title: Ben Cousins

text: "It's quite a special time for the club and it's probably worth $1 million to WA footy as a minimum I would think... The performances of Chris and Ben assist us in raising more money for WA football and their contribution is just outstanding. They're marquee players and, apart from everything else that happens with them, they are extremely beneficial for all West Australians."


title: Ben Cousins

text: West Coast lost the 2005 Grand Final to Sydney by four points, but as well as his Brownlow win, Cousins was awarded another West Coast Best and Fairest and the players' Most Valuable Player award, with 159 votes compared to runner-up Matthew Pavlich's 99 votes. He was runner-up to Barry Hall in the coaches' player of the year award, and in statistics, had 612 disposals, 24 goals, and ranked in the top five of the league in nine of the 12 categories.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In February 2006, Cousins resigned his captaincy after an off-field incident where he fled a booze bus. In May 2006, he signed a new three-year contract with West Coast, and in September 2006, West Coast won the Grand Final, defeating Sydney by one point. Cousins was suspended indefinitely by West Coast on 20 March 2007 after missing two training sessions. It was later confirmed that Cousins had a substance abuse problem.


title: Ben Cousins

text: After returning from four weeks of rehabilitation in Malibu, California, for substance abuse, Cousins was offered an amended contract by West Coast, rumoured to contain strict conditions such as repaying the cost of rehab and undertaking regular drug tests. On 29 June 2007, Cousins was given clearance by the AFL to resume training with the West Coast Eagles, which he did the following Monday. However, he injured a hamstring in training, delaying his comeback until West Coast's home game against Sydney on 21 July at Subiaco Oval. He gained 38 disposals and six marks in the game, inspiring West Coast's win.


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 16 October 2007, Cousins' car was stopped in Northbridge and searched. He was arrested for drug possession and refusing to submit to a blood test. The Eagles sacked him the next day, which meant that he was no longer a registered AFL player. On 19 November, he was banned from playing senior football for 12 months by the AFL Commission for "bringing the game into disrepute", and was formally delisted by West Coast on 30 November. Eagles officials said that he would never appear in an Eagles guernsey again, and AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou said it would be "extremely difficult" for him to ever return to the AFL.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In November 2008, the AFL Commission cleared Cousins to play AFL football in 2009. The Commission ruled that Cousins must submit to regular drug tests, including urine testing up to three times per week and hair testing up to four times annually. Cousins attended drug testing in early November with no body hair long enough to sample.


title: Ben Cousins

text: Several teams showed an interest in drafting Cousins for 2009, including Collingwood Football Club, St Kilda Football Club and Brisbane Lions. Collingwood sent a private investigator to Perth to follow Cousins for several days. After meeting with Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police Christine Nixon in October 2008, Collingwood announced that they would not draft Cousins. In November, after reviewing Cousins and consulting stakeholders for five months, St Kilda said they would not draft him. The day before the national draft, Brisbane issued a media release that said they would not be drafting Cousins. On 29 November 2008, Cousins was not selected in the AFL National Draft.


title: Ben Cousins

text: Ahead of the AFL Pre-season Draft in December 2008, Richmond Football Club approached the AFL Commission for approval to move injured senior player Graham Polak to its rookie list in order to obtain a second draft pick in the pre-season draft, which it said it would use to select Cousins. The AFL Commission had given approval to Essendon two years earlier to do similar with Adam Ramanauskas during his battle with cancer. The commission, with the support of the AFLPA and most of the clubs, denied Richmond's request. However, Richmond selected Cousins with its only Pre-season Draft selection (#6 overall) on 16 December. Following this Richmond received an influx of new club members and Cousins trained with the team the following day in front of a crowd of around 2,000. In Richmond's Round 1 game against Carlton on 26 March, Cousins strained his hamstring during the final quarter. He played a game with the Coburg Football Club in the Victorian Football League before returning to the AFL in Round 7 against Brisbane.


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 17 August 2010, after weeks of speculation by the media, Cousins announced his retirement in front of his family and huge crowd. During the speech, he thanked everyone who had assisted him during his career, acknowledged his encounters with drugs and the law, and apologised to his family for the situation he had put them in:


title: Ben Cousins

text: I'll always regret what I've put my family through. There's a lot of shame and regret. People wonder why I haven't broken down or shed a tear (in public). My tears are something that I hold close to me; they're for me and my family.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In 1997, Cousins took part in an education campaign for the WA Asthma Foundation. During his first year in the AFL, Cousins said his chest often felt tight and he had difficulty playing, "but if I monitored my asthma correctly and took the right medication, I was able to overcome those effects". In 1999, he had a mild asthma attack while warming up for a game against Melbourne, then fainted while at a restaurant after the game. West Coast's football manager, Rod Lester-Smith, said Cousins may have been affected by asthma, low blood pressure from playing the game earlier, and a corked leg that caused some internal bleeding. He was taken to Murdoch Hospital and recovered quickly.


title: Ben Cousins

text: West Coast coach Ken Judge was told by a Perth detective in 2001 that Cousins and two of his teammates may have been using illegal drugs. Judge passed this information on to the club's administration but no action was taken.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In September 2002, Cousins punched teammate Daniel Kerr at the club's best and fairest award celebrations, after an argument about Kerr's relationship with Cousins' sister Melanie. The altercation resulted in Cousins breaking his arm.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In May 2005, Cousins and teammate Michael Gardiner were questioned about their acquaintance with John Kizon and Troy Mercanti, two Perth underworld figures who were allegedly involved in a stabbing and shooting at Perth's Metro City nightclub. Cousins was in Melbourne at the time of the shooting, but it was claimed that he and Gardiner had received phone calls from the figures both before and after the incident at the nightclub. Police questioned Cousins and Gardiner about the incident but they refused to co-operate. Newspaper columnists at "The West Australian" and talkback radio callers demanded Cousins resign his captaincy. His judgment had previously been questioned by West Coast management after he and Gardiner were photographed entering Crown Casino with Kizon in 2001. However, no disciplinary action was taken. Trevor Nesbitt, the team's chief executive, said:


title: Ben Cousins

text: "We are prepared to give them more than one chance. In this case, it is maybe their last chance... They have had chances before, they have had opportunities before, they have made mistakes before. It gets to the point where those mistakes can't be tolerated any longer. This hurts us. It hurts our brand. It hurts our image."


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 12 February 2006, Cousins fled a booze bus, abandoning his Mercedes-Benz and girlfriend Samantha Druce in the middle lane of Perth's Canning Highway and running from police with a male passenger. The male passenger was later caught and breath-tested, but Cousins eluded the police by swimming into the Swan River. On 20 February, Cousins resigned as captain of the West Coast Eagles. He pleaded guilty to obstructing the path of another driver and obstructing a public officer in court in March 2006 and was fined $900 plus costs. He was fined an additional $5,000 by West Coast.


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 3 December 2006, Cousins was arrested for public intoxication after passing out in front of Crown Casino in Melbourne and spent four hours in jail. He was released without being fined or making a court appearance. The West Coast Eagles later announced that the club would not discipline Cousins, stating that the media scrutiny was sufficient punishment.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In early March 2007, Cousins and his girlfriend of 13 years, Samantha Druce, ended their relationship. On 20 March, Cousins was suspended indefinitely from West Coast after failing to attend two training sessions. West Coast club chairman Dalton Gooding stated at a press conference that Cousins was facing a "number of personal and professional issues" and that "Over the past few weeks those issues have come to the surface and it's time that Ben was suspended from the club to go away and try to tackle those issues head on." He also said:


title: Ben Cousins

text: "We always said we would suspend players if they reoffended and Ben has reoffended by missing training, and we have been very consistent with that … We believe he's breached his contract and acted unprofessionally and that's why he's been suspended and that's why we're giving him every opportunity to fix up his personal and private issues."


title: Ben Cousins

text: It was later revealed that Cousins underwent an AFL drug test on 19 March 2007, and it was later confirmed that he had a substance abuse problem. On 21 March, Cousins was admitted to drug rehabilitation. On 22 March, his father Bryan released a statement in a video broadcast by Network Ten:


title: Ben Cousins

text: "I am making this statement today not on behalf of Ben, but as a father on behalf of his son... Ben's problem relates to substance abuse and he faces a great challenge... We acknowledge the public scrutiny that comes with the opportunities and privileges that Ben has had, but I ask now with the issues that Ben faces, that my son be given the privacy and the opportunity that he needs to deal with this problem... Ben, you are not alone with this challenge. Your family, your friends, your fans and your footy club want you to overcome this issue and win in the same manner in which you have done throughout your whole career."


title: Ben Cousins

text: At the end of March 2007, Cousins flew to Malibu, California, for rehabilitation at the Summit Center where he stayed for four weeks. He returned to Perth on 30 April 2007, with much attention from the media. On 4 May, he released a televised apology, saying:


title: Ben Cousins

text: "As you are aware, I have been at an overseas rehabilitation centre for the past month undergoing treatment for a number of personal issues, including illness as the result of substance use... I apologise to the West Coast Eagles Football Club, sponsors, the AFL and the community for my actions... I know that in order to play football again I will have to be accepted back by the players and staff of the West Coast Eagles and the AFL, and I'm willing to fulfil any obligations imposed on me. At the present time I don't know when I'll play again. My priority is to regain my health, my life and my standing."


