For many issues, people who have strong political beliefs will have predictable opinions. If you’re an American conservative, you will (probably) be opposed to efforts to raise taxes, because you like small government. If you’re an American liberal, you will (probably) want to increase spending on education, because you believe in the government using its power to help the populace at large.[1]
But sometimes an individual’s political opinion—or the collective opinion of one side or the other—isn’t entirely explainable by examining their ideology. Suppose that in your town, there’s a proposal to build a memorial to the town founder. Do conservatives support this idea? What about liberals?
This is a question that can be examined objectively. What will it cost? What value is there to the townspeople? But there’s an excellent chance that the conservatives’ and liberals’ opinions about the proposed memorial will depend not on these objective criteria, but on a simpler one: who proposed it. If it was proposed by a conservative town council, many liberals will find themselves opposed to the idea. If it was proposed by a liberal mayor, many conservatives will grumble.
This notion is familiar, but not long ago I ran across a term for it: Cleek’s Law. This was originally formulated in a comment by a certain “cleek” on the balloon-juice site. The proposal was to summarize modern conservatism, and Cleek came up with the formula ~liberal, or as they explained, “today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.” Although Cleek’s formulation was aimed at conservatism, it applies to both sides of a political divide. It is, in effect, a variation of an old Groucho Marx line: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” (video)
Cleek’s Law is one reason that bipartisanship seems to have become impossible in the current political climate. There is probably no proposal that can come out of the Trump administration that would meet with wide approval from liberals. And we saw something similar with the Obama administration, where proposals were not weighed by conservatives on their merits, but were assumed to be bad because they came from Obama. Take deficits. They’re bad if the other side runs them up. School vouchers? Tax reform? Covid measures? We might think we’re being objective in formulating our thoughts about these things, but it wouldn’t hurt to consider whether our opinions aren’t just the result of Cleek’s Law.
On to origins. Not far from our place is a city facility (Parks Department, I think) that has a Quonset hut on it. This is a structure that’s made of metal in the shape of an inverted half-circle:
I was pleased with myself that I knew what this was called, but I realized I had no idea why it was called a Quonset hut. (Well, I got the hut part.) My first guess is that it was named for someone named Quonset, although I’d never heard of anyone with that name.
But that’s not entirely off the mark. The Quonset hut was invented in its current form during WWII by a company that made them for the US Navy. (“Invented” here means, as with a lot of technology, “improved an earlier design of”; the inspiration was the Nissen hut originally designed by the British in WWI.) The name Quonset hut is a toponym, a word based on a place: the Navy first put these things up at a naval station at Quonset Point, Rhode Island.[2] The word Quonset is from the indigenous language spoken earlier in the area (Algonquin) that means “small, long place,” or so I read.
The capitalization of Quonset is explainable by its origins in the place name. But it turns out that Quonset is also a trademark. Or it was, anyway; it appears to have been cancelled in 2016. Perhaps the term will start being downcased over time.
Quonset huts have some features that make them attractive for things like Parks Department storage. They’re premanufactured, hence quick to put up, and their design gives them structural strength. They also have no internal structural elements (poles, walls), so you can use all the space that’s enclosed by the metal. I suppose it’s fairly clear what the disadvantages might be, like if you’re sleeping on a cot near a wall and are startled awake. Or what your HOA probably has to say about putting one up in your backyard. But another advantage of Quonset huts is that they’re portable, so when you get tired of the HOA telling you what to do with your hut, you can just pack it up and move it to your next home.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] Political ideologies simplified for purposes of this exercise.
[2] This is the part where many folks in the northeastern US say “duh, everyone knows that.” 🙂