Category: Language
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Lost
Joe is ready to go to the…well, just read the article.
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All Those Thems And Theys
Another day, another DFL policy to turn black and white into a rainbow of grays: If it’s a day ending in “Y”… Know the part that annoys this English major? There was a time – like, in the past decade – when referring to someone whose gender you didn’t know, or where the gender was…
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Walz: Where’s The Beef?
I’ve got a question for the hive mind of this blog. Yesterday, Governor Klink made perhaps his most, to coin a term, “weird” attack on JD Vance: Now, what he’s talking about is theWhich brings up the question – does the term “Runza” occur in Minnesota at all? It’s apparently named after a chain of…
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Chanting Points Memo: Little Robots Full Of Ticky-Tack
Remember “Journo-list?” The top-secret, hush-hush chat room for “journalists” from fifteen years ago? If you don’t remember, that’s OK, because: a) This bit here summarizes and parodies it pretty aptly, and b) There’s no need to remember, because it’s happening today, again. This time, it’s about the term “weird”. Every Democrat and media (ptr) figure…
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Words To Live By
This needs to be said. Dennis Prager says “everything the left touches, it destroys”. The language is one of those things, and the left’s been actively working on it for decades. The left has made so many words meaningless: And, in this campaign, “Democracy” – which has come to mean “everything the Democrat party wants”.
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Social Media Rules For An Anarchic World
With the change in name from Twitter to “X”, we an in fact call these “X-ioms”: “A tweet that starts with “hear me out” almost never deserves to be heard, much less heard “out””. “Arguments that end with “period” or “full stop” should almost always have stopped before they started.” “When a tweet ends with…
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Woke: Defined?
In the game of cheap rhetorical card tricks, the latest card up your average garden variety Leftists sleeve is saying “Define ‘Woke’”, and then plastering a sanctimonious smirk on their face as the good guys try to arf up a definition for something that isn’t really meant to be definite. To some extent, Big Left…
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Every Year
ME: “Have a great Fourth of July!“ THEM: “Ahem. It’s IndePENdence Day“. ME: “Oh, excuse me for not only using a term that literally everyone in America, and probably western civilization, understands, but that until maybe 10 years ago I never, ever heard a single person “Ahem”-ing anyone else about. I hope you live in…
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The Awesome Power Of Logic, Reason And Rhetoric
Is there nothing in the worlds of negotiation, of convincing people to think and do things they aren’t entitled to, with the elegance, the power, the pure majesty of simply capping off one’s argument with a jaunty “full stop”? If Abraham Lincoln had told Jefferson Davis “abolish slavery and rejoin the union, full stop!” there…
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I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself
So I won’t try. This is Shawn Holster – long-time friend of the blog, show and me personally: It is indeed a short step from “Unhoused People” to “Un-Corralled LIvestock”. Ownership culture is a mortal threat to progressivism – which is why Big Left is trying to ease its linguistic relics out of the language.
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What’s In A Name
“What if someone built a restaurant named ‘Swastika’?” It wasn’t a question I ever got to ask the owner of Uptown’s late, lamented (?) Soviet-themed restaurant. I wasn’t going to ask the waitstaff or the bartender; they’re working stiffs and they don’t need to care one way or the other. But when friends asked me…
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Proposed Berg’s Law
To wit: People who use the phrase “…stand in solidarity” are almost always entitled, grandiloquent jagoffs who are speaking in support of horrible people who are doing wretched things”. To wit: Exhibit B…: …which also suggests a link between the phrase and bad Latin Socialist Realist art. Discuss.
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Urban Progressive Privilege: “The Word Means What I Say It Means. Also, It Doesn’t Exist”
In my 20s, I had a section of my bookshelf that I called my “Know Thy Enemy” section. It had an assortment of books that, broadly, are antithetical to Western Civliization: Marx, Mein Kampf (in German and translation), even a copy of “The Turner Diaries” at one point (although that last one got tossed along…
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Something For Everyone In The New Year
Over the past few weeks, Stanford issued its “List of Allowable Words”. They don’t call it that, of course. The official title is the output of the “Elimination of Harmful Language” initiative. And if you expect something that the Babylon Bee might have passed on as too implausible, you’re half right. The Bee makes better…
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In Which I Pummel
Big Left’s latest atrocity against the language – a perversion that looms large in the “Twitter Files” story – is the debasement of the terms “Attack” and “Safety”. One example: The “attack” was more commonly or germanely known as “showing evidence of wrongdoing on Fauci and Roth’s parts”, of course. And the fact that Roth…
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Make Orwell Fiction Again
Badthink is the new…badthink. Or to put this in terms any Second Amendment activist can relate to, “Don’t be paranoid. Nobody’s coming for the language itself”. Pathologizing freedom of conscience by speciously linking it to objective evil? Demonizing dissent? Oh, yeah – and just flat out lying… …to gull the gullible – a population the…
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Pet Peeve
Two bits of housekeeping before Pet Peeve time. First: Thoughts and prayers for the people of Puerto Rico. Two devastating disasters in five years – the mind reels. Second: It’s generally good manners to try to pronounce names and places relatively close to their linguistic originals. It’s why “Beethoven” and “Bach” are proncounced “BAY-to-ven” and…
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Stuff Linguistics Geeks Love
Linguists determine cattle in the UK develop local accents: In a major breakthrough in bovine linguistic research, experts have confirmed that cows moo with accents distinct to their herd, the BBC reports. John Wells, professor of Phonetics at the University of London, examined West Country farmers’ claims that their beasts were mooing with a local…
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The DFL Dictionary: Third Edition!
It’s been 12 years since we last updated “The DFL Dictionary” – the official guide to translating from “leftist” to English. And in today’s politics, that’s a couple of eternities, pureed to a fine sheen. Looking back at the Second Edition, last updated in 2009, it almost looks like a trip back to a more…
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Hastily Made Portland Tourism Ad?
So is this a tourism ad, or a cry for help? Odd tourism ad, doncha think? Usually you get a picture of nature, or a soaring skyline, or beatiful people enjoying dazzling nightlife. But not this time. So what does a tourist do in Portland? Apparently you can cross a bunch of bridges. That might…
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You’ve Heard Of Word Salad? Meet “Word Salsa”
This quote popped to mind… “We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters …when I read this twitter thread: To plumb…
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Term Life
1985: “Progressive” “In” Crowd (academics, media, non-profiteers, etc): “It is good to be politically correct”. (Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people ensue). 1986: “Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Political Correctness” doesn’t exist, and is just a term made up by right wingers to try to ‘satirize’ us”. 1994: “Progressive” In Crowd: “It’s time…
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Evils Of The Leftist Lexicon
I first observed that Big Left was devaluing the term “Holocaust” – redefining it as “any social change Big Left doesn’t approve of” – over 30 years ago. To be fair that one never really took off – at the time, when people still took “Never Forget” seriously. I’m less sanguine about Big Left’s next…
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I Wonder
At what point will the common-usage definition of “conversation” merge with “monologue” in popular parlance? Because I can see that happening sooner than later.