title: Ben Cousins

text: Chris Mainwaring, a former West Coast Eagles player and close friend of Cousins, died of a drug overdose on 1 October 2007. Cousins received renewed media attention, as he was the last person to see Mainwaring alive, having visited him twice on the night of his death to provide emotional support and deliver food. On 16 October, Cousins was arrested in the Perth suburb of Northbridge after police pulled over his vehicle because of "the manner of his driving". Cousins' vehicle was searched, and he was charged with failure to comply with a police-ordered drug assessment and possession of a prohibited drug, the police having found quantities of prescription drugs diazepam, Viagra, oxycodone and Caverta as well as traces of ecstasy and cocaine on a $20 note in the car. Cousins was sacked by West Coast for serious breaches of his agreement with the club the day after his arrest. On 19 October, Cousins's lawyer, Shane Brennan, reported that police would drop the drug-related charges against him. On 27 October, Cousins flew to Los Angeles to continue his drug rehabilitation at the Summit Center. The media reported that Cousins was missing and had failed to attend treatment in Malibu, and he was admitted to hospital several days later after an alleged cocaine binge. No charges were laid by US police. He returned to Australia and told a packed media conference that he was "overcoming a drug addiction". A week later he flew to the Gold Coast for a three-day alcohol and drug binge during Schoolies week.


title: Ben Cousins

text: A painting of Cousins titled "Waiting for the Day" reached the finals of the 2009 Archibald Prize. Painted by South Australian artist Megan Roodenrys, it shows Cousins in bed battling through a sleepless night during his drug scandal. The painting was bought at auction by a Melbourne businessman the following year for $18,000.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In March 2010, Cousins was twice admitted to Epworth Hospital after suffering from abdominal pain and cramping. The Richmond Football Club denied reports that it had warned Cousins to curb his drinking amid fears his AFL career could be shortened by excessive alcohol consumption. On 12 April, Cousins was among four Richmond players suspended by the club after a drunken escapade at the team hotel in Sydney earlier that week. Although Cousins was not intoxicated, the club deemed that he had not acted responsibly or in a manner expected of him by the club, and he was suspended for one week. On 5 July, Cousins was admitted to hospital after a "severe reaction to prescribed sleeping medication". His hospitalisation prompted debate over the use of legal stimulants such as caffeine and legal sedatives such as sleeping pills among sportspeople, with the Premier of Victoria, John Brumby, disapproving of their use.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In May 2011, it was reported that since Cousins' departure from AFL football his life had lost direction: he had failed to commit to a mining job in Western Australia and was struggling to find focus. His father confirmed that his son's attempt to rebuild his life had taken a "couple of bad turns" in the previous three months and that he was battling "troubled times". In September 2011, Cousins' partner Maylea Elizabeth Tinecheff gave birth to their first child, a son, Bobby Ernest Cousins.


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 9 January 2012, Cousins was admitted to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital after suffering a fall at a drug rehabilitation clinic. He slipped while getting out of a shower, striking his head on a basin and injuring his neck. It was reported that Cousins had been experiencing continuing problems with illicit drugs, despite seeking help at several drug rehabilitation clinics, and that he had "never been clean for more than three months." It was also reported that he had recently undertaken an extreme drug binge lasting for approximately eight days. Cousins was committed by doctors to a suburban mental health unit under police escort on 13 January 2012 after suffering a four-day episode of drug-induced psychosis while being treated at Sir Charles Gardiner Hospital.


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 27 March 2012, Cousins was arrested by police at Esperance Airport, in the south of Western Australia, on suspicion of possession of drugs. He was strip-searched and found to have methylamphetamine secreted in his anus. The initial charge of intent to sell or supply the drug was later downgraded to simple possession, to which Cousins pled guilty and was fined $800. On 17 April 2012, Cousins was arrested and charged again in Western Australia for possession of cannabis and a smoking implement.


title: Ben Cousins

text: On 11 March 2015, Cousins was arrested in the Perth suburb of Bicton after leading police on a slow-speed car chase, stating he could not stop due to a family emergency. Four days later, it was reported that Cousins had been sent to a mental health facility after he was found inside the Special Air Service's Campbell Barracks in Swanbourne. Cousins was arrested for the third time in two weeks after trying to outrun police in Canning Vale following a "bizarre incident" outside a Sikh temple.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In June 2016, police intervened when Cousins attempted to direct traffic on Perth's Canning Highway. He was described by witnesses as being "really lost, confused and making no sense at all", and taken to Fiona Stanley Hospital.


title: Ben Cousins

text: In November 2016, Cousins failed to appear in court on charges of breaching a violence restraining order and possessing methamphetamine. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest. At around 1:30 am the following day, while driving high on methamphetamine in High Wycombe, he crashed his car head-on into a truck. He sustained minor injuries and was taken to Royal Perth Hospital under police guard.


title: Ben Cousins

text: Cousins was arrested in the Perth suburb of Melville in February 2017 and charged with a number of offences related to drugs, violence and stalking, including seven counts of breaching a violence restraining order. The following month, at the Magistrates Court of Western Australia, Cousins was charged with eleven offences and received a 12-month prison sentence. He served his sentence at Acacia Prison. In May 2017, it was reported that Cousins was attacked by another inmate after borrowing his tea cup and not returning it. Cousins became eligible for parole six months into his sentence, but the parole board denied his application and ordered him to complete rehabilitation courses after he failed a drug test.


title: Ben Cousins

text: Cousins was released from prison in January 2018. As part of his parole conditions, Cousins began part-time work in the West Coast Eagles' community and game development department, but abruptly left the job in April 2018. In August 2018, he was arrested and charged with multiple offences, including drug possession, making threats and breaking a violence restraining order. He was released on bail in April 2019.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist Ambrose Bierce, consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of installments for magazines and newspapers. Bierce's witty definitions were imitated and plagiarized for years before he gathered them into books, first as The Cynic's Word Book in 1906 and then in a more complete version as "The Devil's Dictionary" in 1911.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Initial reception of the book versions was mixed. In the decades following, however, the stature of "The Devil's Dictionary" grew. It has been widely quoted, frequently translated, and often imitated, earning a global reputation. In the 1970s, "The Devil's Dictionary" was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. It has been called "howlingly funny", and "Wall Street Journal" columnist Jason Zweig said in an interview that "The Devil's Dictionary" is "probably the most brilliant work of satire written in America. And maybe one of the greatest in all of world literature."


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Prior to Bierce, the best-known writer of amusing definitions was Samuel Johnson. His "A Dictionary of the English Language" was published 15 April 1755. Johnson's "Dictionary" defined 42,733 words, almost all seriously. A small handful have witty definitions and became widely quoted, but they were infrequent exceptions to Johnson's learned and serious explanations of word meanings.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Noah Webster earned fame for his 1806 "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language" and his 1828 "An American Dictionary of the English Language". Most people assume that Webster's text is unrelieved by humor, but (as Bierce himself was to discover and describe), Webster made witty comments in a tiny number of definitions.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Gustave Flaubert wrote notes for the "Dictionary of Received Ideas" (sometimes called "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas"; in French, "Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues") between 1850 and 1855 but never completed it. Decades after his death, researchers combed through Flaubert's papers and published the "Dictionary" under his name in 1913 (two years after Bierce's book "The Devil's Dictionary"), "But the alphabetful of definitions we have here is compiled from a mass of notes, duplicates and variants that were never even sorted, much less proportioned and polished by the author."


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Bierce took decades to write his lexicon of satirical definitions. He warmed up by including definitions infrequently in satirical essays, most often in his weekly columns "The Town Crier" or "Prattle". His earliest known definition was published in 1867.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: His first try at a multiple-definition essay was titled "Webster Revised". It included definitions of four terms and was published in early 1869. Bierce also wrote definitions in his personal letters. For example, in one letter he defined "missionaries" as those "who, in their zeal to lay about them, do not scruple to seize any weapon that they can lay their hands on; they would grab a crucifix to beat a dog."


