Which someone was I?

Never mind, here's a new definition for the Trailing Edge Dictionary, used with permission of the email author, origin uncertain:
'From: Cat Bieber
'Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--erg
'Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/erg.html
'This word [erg] spawned a great one-line joke that I heard often while in school at MIT: the lesser known "arg" which is "the unit of work done incorrectly"...'
Another comment on that week's words (see http://wordsmith.org/) had to do with standardization, which the Trailing Edge Dictionary defines as, "the practice of forcing everyone in a given discipline to use the terminology, processes, and basic concepts that I learned in Graduate School." One query was whether the use of "erg" is acceptable when there is a standard, the Joule ("a rose by any other name...," said Jouliet, but I digress, and I have no energy left to ergue about it).