Joe Doakes, long ago of Como. Park, emails:

People keep using the phrase “go to the mattress” when talking about fighting. “Republicans must go to the mattress over this issue.”

 

No dummy, it’s “mat,” as in wrestling mat, as in “take your opponent to the mat to pin him.”  Didn’t your high school have a wrestling team?

 

 But of course some idiot didn’t understand that 20 years ago and wrote the dialogue wrong in a movie. So now the internet thinks that’s the origin of the phrase. Or possibly that it relates to 15th century Italians who hung mattresses on the walls to deflect cannon fire.  Really?  You figure people today know so much about Renaissance warfare that they use it everyday speech? Ridiculous.

 

 How does society recover a lost idiom?

 

Joe Doakes

By doing more wrestling. 

(And I think it was Clemenza, not Puzo, that got the term wrong.   Which, if true, I think is hilarious).  

Another day, another DFL policy to turn black and white into a rainbow of grays:

(Center of the American Experiment) — Starting this fall for the 2025-26 school year, Minnesota’s public schools will be required to teach third graders how to use non-binary gender pronouns in writing sentences.

The Minnesota Department of Education’s new K-12 English Language Arts (ELA) standards and benchmarks were adopted in 2023 and are scheduled for full implementation at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. Reviewed and revised on a 10-year cycle, Minnesota’s ELA standards and benchmarks are organized into three strands: 1) reading, 2) writing, and 3) listening, speaking, viewing, and exchanging ideas.

Under the writing strand, a third-grade benchmark requires students to “use nouns (collective and irregular plural), verbs, frequently used adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns (including reflexive pronouns and male, female and non-binary gender pronouns) [emphasis added] in simple and compound sentences authentically in writing.” (3.2.1.3)

 

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 immaterial to the discussion, as “they”.   In common usage, it was a perfectly acceptable third-person pronoun – a “Neutral” one, for those of us who speak gendered European languages like German, French or Spanish.  

Now it’s a poiltical and social statement – for both sides. 

It’s almost like they’re trying to make human communication impossible, or reduce language down to the bare minimum needed to express compliance.  Almost like the quacking of ducks…

Oh. 

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 burger joints in Nebraska. 

And on that burger joint’s menu is a meat pie.

In North Dakota, it’d be called a Fleischkikla (German-Russian for the German Fleischküchle. In Northeast Minneapolis, it’s a Pierog. There are other names in other languages. They probably have a local term in Ohio that would flummox Klink

But in all my years in Minnesota – admittedly almost none of it in the First CD – I’ve never ever heard the term Runza. 

Am I missing something? 

Or is this literally the dumbest attempt at a dunk that Walz has ever tried?

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 has suddenly started using it.

This is intended to go viral among the clubby environs of local blue-city media – in this case, the Star-Tribune’s – what’s a good adjective – pointless Jennifer Brooks, whose column about the issue…:

…shows us what happened to those people who were writing all those “FIX INDIGESTION WITH THIS ONE WEIRD [!!!] TRICK” copywriters from ten years ago.

Did I say “clubby”?

We’ll unpack that statement in another post.

This is, of course, a classic instance of Berg’s Seventh Law .  They’re calling Republicans “weird” to deflect away from their very, very weird – no, bizarre – presidential candidate, at the head of a party that believes a lot of things that go way beyond “weird”. 

Once you understand that…

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:

• (Toxic) masculinity
• Fascism
• Treason
• Racism (and its meaningless analogue, “anti-racism”.
• White Supremacy

And, in this campaign, “Democracy” – which has come to mean “everything the Democrat party wants”.

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 “that’s the tweet”, a silent “unfortunately” is assumed.”

“Posts beginning “As a [blank] scholar” or “[Blank] scholar here!” only have a high likelihood of being wrong and stupid. They are, however, infallibly guaranteed to be insufferable.” (This one is via @davidpdeavel on X. And it reminds me of a prominent NeverTrumper who tosses “GErman Studies major here…” in front of an amazing number of unrelated subjects).

“Any tweet that start with the words: “With all due respect” will include none.” (Via OldSchoolPhD on X)

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 uses terms like “woke” as a game of “Bring Me A Rock” – trying to answer a question whose parameters you don’t understand – or, ultimately, one of those greased pig contests at the county fair, where kids chased after a slicked-up piglet as the adults laugh at the hijinks.

But I love seeing smirks decaying into dejection, or better yet rage; it’s one of my life’s great joys, in fact.

