Just a few.
I should make clear that these "From the Email Bag" posts also include material from the comment threads at Unz.com, whither the monthly Diary and extracts from the Radio Derb transcript are cross-posted.
In my September Diary I confessed that I had never,until that month, encountered the word "allocution."
Several readers emailed in to tell me that it is a legal term of art. One such — a prosecutor! — excused me thus:
No shame in not recognizing it. As far as I can tell it's only used in a legal context.
When a defendant in a criminal case agrees to plead guilty he will be required to "allocute" in open court prior to the judge accepting his guilty plea. I.e., the prosecutor will lead the defendant through the facts of what he did; the defendant must affirm under oath that he actually did the acts that comprise the crime that he's agreeing he's guilty of. If both the prosecutor and the judge are satisfied the guilty plea is accepted.
This is to ensure that the defendant can't later say he didn't really understand the "big words" and the technical legal mumbo-jumbo and that he's really innocent.
An appellate court will overturn a guilty plea as a violation of Due Process if it finds the defendant's "allocution" was insufficiently detailed.
I'm not as well read as you, but I've never heard the word in any other context.
Now that's soothing, and I feel much better about myself. Thanks to that reader and all others who set me straight on "allocution." I have to ask, though: If it's a legal term of art, why isn't it in Latin?
On my adventure into facial surgery, a sharp-eyed reader at Unz.com wondered:
Derb: I am curious why there is an incision on your cheek as a result of
removing or addressing a cm2 of tissue from your nose.
Yes: Before engaging with Dr Dagum I had assumed that the patch to replace that nose tissue would be taken from somewhere else on my body — back of the neck, I vaguely remembered hearing from somewhere.
That can indeed be done. However, there is a sub-category of facial reconstruction that can be accomplished by artfully rearranging the existing facial skin.
See here, from which:
Your surgeon may repair the defect with a flap, which is a section of skin or tissue from a nearby area cut away, stretched and then moved to cover the defect. Or, you may require a skin graft, which involves a patch of skin removed from another part of the body and grafted onto the defect.
Having characterized colossal anti-white propagandist Ashleigh Shackelford (the lady pictured below) as a "land whale" in the October Diary, I then, in the next paragraph, referred to her as Moby Dick.
A reader emailed in to chide me for that. Moby Dick, he pointed out, was white.
You got me, Sir.
In the November 5th Radio Derb I had a half-segment on Chinese intellectual Wang Huning, subject of a much-noted October 11th article at the Palladium website.
Listeners are asking me where they can get an English translation of Wang's 1991 book America Against America. Easy: You can read it for nothing at Unz.com.
The Unz Review is a wonderful free resource for oddities like this: books and periodicals you can find elsewhere only with difficulty, or not at all. Ron Unz deserves some kind of national award or honor for what he has accomplished there.
