"Overrepresentation" (as Merriam-Webster spells it) is

represented excessively; especially: having representatives in a proportion higher than the average

So what then does Andrew Sullivan mean when he writes in his Time piece on gas taxes that

Very few taxes are perfect, and our electoral system — with its over-representation of big agricultural states in the Senate — already pampers the rural.

Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.

So long as these big agricultural states refrain from sending three or more Senators, they will not be over-represented; they are particularly not over-represented with regards to the 'principle' or 'system' at hand (the Constitutional apportionment of Senators). They do not have representatives in a higher proportion than the average if the proper units of measurement are used: two senators per state. Find a new term to complain that Wyoming has two senators. "Overrepresented" doesn't fit.

(To search my preferred dictionary, which I did not quote above because it is not American.)

The OED does not have a separate entry for "over-representation." Instead, the main entry for "over" directs that the word is

is used with adverbial, prepositional, and adjectival force, in combination with ns.; with adverbial and prepositional force in comb. with verbs; with adverbial force in combination with adjs., advbs., and prepositions. . . .

29. With substantives. . . b. Nouns of action or condition, formed from vbs., or from ns. belonging to vbs., or on the type of such. These have often the same form as the vb. or a modification of it, as. . . -representation. . .

For "representation, we find

8. a. The fact of representing or being represented in a legislative or deliberative assembly, spec. in Parliament; the position, principle, or system implied by this.

James Lileks is complaining that the actors in Doctor Zhivago speak with an English accent:

Friday night I decided to dip into the Classic Movie Collection. I usually buy the DVDs of classic movies restored to original luster, just because you want to support that sort of thing. I took down “Dr. Zhivago.” I lasted 35 minutes. It’s lovely but it’s dull and disjointed. It has that sodden pace of an Important Movie. The real deal-killer, though, was the inexplicable fact that everyone spoke with an English accent.

Why not a Russian accent? Did they think that a movie about Russia would be somehow unauthentic if the characters sounded like, you know, Russians? I would have accepted French accents among the upper classes. But British? It certainly doesn’t help suspend your disbelief. Especially when the first character you meet is Alec Guinness.

What I don't understand is how someone could accept with nary a problem that the characters in a story that takes place in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution would speak English, but find their suspension of disbelief destroyed by the fact that they do so with an English accent. Is this a common problem? Anyone care to explain?

Eugene Volokh writes that he was not impressed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Directly below that, he writes that he did not particularly enjoy Hellboy.

I wasn't planning to before, but now I'm wondering if I shouldn't go see Hellboy. Since I enjoyed Eternal Sunshine so much, chances seem pretty good that I'll go for Hellboy as well.

Taylor Green of Modern Art Notes is carping about potential damage to the Monets that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has loaned out to the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas. Apparently, the Bellagio's power went out, exposing the paintings to the desert heat. Now, I am certainly not advocating we hold an annual Monet roast, but still, the general thrust of the post irritates me.

Now, if preservation is our only concern with regard to art, then what we should do is place all pictures in an airtight vault in a bunker in Wyoming, and hang only copies in museums. But if that seems extreme, then surely it's not unreasonable to place all museum pictures behind the sort of protective glass that encases the Mona Lisa.

But obviously, preservation isn't our only concern. Art only has value insofar as it gives enjoyment to people--not fodder for critics, but enjoyment to ordinary people. And insofar as taking art out of museums increases the number of people enjoying that pleasure, and the quality of that pleasure itself, then we ought to consider a bit of damage to the art incurred in the process as a reasonable cost.

Fact is, I don't particularly enjoy looking at art in most museums. Often, the lighting is bad, special exhibits are usually unbearably crowded, and even under the best of circumstances, most museums just feel sterile and institutional. And the lack of places to sit down and contemplate the art is really the worst. Now, I don't know to what extent the Bellagio managed to rectify these deficiencies, but I can definitely see that besides the convenience for those who live in or visit Las Vegas, it wouldn't be that difficult to create a place where looking at pictures was just plain more enjoyable than it would be in the local museum.

Second Third and final round of updates below

In response to one person's defense of English majors, Kathleen discusses why science majors don't respect them.