So what the heck: let’s define “woke”, once and for all. For the ages.

Con Text: First, the rules:

• We’re defining it from the modern white progressive context. The term is appropriated from Black America, a relationship under whose convenient cover those white progressives scamper when you start getting close to their terms: “You just hate black terms!”, or some such dogwater.
• Leave your suggestions, or feedback on my suggestion, in the comments.
• Threadjacks of any kind, left or right, will be removed without comnent.

So let’s give this a ahot.

Rough Draft: Here’s Take 1.

“Woke: Noun: A pseudoreligious social and political philosophy that ascribes all dissent from social progressive beliefs to “systemic” problems, demands acceptance of those beliefs rather tha toleration of dissent, and calls for conversion of non-believers by social persuasion or coercion.

Go to it.

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 a city without a fireworks display. ”

And SCENE

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 would’ve been no Civil War.

Had RIchard Nixon said “I am not a crook – full stop“, there’d have been no Watergate, no impeachment, no resignation.

If WInston Churchill had punctuated the Dunkirk speech – “…we shall fight on the beaches and the landing grounds, we shall never surrender, full stop!”, Hitler would have pulled back from France, abdicated, and fled to Mongolia.

Had the Pope responded to Martin Luther with a decisive “Iustificamur ex operibus, plenus finis” (“We are justified by works. Full stop“), there’d have been no Reformation, no 100 years war. \

If the guys in Milli Vanilli had simply said, “We are the real singers! Full stop!”, they would be bigger than Madonna, Elvis, the Beatles, Taylor Swift and Slim Whitman today.

So pity the poor Minnesota GOP. Who can stand in the face of such remorseless logic and deft rhetoric?

For example – I, personally, started out believing that “Rights” are inalienable, non-material things with which one is born, and from which one can not be legitimately separated except by very solemn due process.

But then I read this:

And voila! I’m convinced! A “right” is a bit of material swag bestowed on the deserving by the political process!

Even “Lieutenant” Governor Flanagan, who punctuated one of her (very, very few non-risible) arguments with this…

Is there nothing that phrase can’t do?

…

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.

“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 to meet there, I was a little uncomfortable; nobody would attend, much less open, a restaurant named “Swastikas”. You could probably sneak a few themes through: Blutwurst und Boden, or maybe Ein Fork, Ein Stein, Ein Menu.

But Hammer and Sickle? A direct reference to the emblem of one of the three most lethal regimes in history?

I went – long story. Great selection of vodka, and the best piroshki I’ve had since the Vomit Comet killed off the late, great “Russian Tea House” on University Avenue. It wasn’t my party, didn’t need to make a fuss…

…but I wasn’t especially pained to see that the concept has apparently gone to the great restaurant Lubyanka in the sky.

But when one door closes, a window opens. Maybe.

Another new restaurant, this time on the East Side of Saint Paul, gets into funky historical and cultural turf – maybe.

Juche is the official ideology of the North Korean regime. It’s Stalinism with a Korean accent. In terms of cultural and historical overtones, it’s a simple word that, viewed through a Nork lens, is as loaded as Lebenraum or Wrecker.

Not viewed through a Nork lens, it’s not entirely unlike the idiomatic and unobjectionable-to-admirable Finnish maxim of Sisu – self-reliance, grit, determination, stoicism.

And I’d love to figure it out. So, long story short, I guess I know where I’m eating next weekend.

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.

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 the way).

Point being, while I don’t still literally have that bookshelf, I find it useful to know our enemies.

So I listen to NPR. Not all the time. Mostly when I’m stuck on a long drive. I seek out the blinkered, the entitled and the depraved.

The New Yorker Radio Hour rarely disappoints on any of those counts. Like it’s fellow WNYC production, NYRH is a reliable stenographer for the inner id of eastern transatlantic progressive reflexes.

This past weekend? The etymology of word “woke”…

…which, we are reminded, doesn’t really exist:

Lately, conservatives have blamed “wokeness” for everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Still, few have a ready definition for what the word means. 

The episode then goes on to provide its etymology (I’m a linguistics geek, I live for that stuff) and several working definitions and its history of use on the “progressive” left…

…on the way toward telling us the whole thing is a conservative messaging scam.