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: By summer of 1869 he had conceived of the idea of something more substantial: "Could any one but an American humorist ever have conceived the idea of a "Comic Dictionary"" he wrote.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Bierce did not make his first start at writing a satirical glossary until six years later. He called it "The Demon's Dictionary", and it appeared in the "San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser" of 11 December 1875. His glossary provided 48 short witty definitions, from "A" ("The first letter in every properly constructed alphabet") through "accoucheur". But "The Demon's Dictionary" appeared only once, and Bierce wrote no more satirical lexicons for another six years.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Even so, Bierce's short glossary spawned imitators. One of the most substantial was written by Harry Ellington Brook, the editor of a humor magazine called "The Illustrated San Francisco Wasp". Brook's continuing column of serialized satirical definitions was called "Wasp's Improved Webster in Ten-Cent Doses". The column started with the 7 August 1880 issue and appeared weekly in 28 issues, working its way step-by-step alphabetically to define 758 words, ending with "shoddy" in the 26 February 1881 issue.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: In the next issue of "The Wasp" Brook's column appeared no more, because "The Wasp" hired Bierce and he stopped it, replacing "Wasp's Improved Webster" with his own column of satirical definitions. Bierce named his column “The Devil's Dictionary.” It first appeared in the March 5, 1881 issue. Bierce wrote 79 “The Devil's Dictionary” columns, working his way alphabetically to the word “lickspittle” in the 14 Aug. 1886 issue.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: After Bierce left "The Wasp", he was hired by William Randolph Hearst to write for his newspaper "The San Francisco Examiner" in 1887. Bierce's first "Prattle" column appeared in the "Examiner" on March 5 of that year, and the next installment of his satirical lexicon appeared in the 4 September 1887 issue on page 4, under the title "The Cynic's Dictionary". Bierce wrote one more “The Cynic's Dictionary” column (which ran in the 29 April 1888 "Examiner", page 4), and then no more appeared for sixteen years.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: In the meantime, Bierce's idea of a "comic dictionary" was imitated by others, and his witty definitions were plagiarized without crediting him. One imitator even copied the name of Bierce's column.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: In September 1903, Bierce wrote letters to his friend Herman George Scheffauer mentioning he was thinking about a book of his satirical definitions "regularly arranged as in a real dictionary."


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Bierce restarted his “The Cynic's Dictionary” columns with new definitions beginning in June 1904. Hearst's newspaper publishing company had grown nationally, so Bierce's readership had expanded dramatically as well. Now “The Cynic's Dictionary” columns usually appeared first in Hearst's "New York American", next in other Hearst papers ("San Francisco Examiner, Boston American, Chicago American, Los Angeles Examiner"), and then via Hearst's syndication business in other newspapers covering additional cities Hearst newspapers did not reach.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: On 4 November 1905, Bierce wrote to a friend that he was at last reshaping the witty definitions from his newspaper columns into a book, and was irritated by his imitators: “I'm compiling "The Devil's Dictionary" at the suggestion of Doubleday, Page & Co., who doubtless think it a lot of clowneries like the books to which it gave the cue.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: The 25 November 1905 issue of "The Saturday Evening Post" contained “Some Definitions,” a short list of humorous definitions by "Post" editor Harry Arthur Thompson. Thompson's definitions were popular enough to generate short sequel lists called “Frivolous Definitions” and to be reprinted in newspapers and magazines. Thompson and his definitions would have an unexpected impact on the publication of Bierce's book.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: On 19 March 1906 Bierce signed a contract with Doubleday, Page & Co. for publication of his book, but without his preferred title "The Devil's Dictionary". Instead the contract used the same title as Bierce's nationally distributed newspaper columns: "The Cynic's Dictionary". Bierce explained to poet and playwright George Sterling: “They (the publishers) won't have "The Devil's Dictionary" [as a title]. Here in the East the Devil is a sacred personage (the Fourth Person of the Trinity, as an Irishman might say) and his name must not be taken in vain.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Bierce's publishers quickly discovered that they would not be able to use "The Cynic's Dictionary" for the title either. Harry Arthur Thompson was turning the handful of definitions he wrote for "The Saturday Evening Post" into a book. Thompson's book would be published first and would steal Bierce's title. Bierce wrote to Sterling: “I shall have to call it something else, for the publishers tell me there is a "Cynic's Dictionary" already out. I dare say the author took more than my title—the stuff has been a rich mine for a plagiarist for many a year.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: The new title for Bierce's book would be "The Cynic's Word Book". Bierce changed the title of his newspaper columns to “The Cynic's Word Book” to match his book.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Bierce's book was filed for copyright 30 August 1906 and was published October 1906. "The Cynic's Word Book" contained 521 definitions, but only for words beginning with “A” through “L.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Doubleday, Page & Co. printed and bound 1,341 copies of "The Cynic's Word Book". 147 copies were given to the author and to book reviewers for newspapers and magazines; 1,070 copies were sold; and eventually Doubleday remaindered 124 unsold copies and sold them below the publisher's cost. Doubleday was also able to sell British rights to a small publisher in London, Arthur F. Bird, who brought out a British edition in 1907. Sales of "The Cynic's Word Book" qualified it from the publisher's point of view as modestly successful, but not strong enough to justify a companion volume of words beginning with “M” through “Z” as Bierce had hoped.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Bierce's plan to cover the entire alphabet was brought back to life by publisher Walter Neale, who persuaded Bierce to sign an agreement with him on 1 June 1908 for Neale to publish "The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce" in a set of ten or more volumes. They planned for Volume 7 to be Bierce's lexicon, finally using his preferred title, "The Devil's Dictionary".


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: To create a typescript for Neale to publish, Bierce first marked up a copy of "The Cynic's Word Book" with changes and a few additions. That work quickly gave him definitions of words beginning with “A” through “L”. Next he took clippings of his newspaper column definitions and revised them. That brought his dictionary up from “L” to early in the letter “R”. Finally Bierce wrote 37 pages of mostly new definitions spanning from “RECONSIDER” to the end of “Z”. On 11 December 1908 Bierce wrote to George Sterling that he had completed work on "The Devil's Dictionary".


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: In 1909 publisher Walter Neale began issuing individual volumes in the 12-volume set "The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce". Volume 7, "The Devil's Dictionary", was published in 1911. Unlike most publishers, who sell "individual" volumes of a published work, Neale focused on selling "complete sets" of the 12-volume "Works". Neale later claimed that he printed and sold 1,250 sets (250 numbered fully leatherbound sets, the first volume of each set signed by Bierce; a small number of sets half-bound in Morocco leather; and the bulk as sets of clothbound hardcovers). However, Neale's surviving royalty statements to Bierce for "The Collected Works" tell a different story: Bierce was paid for sales of 57 fully leatherbound 12-volume sets, 8 half-Morocco sets, and approximately 164 clothbound hardback sets.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Neale did not sell the rights to print a British edition of "The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce". However, in late 1913 or early 1914 the periodical "The London Opinion" paid Neale for the right to reprint definitions of 787 words from "The Devil's Dictionary".


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Under the entry "leonine", meaning a single line of poetry with an internal rhyming scheme, Bierce included an apocryphal couplet written by the fictitious "Bella Peeler Silcox" (i.e. Ella Wheeler Wilcox) in which an internal rhyme is achieved in both lines only by mispronouncing the rhyming words:


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Initial critical reception for "The Cynic's Word Book" was mixed. Some reviewers praised Bierce's book, such as the anonymous critic for the "Los Angeles Herald", who wrote: “It is a dictionary of misdefinitions, funny, witty and with an abiding background of humor, a tinge of real philosophy yet never degenerating into cheapness. One, upon reading it, finds a decided delight upon Bierce's character and his grim morbidness and obsession.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Other reviewers disliked the sharp edge of Bierce's wit. Some were exhausted trying to read "The Cynic's Word Book" cover-to-cover, as though it was a thriller or popular novel. Edward F. Cahill of the "San Francisco Call" concluded of Bierce's definitions: “As paragraphs they were amusing, but in book form they grow tiresome.” Even so, Cahill could not help but quote a definition he found particularly amusing.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Like Cahill, other reviewers—whether they hated "The Cynic's Word Book" or they loved it—quoted definitions they liked. When the British edition of "The Cynic's Word Book" was published, one London magazine published a long, nearly full-page approving review; 95% of it was quoted definitions, and the review never mentioned the author Bierce's name even once.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: In 1911 "The Devil's Dictionary" was published as volume 7 of the twelve-volume set of "The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce". Most reviewers of the twelve-volume set didn't mention "The Devil's Dictionary" in their reviews, and those few who even named the book gave it scant consideration. For example, in a 9¾-page magazine article on Bierce's "Collected Works", Frederic Taber Cooper gave "The Devil's Dictionary" one paragraph, explaining “One is tempted to devote considerably more space than is warranted to that extremely clever collection of satiric definitions, "The Devil's Dictionary". It represents a deliberate pose consistently maintained, it is pervaded with a spirit of what a large proportion of readers in a Christian country would pronounce irreverent, it tells us nothing new and can hardly be conceived of as an inspiration for higher or nobler living. But it is undeniably entertaining reading.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: "The Athenaeum Journal", one of the most widely circulated literary periodicals in the world, gave "The Devil's Dictionary" lengthier consideration and observed: “Dealing with a wide range of topics as well as a great number of words, it presents a sort of summary index of the author’s characteristic views as well as his literary aptitudes and poses. . . . Substantial intellectual value belongs to a great many entries that deal with a few large groups of subjects (politics, philosophy, &c.) that are individually too long for quotation.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Seven years after the book's publication H. L. Mencken, the most influential American literary critic during the first quarter of the twentieth century, praised "The Devil's Dictionary" highly: “There you will find the most brilliant stuff, first and last, that America has ever produced. There you will find the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen.” Mencken later stated the book's contents “… are some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language. … In "The Devil's Dictionary" are some of the most devastating epigrams ever written.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: At that time, critical evaluations of "The Devil's Dictionary" were rare because copies of the book were hard to find. This scarcity changed in 1925, when the first reprint of "The Devil's Dictionary" was published, making the book easy to obtain. About the same time, the first abridged version was published by Haldeman-Julius as a Little Blue Book with a budget price of five cents. As "The Devil's Dictionary" became widely available, critical coverage of it increased.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: The "New York Times" reviewed one reprinted edition: “It is a tour de force of no mean proportions, because it is possible to read it from cover to cover without being bored, so amusing are his unexpected turns of caustic humor, so brilliant his flagitious wit and so diverting the verses and dicta of non-existent philosophers as ‘Father Cassalasca Jape, S. J.’, with which he illustrates them.”


