Strange effects of the recession

Creativity is key, and Mr. Rosenberg, owner of a clothing store, proves it. He switched his line from women’s to kids’ clothes because parents may cut back on their own wants but not on their children’s. He has diversified and “even [does] clothes for prenatals now.” This seems hard to imagine since prenatal means “occurring or existing before birth” and refers to “the growth and development of a single-celled zygote formed by the combination of a sperm and an egg into a baby” (Medical Dictionary). However, as the article claims, “parents want their kids to be insulated from the recession,” and this evidently begins even before the child is born.
Yet, parents don’t stop at the outfit for their unborn. While they may spend less on Christmas, “back-to-school didn’t decline as much as other holidays,” according to the National Retail Federation. Has the recession deprived us of so many pleasures that we now consider the beginning of the new school year a holiday?
An important segment of back-to-school sales are clothes, and Mr. Rosenberg observed that in his store “Girls’ dresses have been explosive – 6 months to 8 years.” Well, this looks a lot like commercial litigations coming Mr. Rosenberg's way.

Divine intervention

The CBS series “Undercover Boss” rests on the “machina-manning deus” fantasy, wrote Alessandra Stanley in the NYT (4/11). According to her, this idea of gods or rulers mingling with regular (or small!) people to find out “how the other half live by living among them” is as old as humankind and a routine in mythology, literature and film.
The “machina-manning deus,” literally a god operating a machine, is an interesting pun on “deus ex machina,” an also well-worn device used by authors to solve an inextricable problem by a sudden and improbable intervention of a new character or object. Aristotle criticized the use of a deus-ex-machina, because a writer “ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort, and it is either necessary or probable that this [incident] happen after that one.”
Thus, Stanley’s critique of “the way each episode ends with a pageant [sic] of seigniorial largesse — a $1,000 gift certificate, a family vacation — instead of a commitment to fair wages and safe working conditions” is not quite in synch with her terminology. The undercover boss is definitely not a deus-ex-machina, who solves a problem in unexpected ways, but rather a character much to Aristotle’s liking. After all, such “small acts of benevolence” (Stanley) are exactly the most probable things for the average boss to say or do.

A dubious case

NPR today reported on the Russian Spy Saga, pointing out that some experts are “dubious” about the evidence provided by the FBI. The anchorperson then transitioned to several interviews, wondering what those “dubious experts” think about the case. Dubious, when preceding a noun, means “probably not good, not honest, not true.” Thus the facts presented may indeed be dubious, but the experts who are dubious about them, i.e. not sure whether the facts are solid and trustworthy, are doubtful. If they were dubious experts, NPR would most likely not venture to interview them.