This is, of course, the leftist pattern:

1. Coin a term – “Politically Correct”, “CRT” “Woke”, “Mostly Peaceful” – to describe one of the left’s activities or goals
2. Use it.
3. Turn it into a social cliche.
4. When conservatives turn the cliche against them, declare it never existed and that that it’s all right-wing messaging (leaving behind a residue of people who didn’t get the memo, and continue to use the term in its original form with dogged, entitled obstinacy).
5. Move on to the next term, lather, rinse, repeat.

My project for the coming year: do my little bit to push “white supremacy” down into Step 4.

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 satire. But if you work in modern corporate culture, it’s all too plausible.

The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020.

The list has gotten a raft of derisive coverage – all of it justified.

Pick a favorite.

Mine (so far):

• Seminal: Replace with “Leading, Groundbreaking”. Term reinforces male-dominated langauge.

Well, no – Seminal (and “Semen”) are derived from the Latin term for “Seed”. A “seminal” thing is something from which something bigger grows. It’s not “male-dominated”, it’s Latin-dominated.

But :

• Transgendered: replace with “Transgender”. This term avoids connections that being transgender is something that is done to a person and/or that some kind of transition is required.

Grammatically? That’s just bizarre. Adding “ed” is a common way to turn a noun into an adjective.

Biologically? That’s even more bizarre. The word “Trans” itself means some sort of, uh, transition is required.

Oh, go ahead. Pick out your favorite and leave it in the comment section. I can’t fight the language war by myself.

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 was Twitter’s “Safety” czar, with “safety” in this case meaning “insulation from conservative dissent”, closes the circle on my lede.

But the larger point is, Big Left is actively debasing terms that used to have fairly vivid meanings.

“Attack”: Leaving out actual physical assaults, it meant a malicious verbal or written aggression – not “building a case for someone’s malfeasance”.

“Safety”: The state of being protected from or preventing harm – once upon a time. Now: the existence of an informational echo chamber.

The list goes on: Fascist, Holocaust, Nazi, Hitler, Man, Woman, Family, and on and on.

It’s not accidental, of course – controlling language is a key part of controlling society, and removing the redolence in language that harkens to the lessons of the past ensures that any future tyrant can dispense with any foreknowledge of what they are up to.

It’s pretty brilliant, really. Also evil.

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 Democrats count on growing to supermajority levels.

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 “BAKH”, rather than BEE-Thoh-vun” and “BATCH”.

But now that there’s a big story in a Hispanic country, it’s time for National Public Radio reporters to indulge their most annoying affectation.

During standard NPR newscasts, we get a steady diet of reporters and anchors with otherwise traditional “Public Radio accents” – mild-mannered, neutral and and unobtrusive in a way that still bespeaks upper-middle-class roots, the sound of an Oberlin College graduate who interned in DC – abruptly switching out of their public radio lack-of-brogue to wrap their tongues around words like “PWAIR-toh RRRREEEE-koh”, rolling the “R” like Ricardo Montalban in his prime, dare I say *appropriating* a Puerto Rican via “West Side Story” accent [1]…

…and then back to the NPR accent.

And for some reason, it’s ONLY Latino words (or the occasional South Asian one like “POCK-ee-stawn”) that prompts this affectation.

You never hear:

• OAH-zhlo NOR-guh
• STOK-holm SVAIR-ee-guh
• Bair-LEEN, BOON-des-re-poo-bleek DOYCH-land
• MOSK-vah ROSS-ee-ya
• TOH-kio NEE-hon
• Var-SHAH-vah Po-LOH-nya”
• Or, these days, most of all, “KHYIV, Ooo-KHRAI-nah”.

Pick one affectation and stick with it, I say.

SNL did in fact nail it, back when SNL was still capable of nailing, well, anything:

[1] One exception to the peeve – the reporters who are actually Puerto Rican or at least Latino, who manage to pull off the “NPR Accent” until it comes time to pronounce something Hispanic. No reason for them to dumb down their own language.

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 twang.

And the “twang” is, the researchers say, influenced by the local human dialect.

The accent noted is that of Somerset – in the West of England. Where, as Jimmy Carr notes, if you want to nail the accent, just sound like a pirate:

Does this work in America?

I mean, I can’t be the only one wondering of Kamala

A tale as old as time:

Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else. 

While I appreciate the willingness of Glenn Greenwald, a man of the Left, to call out the hypocrisy of our Ruling Class, this observation isn’t quite right, actually. Dominant liberal culture is all about rule promulgation, not necessarily personally abiding by rules. As time goes on, the pretense fades, and why wouldn’t it? Nothing ever happens to the Ruling Class.