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: After receiving attention from reviewers in newspapers and commercial magazines, "The Devil's Dictionary" started to receive analyses from scholars in dissertations and academic journals. They investigated the place of Bierce's writing in the world's history of satire, how "The Devil's Dictionary" achieved its humorous effects, and the themes Bierce stressed in the book. In an often-cited essay, French author Jacques Sternberg categorized the caustic wit of "The Devil's Dictionary" as an example of "humor noir".


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Reprinted editions sometimes provided critical information about the book in the form of introductions by literary critics, Bierce scholars, or Bierce's biographers. In addition, the many imitators and successors of "The Devil's Dictionary" occasionally included thoughtful comments on Bierce's achievement.


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Scholars came to agree that "The Devil's Dictionary" is “of primary importance to any study, understanding, or appreciation of Ambrose Bierce.” Critics noted that the "Dictionary"s definitions are frequently quoted, both with and without attribution, so several of Bierce's observations have been absorbed into American culture, familiar to and repeated by people who have no idea where the witticisms originated. Critics also noticed that Bierce used his humorous dictionary as a vehicle for moral instruction, as “… he often induced the readers to reexamine the validity of their own thinking.” A critical consensus has evolved that considers "The Devil's Dictionary" as “An American masterpiece of cynical wit” and "… probably the most brilliant work of satire written in America. And maybe one of the greatest in all of world literature."


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: In 1973, the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration was created by an act of Congress to create events and commemorations to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Bicentennial Administration decided to select “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature,” one hundred books written by Americans that “actually helped to shape the very course of our nation.” Faculty members of universities in all fifty states submitted nominations. The final choices included 99 volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays, but only one volume of humor: "The Devil's Dictionary".


title: The Devil's Dictionary

text: Since then the critical reputation of "The Devil's Dictionary" has continued to expand, as has the book's popularity with readers, by means of reprints, illustrated versions, and abridged editions continuously published in a dozen languages around the world.


title: Silicon Knights

text: Silicon Knights was a Canadian video game developer. Founded in 1992 by Denis Dyack, the company was headquartered in St. Catharines, Ontario. They started developing for computers such as the Atari ST and IBM PC compatibles. After 1996, they moved to console titles.


title: Silicon Knights

text: Dyack left Silicon Knights to form a new game studio, Precursor Games, after the loss of a court case against Epic Games over the game engine Unreal Engine 3. Epic Games won the case and a counter-suit for $4.45 million on grounds of copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract. Following the case, Silicon Knights filed for bankruptcy on May 16, 2014.


title: Silicon Knights

text: Silicon Knights' first games were real-time strategy/action hybrids for computers. Silicon Knights' last PC game, "" was published in 1996. Since that time, Silicon Knights moved from creating PC games to console titles. In 2000, Silicon Knights was signed by Nintendo to create games exclusively for its consoles, during which time it produced "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem". Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create "". In 2004, the company ended exclusivity with Nintendo. In 2005, it partnered with publisher Microsoft Game Studios for "Too Human", though Nintendo still owned stock in the company. In 2008, the company released "Too Human", which was published by Microsoft for the Xbox 360. The final game developed by the company, "", was released on September 2011 for multiple console platforms.


title: Silicon Knights

text: Canceled games included "Silent Hill: The Box" (later known as just "The Box" and "The Ritualyst"), "Too Human 2" ("Too Human: Rise of the Giants"), "Too Human 3", "Eternal Darkness 2", and the little-known projects "Siren in the Maelstrom", "The Sandman" and "King's Quest" (not to be confused with the Sierra series).


title: Silicon Knights

text: Silicon Knights was a strong proponent of collaboration with academia and was a key player in the formation of Eight. Eight: The Hamilton Institute for Interactive Digital Media is a collaboration between Silicon Knights, McMaster University, the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) and Mohawk College to create a novel academic and research model around interactive digital media and will help pioneer and shape cutting-edge advances in the interactive entertainment arena.


title: Silicon Knights

text: On July 19, 2007, Silicon Knights sued Epic Games for failure to "provide a working game engine", causing the Ontario-based game developer to "experience considerable losses." The suit alleged that Epic Games was "sabotaging" Unreal Engine 3 licensees. Epic's licensing document stated that a working version of the engine would be available within six months of the Xbox 360 developer kits being released. Silicon Knights claimed that Epic not only missed this deadline, but that when a working version of the engine was eventually released, the documentation was insufficient. The game studio also claimed Epic had withheld vital improvements to the game engine, claiming they were "game specific", while also using licensing fees to fund development of its own titles rather than the engine itself.


title: Silicon Knights

text: In August 2007, Epic Games counter-sued Silicon Knights, alleging the studio was aware when it signed on that certain features of Unreal Engine 3 were still in development and that components would continue to be developed and added as Epic completed work on "Gears of War". Therefore, in a statement, Epic said that "SK knew when it committed to the licensing agreement that Unreal Engine 3 may not meet its requirements and may not be modified to meet them." Additionally, the counter-suit claimed that Silicon Knights had "made unauthorized use of Epic's Licensed Technology" and had "infringed and otherwise violated Epic's intellectual property rights, including Epic's copyrighted works, trade secrets, know how and confidential information" by incorporating Unreal Engine 3 code into its own engine. Furthermore, Epic claimed the Canadian developer broke the contract by employing this derivative work in an internal title and a second game with Sega, a partnership for which it never received a license fee.


title: Silicon Knights

text: On May 30, 2012, Epic Games prevailed against Silicon Knights' lawsuit, and won its counter-suit for $4.45 million on grounds of copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract, an injury award that was later doubled due to prejudgment interest, attorneys' fees and costs. Consistent with Epic's counterclaims, the presiding judge, James C. Dever III, stated that Silicon Knights had "deliberately and repeatedly copied thousands of lines of Epic Games' copyrighted code, and then attempted to conceal its wrongdoing by removing Epic Games' copyright notices and by disguising Epic Games' copyrighted code as Silicon Knights' own." Evidence against Silicon Knights was "overwhelming", said Dever, as it not only copied functional code but also "non-functional, internal comments Epic Games' programmers had left for themselves."


title: Silicon Knights

text: As a result, on November 7, 2012, Silicon Knights was directed by the court to destroy all game code derived from Unreal Engine 3 and all information from licensee-restricted areas of Epic's Unreal Engine documentation website, and to permit Epic Games access to the company's servers and other devices to ensure these items had been removed. In addition, the studio was instructed to recall and destroy all unsold retail copies of games built with Unreal Engine 3 code, including "Too Human", "X-Men Destiny", "The Sandman", "The Box"/"Ritualyst", and "Siren in the Maelstrom" (the latter three titles were projects never released, or even officially announced).


title: Silicon Knights

text: In February 2008, Silicon Knights was granted $500,000 by the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) through its Video Game Prototype Initiative. Using this funding, they were to create a prototype for a "third-person action/psychological thriller".


title: Silicon Knights

text: In April 2010, it was announced that the company would receive nearly $4 million through the Canadian government's Community Adjustment Fund. The purpose of the loan was to allow the hiring of 65 new staff members, who would be working on a new game targeting multiple platforms. The game was estimated to take two to five years to complete.


title: Silicon Knights

text: In July 2011, Silicon Knights was awarded $2.5 million to be distributed over five years in provincial funding to improve its technology, create new products and become a self-publishing company. The investment would supposedly have allowed the company to improve its technology, hire 80 new people while keeping 97 current jobs and allow the company to become "self sustaining." As of November 2011, Silicon Knights had not received any of this funding.


title: Silicon Knights

text: On May 16, 2014, following the loss of the court case, Silicon Knights filed for bankruptcy and a Certificate of Appointment was issued by the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, with Collins Barrow Toronto Limited being appointed as Trustee in Bankruptcy.


title: J. L. Austin

text: John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960) was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin pointed out that we use language to "do" things as well as to "assert" things, and that the utterance of a statement like "I promise to do so-and-so" is best understood as "doing" something—"making a promise—"rather than making an assertion about anything. Hence the name of one of his best-known works "How to Do Things with Words". Austin, in providing his theory of speech acts, makes a significant challenge to the philosophy of language, far beyond merely elucidating a class of morphological sentence forms that function to do what they name. Austin's work ultimately suggests that all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin was born in Lancaster, England, the second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and Mary Hutton Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948; "née" Wilson). In 1921 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonards School, St Andrews. Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School in 1924, earning a scholarship in Classics, and went on to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford in 1929.


