“Keep your eye on the ball” has to be one of baseball’s most fundamental clichés in teaching batting skills, but it apparently doesn’t apply to the Texas Rangers, the ballclub I’ve followed assiduously, and painfully, for over 50 years.  This year’s team is loaded with powerful hitters who’ve won all sorts of batting awards (Silver Sluggers, world series MVPs, etc.) but they apparently like the balls pitched to them so much they don’t want to hurt them with their bats, for the “Strangers” currently own the absolute worst hitting stats in the major leagues.  “Eye on the ball,” indeed!  The game is enshrouded in cliches that have entered normal conversation.  For example, “rain check” “comes all the way from the 1880s,” according the MLB.com.  “Back then, if a game was canceled because of rain or other inclement weather, spectators would be given a ‘rain check’ or cancelled ticket stub that they could use for the postponed contest,” and “touch base” comes from “ballplayers needing to touch the base before the ball or tag gets there.”  The Villageidiom.org states that the expression “ballpark figure” is “rooted in the idea” that, since some people buy game tickets but don’t use them, so stadium officials “make rough estimates based on their judgement and experience.” And “in postgame interviews losing players often call on old chestnuts like “I’m just trying to help the ball club and give it my best shot” and  “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

Webster’s defines “cliché” as “anything that is so commonplace that it lacks freshness or offers nothing new in the way of interest or insight.”  Altalang.com (a company specializing in language resources for businesses) notes that the word “is a French term dating back to the early 19^th century that meant ‘to produce or print in stereotype.’  A stereotype was a printing plate used to create abundant versions of the same design.  Printers heard a ‘clicking’ sound during this process, which gave birth to the onomatopoeic word ‘cliché’.”  Altalang.com added origins of old clichés; “Dead as a doornail,” that Shakespeare and Dickens both used, stemmed from when “wooden doors used to be secured with doornails. After the nail was hammered through the door, the end would be bent and hammered back into the door. This process, known as ‘clenching a nail’ made it almost impossible to use the nail again. In order words, the doornail was dead.” 

Political clichés can wear thin mighty quickly.  For instance, during the 1864 mid-war presidential campaign, Abraham Lincoln warned “Don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream.”  Newer ones include George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway’s ill-advised “alternative facts.”  Let’s not overlook “woke.”  In “Reclaiming the Word ‘Woke’ as Part of African American Culture,” NAACP.org pointed out that “the words ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Woke’ have served as a call to action as conveyed by social activist Marcus Garvey who stated, ‘Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa’, and the Negro Mine Workers who in 1940 issued the statement, ‘We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on, in advocating against discriminatory pay.”  Webster’s defines “woke” as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice),” and it noted that conservatives have co-opted the term to mean “politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.”  Now the disparagement of “woke” has led to wide-spread banning and destruction of untold thousands of books dealing with non-white culture, history, and science including censoring of specific words, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, and even the DEI acronym.   Fortunately, owners of Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms know that DEI can also stand for the (so far) unforbidden terms “different, equal, and involved.”  Florida’s infamous “Stop WOKE Act” mandated the removal and destruction of thousands of books, mostly related to race, sexuality, culture, and history, and anything else the administration wants to eradicate from school, public, and academic libraries. Librarians trying to retain that information, and educators who teach anything to do with those broad subjects, just like they do in most other states, are literally criminalized.  This has happened before in our country.

The pro-slavery, anti-Catholic Nullifier Party of the 1830s, who argued that states could nullify federal law, helped bring about the Civil War.  The anti-immigrant Know Nothing party of the 1850s feared immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and especially Catholics.  The Know Nothings were officially named the American Party, but their members were required to say “I know nothing” when asked about their beliefs by outsiders, and “Know Nothings” stuck.  Their conspiracy theories alleged that Pope Pius IX wanted to destroy “liberty, democracy, and republicanism.”  This was during the presidency of James Buchanan, who famously and wrongly predicted that “history will vindicate my memory.”  His Wikipedia article notes, “historians have criticized Buchanan for his unwillingness or inability to act in the face of secession …. When scholars are surveyed, he ranks at or near the bottom in terms of vision/agenda-setting, domestic leadership, foreign policy leadership, moral authority, and positive historical significance of their legacy.  According to surveys taken by American scholars and political scientists between 1948 and 1982, Buchanan ranks every time among the worst presidents of the United States, ahead of Harding, Fillmore and Nixon.”  Fillmore’s ghost should rejoice since he’s fallen all the way to 7^th worst in the last January’s US News and World Reports annual “Worst President” article.  Now his third-place ranking has been awarded to a more recent holder of the office.

Pro-slavery anti-Catholic President Millard Fillmore (who assumed the presidency when President Zachary Taylor died after less than a year in office from gastroenteritis after over-indulging in “copious amounts of cherries and iced milk”) was a crypto Know Nothing, who refused to comment on the Know Nothing’s platform while running for reelection under the American Party banner and garnered 21.5 percent of the vote.  U.S. News and World Report ranked Fillmore as the third worst President ever, after James Buchanan and Taylor.  However, with his wife Abigail’s encouragement, Fillmore created the first White House Library. Previous presidents had brought their personal libraries with them to the White House and took them home when leaving office.  Fillmore had very little formal education and bettered himself as an adult by buying a share into a subscription library (very few truly public libraries existed then) and reading widely, and he retained a strong appreciation of libraries.  Were it still so.

Last week the current president fired Carla Hayden, the first woman and Black Librarian of Congress, a year before her term was to expire, despite the Library of Congress (LOC) being under Congress’ purvue, and replaced her with Todd Blanche, the attorney who unsuccessfully defended Trump when he was convicted of 34 felonies and has limited, if any, library experience and none at running one, especially one of the largest in the world.  The LOC is not just any library; it preserves 178.2 million items and adds 10,000 new items to its vast collections every working day.  It’s our nation’s most significant knowledge bank, but, since the administration has orchestrated the purging of anything addressing Black and other minorities’ culture and history, and most federally owned libraries have already been “sanitized,” the odds are good that many of the LOC’s holdings are not going to survive the purges of the anti-Woke vigilantes’ poison scrutiny.  It’s a downright shame that the current administration refuses to follow President Ronald Reagan’s advice: “to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allow people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”   Maybe, and it’s a shaky maybe, Congress will react and protect their Library.  A recent Politico article by Katherin Tully-McManus, “GOP Leaders Draw the Line at Trump’s Library of Congress Takeover,” stated that “While they have not challenged Trump’s abrupt firing last week of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, they have questioned his power to name an acting successor and other library officials.”  She added there has been “quiet but firm resistance from Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune,” but that’s an overstatement.  Nonetheless, “Some rank-and-file Republicans are openly questioning how much control Trump or any president ought to have over an arm of Congress,” and “Under federal law, the president is empowered to nominate the librarian of Congress subject to Senate confirmation. But the library’s authorizing statute, which sets out a 10-year term for the top official, is silent on how they might be fired or replaced in an interim capacity.”  As Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “It’s not the president’s librarian, it’s Congress’s librarian.”  It behooves all who love the free flow of information more than the administration’s whims to follow the advice of Collins Dictionary who defines the cliché “on the ball” as being “very alert and aware of what is happening.”