In today’s Impromptus, I have a host of issues, as usual. Some are contentious, some are not. Frankly, I think all are contentious in this one. In any case, that column is here.

The first item is about youth sports, and how difficult officiating has become. The public has turned nasty, and this nastiness can turn into violence. Umps and refs are saying, “Who needs it? And at this pay?”

A friend of mine writes,

I fear the decline in the pool of available umpires may be irreversible, at least based on what I see and hear around here. Most of the umpires in our high-school chapter are 60-plus and will likely retire in the next few years.

I am basically an “emergency” umpire these days and had to do two JV games by myself. And that will only get worse, so ultimately the kids are going to suffer with things like shorter games and fewer games.

And no robo-umps are coming to save the day in high-school sports!

In a previous Impromptus, I wrote,

When Ron DeSantis is denouncing Disney — which is daily, pretty much — he calls it a “multinational corporation.” He obviously means this as a curse word, or curse phrase. “Corporation” is bad enough, in the populist mindset — but “multinational” makes it worse.

I heard “multinational corporation” a lot when I was growing up. I heard it from the Marxists, when they were inveighing against business, trade, capitalism — all of that. To hear the same rhetoric from Republicans today is a little weird.

But that’s life in the horseshoe.

A reader responds,

I always found the phrase “multinational corporation” amusing. It is usually said, with disparagement, by someone sitting in Starbucks, wearing Nike clothes, using a smartphone . . . He may well have driven to the coffee shop in a car, or arrived in the city on an airplane . . . On it goes.

Yup, it do.

A reader writes,

I just wanted to extend my thanks to you for your Buckley book recommendations. I picked up a copy of The Right Word and I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m not very far into it yet and have already hit upon a real gem (found in Chapter 2, “On Vocabulary”): “Should one refuse to use a venerable word for which there is no obvious synonym, simply because it is a word that does not regularly appear in the diet of the average reader?” (The word to which he is referring, specifically, is “energumen,” with which I plan to annoy my friends at the first possible opportunity.)

I don’t write for a living, but I do write for pleasure, as a way to think through a thought or idea, and in correspondence with friends. No one (beyond my friends) may ever read what I write, but I am inspired by WFB to always do my best to find the right word.

Marvelous.

In that previous Impromptus, to which I linked above, I wrote,

It’s not often that I come up with something aphoristic, but a thought occurred to me in a diner two days ago. An English muffin is a muffin like an English horn is a horn. (An English horn, as you know, is a woodwind instrument, not a brass instrument. It belongs to the oboe family.)

Says a reader,

When I went to Britain I was very amused to see “American muffins” on the menu at coffee shops. And NFL football is “American football.” As for the game we call “soccer,” I like what a blogger once suggested for it: “metric football.”

!!

In a piece on the conductor Riccardo Muti, I, and he, mentioned Fritz Reiner, one of Muti’s great predecessors in Chicago. A reader writes,

Hi, Jay,

What a charming article! I’ve always like Muti instinctively, and you bring out how likeable he is. By the way, my Italian grandfather, a clarinetist with various New York orchestras in the first half of the 20th century, always disdained conductors who “showed off” unnecessarily. He told me that his favorite conductor was Reiner.

Yup. A podium tyrant, but he was not a showman. (Neither was George Szell, another podium tyrant.) (Reiner, Szell, Eugene Ormandy, and Georg Solti were all Jews from Hungary. A career in their native country was — “not possible” would be putting it mildly.)

In the aforementioned, and afore-linked-to, Impromptus, I had a note on American homogenization. Are our places becoming the same? This is a worry. (Funny, polarization is too.) I received many responses to that note, including:

Living in Vancouver, Wash. (there is another in B.C.), we are confronted with an alien culture roughly five miles away as the crow flies. All we have to do is cross the river. Sadly, as more and more Portlanders try to escape by crossing the river in the other direction, we are starting to see some changes in the wrong direction. Oh, well.

Thank you to one and all. Later.

P.S. One of the players in the picture above this post is Evidence Makgopa. Isn’t that a wonderful name?