title: J. L. Austin

text: In 1930 he received a First in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin) and in the following year won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. In finals in 1933 he received a First in Literae Humaniores (Philosophy and Ancient History). Literae Humaniores introduced him to serious philosophy and gave him a lifelong interest in Aristotle. He undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin's early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, and Plato (especially the "Theaetetus"). His more contemporary influences included especially G. E. Moore, John Cook Wilson and H. A. Prichard. The contemporary influences shaped their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgements we make. They took our specific judgements to be more secure than more general judgements. It's plausible that some aspects of Austin's distinctive approach to philosophical questions derived from his engagement with the last three.


title: J. L. Austin

text: During World War II Austin served in the British Intelligence Corps. It has been said of him that, "he more than anybody was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence" (reported in Warnock 1963: 9). Austin left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was honored for his intelligence work with an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion of Merit.


title: J. L. Austin

text: After the war Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, as a Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Publishing little, his influence would largely make itself felt through his teaching in lectures and tutorials and, especially, his famous 'Saturday morning meetings'.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin visited Harvard and Berkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures at Harvard that would become "How to Do Things With Words", and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses". It was at this time that he met and befriended Noam Chomsky. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin died, shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer, at the age of 48. At the time of his death, he was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data.


title: J. L. Austin

text: "How to Do Things with Words" (1955/1962) is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In contrast to the positivist view, he argues, sentences with truth-values form only a small part of the range of utterances.


title: J. L. Austin

text: After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are neither true nor false, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he calls "performative utterances" or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:


title: J. L. Austin

text: He goes on to say that when something goes wrong in connection with a performative utterance it is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy" rather than false.


title: J. L. Austin

text: The action which is performed when a 'performative utterance' is issued belongs to what Austin later calls a "speech-act" (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the "illocutionary act"). For example, if you say "I name this ship the "Queen Elizabeth"," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will. In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.


title: J. L. Austin

text: After numerous attempts to find more characteristics of performatives, and after having met with many difficulties, Austin makes what he calls a "fresh start", in which he considers "more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something".


title: J. L. Austin

text: For example: John Smith turns to Sue Snub and says 'Is Jeff's shirt red?’, to which Sue replies 'Yes'. John has produced a series of bodily movements which result in the production of a certain sound. Austin called such a performance a "phonetic act", and called the act a "phone". John's utterance also conforms to the lexical and grammatical conventions of English—that is, John has produced an English sentence. Austin called this a "phatic act", and labels such utterances "phemes". John also referred to Jeff's shirt, and to the colour red. To use a pheme with a more or less definite sense and reference is to utter a "rheme", and to perform a "rhetic act". Note that rhemes are a sub-class of phemes, which in turn are a sub-class of phones. One cannot perform a rheme without also performing a pheme and a phone. The performance of these three acts is the performance of a "locution"—it is the act of saying something.


title: J. L. Austin

text: John has therefore performed a locutionary act. He has also done at least two other things. He has asked a question, and he has elicited an answer from Sue.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Asking a question is an example of what Austin called an "illocutionary act." Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something. To perform an illocutionary act is to use a locution with a certain force. It is an act performed "in" saying something, in contrast with a locution, the act "of" saying something.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Eliciting an answer is an example of what Austin calls a "perlocutionary act", an act performed "by" saying something. Notice that if one successfully performs a perlocution, one also succeeds in performing both an illocution and a locution.


title: J. L. Austin

text: In the theory of speech acts, attention has especially focused on the illocutionary act, much less on the locutionary and perlocutionary act, and only rarely on the subdivision of the locution into phone, pheme and rheme.


title: J. L. Austin

text: "How to Do Things With Words" is based on lectures given at Oxford between 1951 and 1954, and then at Harvard in 1955.


title: J. L. Austin

text: According to J. L. Austin, "performative utterance" refers to a not truth-valuable action of "performing", or "doing" a certain action. For example, when people say "I promise to do so and so", they are generating the action of making a promise. In this case, without any flaw (the promise is flawlessly fulfilled), the "performative utterance" is "happy", or to use J. L. Austin's word, "felicitous"; if on the other hand, one fails to do what he or she promised, it can be "unhappy", or "infelicitous". Notice that performative utterance is not truth-valuable, which means nothing said can be judged based on truth or falsity.


title: J. L. Austin

text: There are four types of performatives according to Austin: explicit, implicit, primitive, and inexplicit. "How to Do Things With Words", edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Bissau, records Austin's lectures on this topic. In this book, Austin offers examples for each type of performative mentioned above. For explicit performative, he mentioned "I apologize", "I criticize" (Page 83), which are so explicit to receivers that it would not make sense for someone to ask "Does he really mean that?". Inexplicit performatives are the opposite, where the receiver will have understandable doubts. For a primary performative, the example Austin gave is "I shall be there". Compared with explicit performatives, there is uncertainty in implicit performatives. People might ask if he or she is promising to be there with primary performatives, however, this uncertainty is not strong enough as in explicit performatives. Most examples given are explicit because they are easy to identify and observe, and identifying other performatives requires comparison and contrast with explicit performatives.


title: J. L. Austin

text: In the posthumously published "Sense and Sensibilia" (the title is Austin's own, and wittily echoes the title of "Sense and Sensibility", Jane Austen's first book, just as his name echoes hers), Austin criticizes the claims put forward by A. J. Ayer's "The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940)", and to a lesser extent, H. H. Price's "Perception" (1932) and G. J. Warnock's "Berkeley" (1953), concerning the sense-data theory. He states that perceptual variation, which can be attributed to physical causes, does not involve a figurative disconnect between sense and reference, due to an unreasonable separation of parts from the perceived object. Central to his argument, he shows that "there is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy" (Austin 1962a, 4).


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin argues that Ayer fails to understand the proper function of such words as "illusion", "delusion", "hallucination", "looks", "appears" and "seems", and uses them instead in a "special way...invented by philosophers." According to Austin, normally these words allow us to express reservations about our commitment to the truth of what we are saying, and that the introduction of sense-data adds nothing to our understanding of or ability to talk about what we see.


title: J. L. Austin

text: As an example, Austin examines the word 'real' and contrasts the ordinary meanings of that word based on everyday language and the ways it is used by sense-data theorists. In order to determine the meaning of 'real' we have to consider, case by case, the ways and contexts in which it is used. By observing that it is (i) a substantive-hungry word that is sometimes a (ii) adjuster-word, as well as a (iii) dimension-word and (iv) a word whose negative use "wears the trousers," Austin highlights its complexities. Only by doing so, according to Austin, can we avoid introducing false dichotomies.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin's papers were collected and published posthumously as "Philosophical Papers" by J. O. Urmson and Geoffrey Warnock. The book originally contained ten papers, two more being added in the second edition and one in the third. His paper Excuses has had a massive impact on criminal law theory.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Chapters 1 and 3 study how a word may have different, but related, senses. Chapters 2 and 4 discuss the nature of knowledge, focusing on performative utterance. Chapters 5 and 6 study the correspondence theory, where a statement is true when it corresponds to a fact. Chapters 6 and 10 concern the doctrine of speech acts. Chapters 8, 9, and 12 reflect on the problems that language encounters in discussing actions and considering the cases of excuses, accusations, and freedom.


title: J. L. Austin

text: This early paper contains a broad criticism of Idealism. The question set dealing with the existence of "a priori" concepts is treated only indirectly, by dismissing the concept of "concept" that underpins it.


title: J. L. Austin

text: The first part of this paper takes the form of a reply to an argument for the existence of Universals: from observing that we do use words such as "grey" or "circular" and that we use a single term in each case, it follows that there must be a "something" that is named by such terms—a universal. Furthermore, since each case of "grey" or "circular" is different, it follows that universals "themselves" cannot be sensed.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin carefully dismantles this argument, and in the process other transcendental arguments. He points out first that universals are not "something we stumble across", and that they are "defined" by their relation to particulars. He continues by pointing out that, from the observation that we use "grey" and "circular" as if they were the names of things, it simply "does not follow" that there is something that is named. In the process he dismisses the notion that "words are essentially proper names", asking "...why, if 'one identical' word is used, "must" there be 'one identical object' present which it denotes".


title: J. L. Austin

text: In the second part of the article, he generalizes this argument against universals to address concepts as a whole. He points out that it is "facile" to treat concepts as if they were "an article of property". Such questions as "Do we possess such-and-such a concept" and "how do we come to possess such-and-such a concept" are meaningless, because concepts are not the sort of thing that one possesses.


title: J. L. Austin

text: In the final part of the paper, Austin further extends the discussion to relations, presenting a series of arguments to reject the idea that there is some "thing" that is a relation. His argument likely follows from the conjecture of his colleague, S. V. Tezlaf, who questioned what makes "this" "that".


title: J. L. Austin

text: "The Meaning of a Word" is a polemic against doing philosophy by attempting to pin down the "meaning" of the words used, arguing that 'there is "no" simple and handy appendage of a word called "the meaning of the word (x)"'.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin warns us to take care when removing words from their ordinary usage, giving numerous examples of how this can lead to error.