Dobie Gray, a more perceptive social critic than our man Greenwald, was all over this way back in ’65:

I’m in with the in crowd
I go where the in crowd goes
I’m in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows
Any time of the year, don’t you hear?
Dressin’ fine, makin’ time
We breeze up and down the street
We get respect from the people we meet
They make way day or night
They know the in crowd is out of sight

Back in ’65, the term “out of sight” roughly meant cool, fashionable, au courant, like that. Some 56 years later, out of sight has a more conventional meaning: in the shadows, behind the curtain, holed up in nondescript office buildings in and around the Beltway. Our in crowd is an industrious lot, and they keep coming up with more rules at all times, whether our Congresscritters weigh in or not.

Any time of the year, don’t you hear? Mocking fools, making rules

But many of our fellow citizens don’t hear, nor are they listening. Instead, we all hear our animatronic Leader of the Free World as he is sent out to joust with the Teleprompter.

We make every minute count
Our share is always the biggest amount
Other guys imitate us
But the original’s still the greatest

Just ask them. If you can identify them.

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 innocent time, doesn’t it? Like an archaeological artifact when it seems like the languages were just a difference in argot, rather than rapidly diverging dialects of English?

It’s high time for an update.

I’ve got my suggestions. I welcome yours in the comments.

My Proposed Additions

Cancel Culture: It doesn’t exist, and never existed. And if you suggest otherwise, a mob will come after you, your employer and your family, as a consequence for saying things that aren’t and were never true.

Gender: (Noun) A social construct that is simultaneously dispositive on Intersectional matters, and doesn’t exist.

Hate: (noun). Any political thought that isn’t covered in the Democratic platform at the appropriate level of government.

Orwell, George: A British author who, despite his decades of activism on the left, and his own admissions, really wrote 1984 and Animal Farm about Republicans. Not leftists. Nosireebob.

Privilege: A set of class entitlements that one invokes in an argument against someone else to pre-empt them doing the same with your own class entitlements.

Racism: Systemic power. Not classism – no way, no how. And it has nothing to do with hating someone for having a different ethnicity.

Woke: The acceptable substitute for critical thought.

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 have some allure. I have it on good authority that Portland has a number of restaurants, but it’s difficult to tell what the bill of fare might be from this brown paper ad. It’s possible the restaurants in Portland feature word salad. “We’re a place of dualities that are never polarities.” What does that even mean? Does it mean this?

That might be the dazzling nightlife? After all, things are going well:

Every member of a police crowd-control unit in the US city of Portland has resigned after one of its officers was indicted on an assault charge.

The charge stemmed from violent anti-racism protests that rocked the city, in the state of Oregon, last year.

Prosecutors allege the officer used “excessive and unlawful use of force” against a protester in August 2020.

But Portland’s police union described the decision to prosecute the officer as “politically driven”.

The reporting here is from the BBC. Looks like they didn’t get the “mostly peaceful” memo. 

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 the depths of our culture’s intellectual collapse, here’s the NR article Cooke wrote on the subject.

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 for comprehensive Gun Control . Join Handgun Control, Incorporated!”

(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people. and a tidal wave of political annihilation, ensue).

2000:

“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Gun Control” doesn’t exist, and never existed, and is just a fairy tale the right uses to scare its followers and increase gun sales!”.

2002:

“Progressive” In Crowd: “It is good to be diverse”.

(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people ensue).

2002006:

“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Diversity” doesn’t exist, and is just a term made up by right wingers to try to ‘satirize’ us”.

2018:

“Progressive” In Crowd: “It is good to be ‘woke'”.

(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people ensue).

2021:

“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Wokeness” doesn’t exist, and is just a dog whistle the “alt right” uses to try to ‘satirize’ us”.

2022: What will be next?

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 attempt to sandbag that word.

Next came “Fascist”. “Anti”-Fa was only the latest among decades of hijacking, during which “Fascism” became equated with “any idea I, a member of Big Left, disagree with on any level” (as opposed to “Socialism combined with nationalism”).

“Hitler” and “Nazi” started taking it in the shorts during the George W. Bush administration, but their devaluation in the not-very-informed minds of a generation is proceeding apace.

Likewise “Racist”, “Misogynist” and pretty much any socially-loaded “-phobia”.

And now? “Jim Crow”.

On Big Left, words no longer have meanings. Or, rather, they’re working overtime to detach words for the meanings they’ve always had.

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.