That list leaves off one of my favorite English majors, Garrison Keillor, who said (and I know I've quoted him before), "Never threaten an English major. We can immortalize you in ways you never knew to fear."

That said, I think an English major is an incredibly strong program in both analytical thinking and expressing those thoughts (it's not just for self-defense). We interact with texts in a different way than philosophy majors do; we think of more things as texts. I suspect that English majors are most closely related to art history and music majors. An English major gives you practical training that allows you to do research in other fields, such as history, with a different set of tools than people trained in those fields traditionally use. I just ran into a professor (Eric Slauter) who is studying the role of art (loosely speaking) in constitutions and revolutionary texts. It's not the approach a law professor would generally take, but I think it has something to add.

I don't see the lack of a standardized curriculum as a problem. Chicago once had one: see here. Now we have breadth requirements. Yes, you can graduate from Chicago with a degree in English literature without having ever read Shakespeare. So what? That's not analagous to getting a bio degree without knowing biology. Shakespeare is a big part of the literature of the English language, but he's not essential.

I'll be graduating without having ever really studied as much poetry or theater as I think I ideally should have. This is undoubtedly a personal loss and gives me less breadth when it comes to discussing particular documents and individual texts, but it doesn't make me any less of an English major. I know very little more than nothing about most of the politicized schools of interpretation that have grown up around English departments and other "studies" departments. Again, so what? I just haven't been interested (Freudian anaylysis is an exception... that's just fun). Those theories are just part of the lagniappe from which English majors can chose; if I need to learn them, I'm well prepared to figure them out. There's a lot of material out there I could have read, but haven't. The degree has evolved away from a focus on canonical texts to a focus on how to approach texts. I don't even see it as a result of a debate on whether texts and which texts should be canonical, but rather on what teaching styles are most effective and most useful.

I don't even think I'm an atypical English major. I'm in the group of concentrators who don't write BAs and take very few (or not any) English courses by the end of our times here at Chicago. I don't know how common this phenomenom is -- a disproportionate number of my friends from the department are glad to be English majors but aren't taking the courses anymore and aren't going to grad school. Other people care more about canonical texts than I do. They chose their courses with more care. I chose pretty much randomly. It didn't hurt me. I've gotten what I wanted from the department and the major, and had a (mostly) good time doing it.

UPDATE: Daniel Moore asks if I would have a problem accepting the credentials of someone who graduated from a physics program without ever taking a course in relativity. No, I wouldn't. But I'm not in charge of admissions for a physics grad school. Depending on what one wanted to do with a physics degree, not knowing relativity might not be a problem. My sister tells me that UIUC physics majors are (were, perhaps, in better days of the economy) hot stuff on Wall Street. Investment firms would recruit them because it was easier to teach a physics major the necessary econ than it was to teach a business major the necessary math. I wouldn't be suprised if it's possible to do other fields within physics -- materials science? -- without a course in relativity. It might be nice, for some general sake of breadth, if that physics major knew relativity too, but I can't see why it would be essential.

UPDATE II in reply to both Daniel and Kathleen:

Part of the reason that I'm not afraid of English majors who haven't taken a class on Shakespeare is that I trust us all to have read at least some of his works. He had a revolutionary effect on the English language and he was amazingly good at writing plays. More so than his characters and plots, his influences on how we speak and the metaphors we use are the common core that Shakespeare has left us. But he didn't (stepping outside of English lit because I can't think of a good example from theater) add a second actor, as Aeschylus did. Shakespeare was followed by Massinger, masques, and the Puritan attack on the stage; after that, Restoration Drama (Congreve, Farquhar, and Colley Cibber), on which the theaters in Spain and France were significant influences. I think Shakespeare may have been reintroduced into the story when Alexander Pope published his edition of the plays.