title: J. L. Austin

text: In "Other Minds", one of his most highly acclaimed pieces, Austin criticizes the method that philosophers have used since Descartes to analyze and verify statements of the form "That person S feels X." This method works from the following three assumptions:


title: J. L. Austin

text: Although Austin agrees with (2), quipping that "we should be in a pretty predicament if I did", he found (1) to be false and (3) to be therefore unnecessary. The background assumption to (1), Austin claims, is that if I say that I know X and later find out that X is false, I did not know it. Austin believes that this is not consistent with the way we actually use language. He claims that if I was in a position where I would normally say that I know X, if X should turn out to be false, I would be speechless rather than self-corrective. He gives an argument that this is so by suggesting that believing is to knowing as intending is to promising— knowing and promising are the speech-act versions of believing and intending respectively.


title: J. L. Austin

text: "A Plea for Excuses" is both a demonstration by example, and a defense of the methods of ordinary language philosophy, which proceeds on the conviction that:


title: J. L. Austin

text: "...our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonable practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchair of an afternoon—the most favourite alternative method."


title: J. L. Austin

text: An example of such a distinction Austin describes in a footnote is that between the phrases "by mistake" and "by accident". Although their uses are similar, Austin argues that with the right examples we can see that a distinction exists in when one or the other phrase is appropriate.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin proposes some curious philosophical tools. For instance, he uses a sort of word game for developing an understanding of a key concept. This involves taking up a dictionary and finding a selection of terms relating to the key concept, then looking up each of the words in the explanation of their meaning. This process is iterated until the list of words begins to repeat, closing in a "family circle" of words relating to the key concept.


title: J. L. Austin

text: Austin occupies a place in philosophy of language alongside the Cantabrigian Wittgenstein and Austin's fellow Oxonian Gilbert Ryle in staunchly advocating the examination of the way words are ordinarily "used" in order to elucidate meaning and by this means avoid philosophical confusion. Unlike many ordinary language philosophers, however, Austin disavowed any overt indebtedness to Wittgenstein's later philosophy.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Tommy George Thompson (born November 19, 1941) is an American Republican politician who most recently served as interim president of the University of Wisconsin System from 2020 to 2022. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 42nd governor of Wisconsin from 1987 to 2001 and 19th United States secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001 to 2005, in the cabinet of President George W. Bush.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: He is the longest-serving governor in Wisconsin history, holding office from January 1987 until February 2001, and is the only person to be elected to the office four times. During his tenure as governor he was also chair of Amtrak, the nation's passenger rail service. He was chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 1991 and 1992, and the National Governors Association in 1995 and 1996. After his time in the Bush Administration, Thompson became a partner in the law-firm Akin Gump and Independent Chairman of Deloitte's Center for Health Solutions. He has served on the boards of 22 other organizations.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson was a candidate for President of the United States, running in the 2008 Republican Party presidential primaries, but withdrew from the race before voting began. He was the Republican nominee for United States Senate in Wisconsin in the 2012 election, vying to replace retiring senator Herb Kohl, but was defeated by Democrat Tammy Baldwin in what was his only statewide election loss.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson was born in Elroy, Wisconsin. His mother, Julie (née Dutton), was a teacher, and his father, Allan Thompson, owned and ran a gas station and country grocery store. His brother, the late Ed Thompson, was a mayor of Tomah, Wisconsin, and was the Libertarian Party nominee for Governor of Wisconsin in 2002.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson earned his bachelor and Juris Doctor degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963 and 1966, respectively. While in law school, Thompson was elected chairman of the Madison Young Republicans.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson held a student deferment from military service during the Vietnam War until he completed law school in June 1966. The following year, 1966, Thompson enlisted in the National Guard.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: After completing six years in the National Guard, Thompson served in the Army Reserves for another four years. His final rank was captain.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Immediately after completing law school in 1966, Thompson ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly. In the Republican primary, he defeated incumbent Assemblyman Louis Romell by 635 votes, after Romell had underestimated the challenge Thompson represented.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In 1973, Thompson became the Assembly's assistant minority leader and, in 1981, its minority leader. Thompson aggressively used parliamentary procedure to block bills favored by the Democratic majority and stop legislative progress, earning him the nickname "Dr. No" by the frustrated majority.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: As a state legislator, Thompson was involved in the early years of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative legislative organization. Speaking at a 2002 ALEC meeting, Thompson stated: "I always loved going to [ALEC] meetings because I always found new ideas. Then I'd take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare, 'That's mine.'" ALEC awarded Thompson its "Thomas Jefferson Award" in 1991.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: While Thompson was Assistant Minority Leader in the Assembly, incumbent Republican U.S. Congressman William Steiger of Wisconsin's 6th congressional district died at the age of 40 from a heart attack. Thompson was one of seven Republican candidates who ran to replace Steiger in the special election in 1979. Tom Petri won the primary and general elections and represented the 6th district until his retirement in January 2015.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson served as the 42nd Governor of Wisconsin, having been elected to an unprecedented four terms. As of April 2013, Thompson has the tenth longest gubernatorial tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history at days.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson decided to run for Governor of Wisconsin in 1986 against incumbent Democrat Anthony Earl. He ran and won the Republican primary with 52% of the vote in a five candidate field. He defeated Earl 53%–46%.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson won election to a second term defeating Democrat Thomas Loftus, the Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, 58%–42%.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson won election to a third term defeating Democratic State Senator Chuck Chvala 67%–31%. He won every county in the state except Menominee County.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson won election to a fourth term defeating Democrat Ed Garvey, a Wisconsin Deputy Attorney General, 60%–39%.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson is best known nationally for changes in Wisconsin's welfare system, which was radically downsized, before similar ideas were adopted nationally. Under his leadership, Wisconsin reduced its welfare rolls by almost 90%, cutting welfare spending but increasing investments in child care and health care, especially for low-income working families.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson was called a "pioneer" for two key initiatives of his governorship, the Wisconsin Works welfare reform (sometimes called W-2) and school vouchers. In 1990 Thompson pushed for the creation of the country's first parental school-choice program, which provided Milwaukee families with a voucher to send children to the private or public school of their choice. He created the BadgerCare program, designed to provide health coverage to those families whose employers don't provide health insurance but make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Through the federal waiver program, Thompson helped replicate this program in several states when he became Secretary of Health and Human Services.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson was well known for his extensive use of the veto, particularly his sweeping line-item veto powers. At the time, Wisconsin governors had the power to strike out words, numbers, and even entire sentences from appropriations bills. In his first two terms alone, he used the line-item veto 1,500 times to cancel a total of $150 million in spending; none of these vetoes were overridden.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson's welfare reform policies were criticized. Wendell Primus of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote that "Many families have actually lost ground even though they are no longer on welfare." Many of Wisconsin's poor remained well below the federal poverty line. In addition, slightly more of the state's poorest children reportedly lacked health insurance than before Thompson's welfare overhaul.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: The growth of the state budget during Thompson's 14-year tenure became a subject of attacks on his record as governor later by conservative opponents in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: While governor, Thompson was appointed to the Amtrak Board of Directors by President Bill Clinton, served as chairman, and had an Amtrak locomotive named for him from 2001 through 2006, when his name was removed from the side of the locomotive as part of a routine overhaul.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson is a rail enthusiast, and was a supporter of mass transit, which earned him distrust on the issue from other Republicans. Prior to being selected as HHS Secretary, Thompson made clear that his first choice in the Bush Administration would be Secretary of Transportation.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In 1996, Thompson bragged that he never raised taxes in Wisconsin. Thompson claimed to cut taxes 91 times—including eliminating the estate tax in 1987, cutting income tax rates three times and a $1.2 billion property tax cut in 1995.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: When Thompson made the same claim, in 2012, that he "never raised taxes", he earned a rating of "False" from PolitiFact-Wisconsin. PolitiFact found numerous examples of taxes that had increased during Thompson's terms. Politifact said in its rating, "Thompson has a long list of taxes he cut and, on balance, he can claim to have reduced taxes. But he also raised some specific taxes along the way." Politifact rated Mostly True Thompson's claim that Wisconsin's overall tax burden went down while he served as governor from 1987 to 2001.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Two of the tax increases that Thompson did fight, using the Wisconsin governor's partial-veto power, were taxes on the state's wealthiest residents. In a budget bill in 1987, Thompson vetoed two tax increases on capital gains and the alternative minimum tax, that would have largely affected the wealthy, at the same time that he pushed forward a six percent cut in welfare benefits.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: As governor, Thompson took major steps to transfer decision-making power from elected constitutional officers and independent agencies to his political appointees. Among the changes:


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson also had two other acts overturned by the courts as unconstitutional. His plan to include church schools in his school voucher plan was found unconstitutional. Thompson also insisted on keeping Good Friday as a half-holiday for state workers, "despite a clear ruling" from the Seventh Circuit, earning a rebuke from the court.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: As governor, Thompson was friendly to tobacco interests. His campaign accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and trips from Philip Morris. He also vetoed a tobacco excise tax and "delayed authorizing the state attorney general to join other state[s] in a lawsuit against cigarette manufacturers.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson is Catholic and opposes abortion. His support for legislation in Wisconsin restricting abortions led Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other pro-choice groups to oppose his nomination to head HHS.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In 1983, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued its "Voigt Decision", which found that Wisconsin's Ojibwa tribe had a treaty-guaranteed right to engage in traditional spearfishing off-reservation and that the state of Wisconsin was prohibited from regulating fishing on Ojibwa land. The decision was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1983.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: During his 1986 gubernatorial campaign, Thompson suggested abrogating the Ojibwa's rights. Once in office, Thompson called on two Ojibwa tribes to sell their treaty-guaranteed rights: the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, for $42 million, and the Mole Lake Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, for $10 million. Thompson's administration tried an unsuccessful legal challenge to the "Voigt Decision". The State of Wisconsin argued that Native Americans' lives were in danger from protesters if they continued spearfishing.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In 1989, federal judge Barbara Crabb ruled against the Thompson Administration's legal efforts. The judge rebuked the state for attempting to avoid violence by punishing the Ojibwa, since it was violence by non-Native American protesters that was the threatened danger. Crabb issued an injunction against violent anti-spearfishing protests in 1991, and made it permanent in 1992. On May 20, 1991, the Thompson administration declared it would no longer attempt to appeal the 1983 Voight Decision.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: During his time as governor, Thompson served as chairman of the National Governors Association and the Education Commission of the States, in addition to the Council of State Governments, the Republican Governors Association, the Council of Great Lakes Governors, and the Midwestern Governors Association.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson's name had been in the press as a possible vice presidential pick during several election seasons. By 1992, Thompson himself had openly discussed his desire to be the Republican vice presidential nominee for 1996.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole considered Thompson as a possible vice presidential nominee in 1996 and Thompson openly lobbied for the position. However, Thompson was forced to fight off perceptions of being someone to "bluster through a speech, turn bombastic during public statements", and have difficulty thinking on his feet. During the 1996 vetting process, Dole also reportedly remarked on Thompson's lack of finesse in their interactions.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: After Dole disclosed that Thompson was no longer under consideration, Thompson stated that he was relieved because he had been "scared to death" of the process and the spotlight of the position. In 2000, Thompson was mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate for George W. Bush.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson left the governorship when he was appointed by President George W. Bush as HHS Secretary. He was confirmed by the Senate on January 24, 2001. Thompson announced his resignation from HHS on December 3, 2004, and served until January 26, 2005, when the Senate confirmed his successor, Michael O. Leavitt.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: While Secretary, he launched initiatives to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health, reorganize the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to encourage greater responsiveness and efficiency, and clear the backlog of waivers and state plan amendments. He approved 1,400 state plans and waiver requests, thereby providing health insurance to 1.8 million lower-income Americans. In the aftermath of 9/11, he also worked on strengthening the nation's preparedness for a bio-terrorism attack, by stockpiling smallpox vaccines and investing heavily in state and local public health infrastructure.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson's major initiatives were "efforts to strengthen U.S. preparedness for a bioterrorism attack, increase funding for the National Institutes of Health, expand health insurance coverage to lower-income Americans, and focus attention on health problems such as obesity and diabetes." He also was elected chairman of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2003.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson was one of the key architects of the 2003 passage of Bush's Medicare Modernization Act, which was slated to provide public funding for prescription drugs for Medicare recipients starting in 2006. On the prescription drug-benefit issue, the major piece of health care legislation of President Bush's first term, Thompson frequently served as the president's point man. National analysts cite the passage of Medicare reform as the most important achievement of Thompson's tenure as HHS secretary.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: As part of the debate over the adoption of Medicare Part D, Thompson was involved in a dispute over whether the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to share cost estimates to Congress for legislation that would create a prescription drug benefit. Critics accused Thompson and HHS of downplaying the true cost of the law by $150 billion. CMS Administrator Tom Scully threatened to fire a CMS actuary if he revealed to Congress his estimate. Investigators determined that the data was improperly hidden from Congress, but did not conclude whether laws had been broken. In 2011 the trustees of Medicare found that the prescription drug benefit had come in 40% below estimates, the Congressional Budget Office (using different budgeting numbers) determined that the program had come in 28% below projections.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In her Senate campaign, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) said in 2012 that Thompson was responsible for forbidding Medicare to negotiate drug prices, a statement that Politifact rated as "True." Thompson said that he had nothing to do with that provision, a statement Politifact rated as "False." The New York Times reported, "In December (2004), just before leaving office, Mr. Leavitt’s predecessor, Tommy G. Thompson, said he wished Congress had given him the authority to negotiate prices for Medicare beneficiaries, as he negotiated discounts on antibiotics during the anthrax scare of 2001."


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Early in his term, Thompson faced an emergency situation with the 2001 anthrax attacks. Thompson was given poor marks for seeming "utterly overtaken by events" and issuing "early statements that the government was prepared to deal with any biological emergency [that] never squared with the facts."


title: Tommy Thompson

text: At a White House briefing following the first anthrax death of the scare, Thompson made a statement to the press that "would be cited for years afterward as a historic blunder in crisis communication." Thompson offered the media a "far-fetched" suggestion that the individual who died had come into contact with anthrax from drinking water from a creek.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson's words were criticized by a range of experts as unwarranted, potentially undermining public confidence, and as the "kind of statements that lead to mistrust of officials and experts." Thompson was also faulted for positioning himself as the voice of the Administration to the public on this issue, having had no formal training in medicine or public health.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In 2001, early in his term as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Thompson's office rejected 19 of 26 people, including a Nobel laureate, recommended for seats on the advisory board for the NIH developing nations unit by the unit's director. In return, Thompson's office sent back to the unit's director, Gerald Keusch of the Fogarty International Center, résumés for other scientists that Keusch described as "lightweights" with "no scientific credibility." Keusch relayed to one of those rejected, Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel, that he was pushed aside for having "signed too many full-page letters in The New York Times critical of President Bush." This incident was cited by the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists as part of a report detailing their allegations of a "politicization of science" under President George W. Bush's administration.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson resigned on December 3, 2004, in a press conference at which he issued warnings over the dangers of avian flu and the poisoning of U.S. food supplies by terrorists. Thompson stated that he had attempted to resign in 2003, but remained until after the President's reelection at the administration's request. Some noted, in particular, his words: "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do. And we are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."


title: Tommy Thompson

text: After leaving the public sector at the end of the Bush Administration, Thompson joined the law firm Akin Gump, and the consulting firm Deloitte and joined the boards of directors of other companies.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In 2011, Thompson was paid more than $1.1 million in cash and stock incentives from five public companies, Thompson's consulting firm was paid $471,000 by six companies, and Thompson himself received $3 million from the sale of a healthcare firm he chaired. Thompson's work with these companies and other investments led him to accumulate a disclosed net worth of $13 million.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: A number of those companies and organizations "he helps oversee have faced an array of troubles, including claims of making faulty and dangerous medical implants, failing grades from a corporate watchdog and allegations of misleading investors." An expert with one agency that gave failing marks three of the six public companies who boards Thompson sits on commented that "either [Thompson] has really bad luck choosing companies...or he is one of the directors on company boards who is not exercising sufficient oversight."


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson became a partner at law firm Akin Gump, a Washington, D.C., law firm that engages in federal lobbying. There, Thompson provided "strategic advice" to the lobbyists in the firm's health care practice, advising them on how to most successfully lobby government officials on behalf of the firm's clients.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: He also became a senior advisor at the professional services firm Deloitte and became Independent Chairman of its Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. Thompson was no longer associated with Deloitte by October 2011.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: For the United States presidential election in 2016 Thompson initially endorsed fellow Republican John Kasich.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: After leaving office, Thompson began offering policy solutions for a variety of programs that he had overseen as HHS Secretary. However, critics claimed many changes would benefit companies Thompson owned or had a financial stake in (including Centene and the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions). These included transferring some Medicaid beneficiaries from federal to state responsibility and requiring digitization of medical records, which would directly benefit those companies.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson spoke as a panelist at a 2005 Havard Kennedy School conference on global poverty, where he discussed medical diplomacy. Thompson also authored a "Boston Globe" op-ed on the topic.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: One of the nonprofit organizations that Thompson joined the board of, Medical Missions for Children, recruited Thompson to co-host a number of episodes of one of its health instructional series, "Plain Talk about Health".


title: Tommy Thompson

text: After first announcing the formation of an exploratory committee in late 2006, Thompson announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election on April 1, 2007.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: During a May 3, 2007, presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Thompson was asked by moderator Chris Matthews whether a private employer opposed to homosexuality should have the right to fire a gay worker. He said, "I think that is left up to the individual business. I really sincerely believe that that is an issue that business people have got to make their own determination as to whether or not they should be." He called CNN the following morning to say he did not hear the question correctly. He apologized, saying, "It's not my position. There should be no discrimination in the workplace."