And Shakespeare read is not Shakespeare performed. The words and the language still stands out, but the conventions (love at first sight) are more believable when seen on the stage. I had one of the best teachers of Shakespeare in David Bevington. Appreciation is easy: this is beautiful, this is well-done, this is insightful to human motives. Finding something worthwhile to say about Shakespeare is harder. You could pick on him when his plots are inconsistent, or when he diverges from history, but that's not going to get you anywhere good. Why did Prince Hal finally mature? There are a lot of answers, but at some point, you can't escape the fact that Henry V simply suprised people (I had Professor Bevington on histories and comedies) and Shakespeare is writing within that constraint. This could be my personal problems of analysis. Why did King Lear act as he did? There are explanations, there are alternatives, and in the end, a feeling of determinism, for this is the character who Lear is. Shakespeare is halfway the English department's sacred cow and halfway the canvas on which all tools of the trade, all forms of analysis, are thrown. The result can be dreary. At some point, don't teach Shakespeare. Read him. Quote him. Go see the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But unless what's said about him is phenomenol (record Bevington), I think he's better off left to personal investigations.

Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Tristram Shandy (none of which I've read -- there's time) may not all be of the same incredibly high quality as the best of Shakepeare is, but they're noted turning points in the evolution of the novel. These, I think, are what you need to read to be able to understand the novels since. I think I might have had a better clue what was going on in Coetzee's Foe had I read Daniel Defoe. Cooper's The Pioneers has its literary faults, but it's still part of what happened in the development of an American style.

The English major who graduates without Shakespeare is missing out, but still better off than the high school student who's had no math. High school train students to be able to function in society. The Shakespeare-less English major will face problems in academia, but he'll still be well trained. And (ducking) Chicago's no longer on the Great Book curriculum, no longer responsible, so sorry for any confusions, hats off to the two St. John's. . . um, I don't know how to make the plural of that and I don't feel like hauling down the CMOS.

UPDATE III in (brief) reply to Thus Blogged Anderson. Yes, there are universities where English majors take multiple choice tests drawn directly out of Barron's BookNotes (true: this was my friend's Faulkner class). If I knew that a person had an English degree from a university with that style of teaching, I'd want demand to see some of the papers he'd written and I'd question him thoroughly. But please don't disparage all English majors because some schools have poorly-taught departments. And not all books assigned get read. My favorite (for other reasons) prof gave daily short reading quizzes. They weren't calculated into the final grade, but passing 70% of them was a prerequisite to receiving a grade in the class. Even with those quizzes, there were still more students who wanted to take his class than slots.

Sentences you don't read every day (in today's U.S. v. Lara):

JUSTICE SOUTER, with whom JUSTICE SCALIA joins, dissenting.

Judge Milton Shadur, a Minnesotan-born graduate of The University of Chicago's undergraduate and law schools, is interviewed by Howard Bashman in an off-schedule "20 Questions" feature.

I don't have much productive to add other than "Look! Look! Chicago!"

A friend of Crescat complained that the sum of my thoughts of the weekend are the six measly musings below. Here are a few more, of no particular coherence:
1: Professor Ellickson is a tier 1 Scrabble player.

2: Where are the grocery stores?

3: I don't know if Dean Koh's speeches were designed to seem condescending, un-concrete, and vaguely annoying. If not, they should probably be re-designed. Saul Levmore put him to shame.

4: Number of the 6 people on the Chicago "jobs" panel who were not practicing or about to practice with a law firm: 0. Number of people of the 5 on the Yale panel who weren't: 3.

5: I'm too sleepy to think of anything else to say.

One sad thing about being in New Haven this weekend was being separated from my books, which I had an unusually great need for to quote in various emails. But now that I am back:
Miss Manners, on letting one's hair go free:

Dear Miss Manners:

I cannot understand why the hair stylists of this world won't do anything about this long sloppy hair on girls and letting it go on forever. We always have to see them brushing their hair away from their faces and havint to eat with them in diners, etc., it's a sickening sight.

Gentle Reader:

It will take Miss Manners a moment to collect herself before answering you. She is shocked and upset and even has a tear or two to brush away from her facce before she can trust herself to think. You see, Miss Manners has very long hair herself. She doesn't wear it down at her age, but she always thought it proper for youn girls to do so, and never worried that hair stylists or other free-lance critics, such as yourself, were policing the streets, looking for visual offenders. If you must, please try to remember: It's the girls who bob their who are fast.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world aroudn you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice-- they won't hear you otherwise-- "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of hroseback riding. Nobody ever though of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse's mane, or maybe tied to the horse's ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for reading; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now dont stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so that you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because oncce you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of balck letters onf a gray backgroudn, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.