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson made campaign contributions to two Democrats in 2008 – $250 to Michigan Senator Carl Levin and $100 to Bev Perdue, who was running for Governor of North Carolina. Both Democrats won in that year's elections. All told, Thompson contributed $11,350 to Republican candidates for federal office in the 2008, 2010 and 2012 election cycles, while contributing another $4,900 to Wisconsin Republicans during those same cycles.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In April 2007, Thompson was compelled to apologize for remarks he made about Jews and Israel during an address to an assembled crowd of Jewish social activists in Washington, D.C.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: On April 16, 2007, appearing before a conference organized by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Thompson referenced his lucrative transition from public service to the private sector and invoked old, slanderous stereotypes linking Judaism with finance. Thompson stated: "You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that." Thompson then returned to the podium with the intention of clearing up his earlier comments, adding: "I just want to clarify something because I didn't (by) any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things. What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people and I compliment you for that." Thompson's comments caused "unease in the room" as the attendees tried to decode the meaning of Thompson's use of this stereotype.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson made a variety of other lesser gaffes, including referring to the Anti Defamation League as the fringe Jewish Defense League, and to Israel bonds as "Jewish bonds". He discussed his connections to politically conservative Israeli and Jewish leaders while speaking to the mostly liberal leaning group


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Conference organizers noted the unease with Thompson's words but otherwise limited their comments on the faux pas, instead thanking Thompson for being one of the speakers at the conference.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, later wrote of the incident that "there could be no more vivid illustration of how deeply ingrained these stereotypes [about Jews and finances] have become" than Thompson's belief that "repeating an age-old stereotype about Jews and money would "please" his Jewish listeners!"


title: Tommy Thompson

text: After the event, Thompson told Politico that his remarks could be blamed on fatigue and a persistent cold. Journalists believed that Thompson had instead failed to prepare for the event, acquaint himself beforehand with the likely audience, and recruit an adviser to properly brief him before the event.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: Thompson had stated he would drop out of the race if he did not finish either first or second in the Ames straw poll on August 11, 2007. Thompson finished sixth, with just 7% of the vote, despite the fact that some major contenders were not competing in the poll. On August 12, Thompson officially announced he would drop out of the race.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In October 2007, Thompson endorsed Rudy Giuliani. Thompson told the Associated Press in a statement that "Rudy Giuliani has shown that he is a true leader. He can and will win the nomination and the presidency. He is America's mayor, and during a period of time of great stress for this country he showed tremendous leadership." He then endorsed Senator John McCain after Giuliani's withdrawal from the presidential race. In a "New York Times" article published October 11, 2008, Thompson was quoted in response to a question regarding whether he was happy with McCain's campaign as saying, "No. I don't know who is."


title: Tommy Thompson

text: On September 19, 2011; Thompson announced he would run for the seat vacated by Sen. Herb Kohl, formally announcing on December 1, 2011. He won the Republican nomination on August 14, 2012, after a bitter four-way primary battle against a field that included millionaire hedge fund manager Eric Hovde, former Congressman Mark Neumann, and Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: The attacks on Thompson led to his defense and endorsement by former Arkansas governor, presidential candidate, and conservative media figure Mike Huckabee.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: ALEC member the American Chemistry Council spent nearly $650,000 in support of Thompson's bid for US Senate in the autumn of 2012. Thompson faced Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin in the general election. Although most polls from the spring through September showed Thompson ahead, he ultimately lost to Baldwin in the general election, taking 45.9 percent to Baldwin's 51.5 percent. Ultimately, Thompson could not overcome a combined 260,000-vote deficit in the state's two largest counties, Milwaukee and Dane – home to Milwaukee and Madison, respectively. It was the first time Thompson had lost a statewide election.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: During the 2012 campaign, Thompson, speaking to a Tea Party group, said, "who better than me, that's already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs that do away with Medicaid and Medicare?" When a videotape of his remarks surfaced, Thompson stated that he did not want to eliminate Medicare, but instead wanted a system that would provide a subsidy to individuals to help them purchase private health insurance.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In the fall of 2019, incumbent University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross announced his intention to retire. This kicked off a search by the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents to find his successor. In what was seen as a flawed candidate search, complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic in Wisconsin, the board initially was poised to offer the position to University of Alaska System President Jim Johnsen. Johnsen was ultimately forced to withdraw amidst vocal opposition from University of Wisconsin System faculty and students. A week later, after closed-door sessions, the board named Thompson as the interim president. Thompson served nearly two years as interim president before announcing in January 2022 that he would step down, effective March 18, 2022.


title: Tommy Thompson

text: In October 2022, Thompson joined the Council for Responsible Social Media project launched by Issue One to address the negative mental, civic, and public health impacts of social media in the United States co-chaired by former House Democratic Caucus Leader Dick Gephardt and former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: Hereward the Wake (Traditional pronunciation /ˈhɛ.rɛ.ward/, modern pronunciation /ˈhɛ.rɪ.wəd/) (1035 – 1072) (also known as Hereward the Outlaw or Hereward the Exile) was an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and a leader of local resistance to the Norman Conquest of England. His base, when leading the rebellion against the Norman rulers, was the Isle of Ely in eastern England. According to legend he roamed the Fens, which nowadays covers parts of the modern counties of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk, leading popular opposition to William the Conqueror.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: "Hereward" is an Old English name, composed of the elements "here", "army", and "ward" "guard" (cognate with the Old High German name "Heriwart"). The epithet "the Wake", first recorded in the 14th century, may mean "the watchful", or derive from the Anglo-Norman Wake family who later claimed descent from him.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: Several primary sources exist for Hereward's life, though the accuracy of their information is difficult to evaluate. They are the version of the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" written at Peterborough Abbey (the "E manuscript" or "Peterborough Chronicle"), the Domesday Book, the "Liber Eliensis" (Latin 'Book of Ely') and, much the most detailed, the "Gesta Herewardi".


title: Hereward the Wake

text: The texts are sometimes contradictory. For example, "Gesta" Chapter XXVIII places Hereward's attack on Peterborough Abbey after the Siege of Ely whereas the "Peterborough Chronicle" (1070) has it immediately before. This probably indicates, as the preface to the "Gesta" suggests, that conflicting oral traditions about Hereward were already current in the Fens in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. In addition, there may be some partisan bias in the early writers: the notice of Hereward in the "Peterborough Chronicle", for instance, was written in a monastery which he was said to have sacked, some fifty years after the date of the raid. On the other hand, the original version of the "Gesta" was written in explicit praise of Hereward; much of its information was provided by men who knew him personally, principally, if the preface is to be believed, a former colleague-in-arms and member of his father's former household named Leofric the Deacon.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: The 12th-century Latin text purports to be a translation of an earlier (and now lost) work in Old English, with gaps in the damaged original filled out from oral history. The earliest surviving copy of the "Gesta Herewardi" is in a manuscript produced around the middle of the 13th century at Peterborough Abbey, along with other materials relating to the abbey. This 13th-century manuscript is known as the "Register of Robert of Swaffham".


title: Hereward the Wake

text: What is known of the earlier history of the "Gesta Herewardi" comes from its prologue, according to which the original text was written in Old English by Leofric, a priest of Hereward's household, who became one of his companions in arms during Hereward's resistance to William the Conqueror. Leofric's work may have been precipitated by Hereward's death.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: The prologue also reports that the earlier, Old English version was badly damaged, though not destroyed: the author of the "Gesta Herewardi" had been instructed by his superior to seek out the remains of Leofric's work and to translate it into Latin. This he did, but, owing to its damaged condition, he filled in the resulting lacunae from oral history, at his superior's insistence.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: It has been argued that the author of "Gesta Herewardi" was Richard of Ely, and that his superior was Bishop Hervey of Ely, who held that office from 1109 to 1131.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: The version of the "Gesta Herewardi" which exists today is a transcription of this work, which was incorporated into a book containing charters and other material relating to the abbey at Peterborough known as the "Register of Robert of Swaffham", though variant descriptions such as "Robert of Swaffham's Book" are also found. According to the historian Janet D. Martin, the book was created in "about 1250", and originally ended with the "Gesta Herewardi", but further material, unrelated to the Hereward story, was added in the 14th century.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: A serial edition of the "Gesta Herewardi" translated by W. D. Sweeting was published from 1895 as a supplement to "Fenland Notes and Queries": this was a quarterly magazine, published at Peterborough, of which Sweeting was editor at the time. He used a transcription of the "Gesta Herewardi" by S. H. Miller to produce an edition in which the transcription and translation appear in parallel columns.


title: Hereward the Wake

text: Partly because of the sketchiness of evidence for his existence, his life has become a magnet for speculators and amateur scholars. The earliest references to his parentage, in the "Gesta", make him the son of Edith, a descendant of Oslac of York, and Leofric of Bourne, nephew of Ralph the Staller. Alternatively, it has also been argued that Leofric, Earl of Mercia and his wife Lady Godiva were Hereward's real parents. There is no evidence for this, and Abbot Brand of Peterborough, stated to have been Hereward's uncle, does not appear to have been related to either Leofric or Godiva. It is improbable that − if Hereward were a member of this prominent family – his parentage would not be a matter of record. Some modern research suggests him to have been Anglo-Danish with a Danish father, Asketil; since Brand is also a Danish name, it makes sense that the Abbot may have been Asketil's brother. Hereward's apparent ability to call on Danish support may also support this theory.