Urban Dictionary Urban Word of the Day: "Too pooped to Pope."

434 up, 249 down.

You know you're really old...

... when the Urban Dictionary "Urban Word of the Day" distinguishes 2 definitions, one for young hip folk and one for old businessmen and you've never even noticed the old-businessman one. The word — phrase, actually, but it's the height of oldness to be pedantic about that — is "out of pocket."

And, no, the old businessman meaning is not paid for with one's own money, like "out of pocket expenses." The new old meaning is unreachable by the normal means of communication (which, I suppose, is the coverage of a cell phone network).

The supposedly hip and young newer meaning seems to be just another way to say out of control.

Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day: laugh.

"A smile having an orgasm."

Dude1: Oh dude look at that smile it's totally orgasming
Dude2: That's called a laugh...

Why I don't delete mobys in the comments section to this blog.

First, I love free expression, and one way to express a viewpoint is to say the opposite. It's sarcasm. It can be comedy. Look at Stephen Colbert. It's a good — even light-hearted — way to expose the bad side of your opponent's arguments.

Second, we all need to become as competent as possible as consumers of communication. Don't be naive. You need to detect these literary devices. Understand that writers/speakers have ulterior motives. I'm not going to clear out material that requires you to exercise your mental muscles. If you can't tell a moby when you see one, I'm not going to delete him: You need practice. If I see you responding to him as if he were sincere, it makes me sad. Where's your mental toughness? How will you be a competent citizen in the political arena where everyone's always more or less bullshitting?

What is a moby? It's surprisingly hard to Google for your answer. Perhaps the singer Moby — after whom the particular sort of trolling is named — has had more success petitioning Google for reputation help than has Rick "frothy mix" Santorum. So here's Urban Dictionary's most popular definition of Moby:

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.

But you don't get banned on my blog for doing that, even though my comments policy, as stated above the compose window, says "we delete... bad faith comments," defining bad faith as "comments that we believe have the ulterior motive of destroying the conversation and driving people away from this forum." A moby can cross the line into bad faith, but mobyism per se is not what I'm talking about. What I want is for readers and commenters not to get suckered by comments that come in this insincere form. I want you to raise your game!

On to the specific incident. This morning, I posted for the first time about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The point of my post was, as I put it in the comments, to demand that everyone pay attention to and value the actual facts of the case and not to fall prey to more prejudice and stereotypes as they snap up a seemingly useful incident for the purpose of saying something they already want to say about — ironically — prejudices and stereotypes.

A commenter called Dane County Taxpayer posted:

Why was this hoodie black boy walking around this neighborhood? He was out looking to provoke a reaction. He definitely deserves a Darwin award for getting himself killed. Let face it, it is reasonable to assume the worst when you see a hoodie black youth in your gated community. This boy should have known that. The gun grabbers are now using this to push their agenda.

Now, that's obviously a moby. Anyone who took DCT seriously and argued with him on the merits was duped. Please don't be duped. Others, like Palladian, called him out:

"Dane County Taxpayer" is what's called a "moby" troll; it posts deliberately inflammatory, racially-charged comments in order to provoke others to make such comments and therefore have "proof" that the commenters here are "racist".

This particular troll has a very long and ugly history here. Ignore it.

And I said:

Yes, if you didn't recognize Dane County Taxpayer as a moby... you need to up your game. Be a savvy commenter. There are mobys afoot.

Meade wanted us to delete DCT's comment, but I argued with him about the proper meaning of our key policy term "bad faith," and I was adamant that what we will delete is only the commenter who we believe hates this blog and is out to wreck it by undermining the conversation and driving people away. I'm not about saving readers from having to be smart about detecting insincerity and sarcasm. Admittedly, I don't know when someone has crossed my "bad faith" line, but that is the line.

I realize that by drawing the line there, it is possible that someone on some other blog might quote that comment and say Aha! Proof that those terrible right-wing commenters at Althouse are a bunch of disgusting racists! And if I believe the commenter is trying to make that happen, with the purpose of wrecking my blog, I will see him as crossing the bad faith line. And, actually, now that I think about it, I'm inclined to view Dane County Taxpayer as having crossed the line. I think anti-Althousians of the web will see his comment as a delicious tidbit. DCT himself could even start another blog, under a different name and use his own quote to attack me and my commenters.

Having written all this, and given all the pointing out of the mobying that appears in the context of the original comments thread, I'm going to leave the comment up, as a lesson in free speech and reading comprehension.

Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Congressional Review.

"To loosely read or breeze through a document, likely missing a fair amount of the information contained within."

How tough will the upgrade be?
I'm not too sure, I only gave the guide a Congressional Review.

Urban Dictionary defines "SOPA."

"The shittiest piece of legislation the U.S. government ever came up with."

uhm, whats that internet thing again? is that what all the kiddies are stealing music with? we better fix that...

Or maybe they were thinking: People don't hate Congress enough. What can we do about that?

"Feminist blogging is definitely not for wimps, which is why the vast majority of us do it pseudonymously."

"The condescension and mansplaining is hard to bear, particularly if you have to deal with a fair amount of this in the meat world."

So writes Claire Potter, which seems not to be a pseudonym, so I guess she's very bold and brave. Who's doing the "condescension and mansplaining," the blogger or the enemies out there who are presumably the reason why feminist blogging is "definitely not for wimps"?

Potter links the word "mansplaining" to the Urban Dictionary:

Mansplain...
to delighting in condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation

Up until I got to the word "he," I thought "mansplaining" referred a feminist expounding feminist dogma to an idiot man. It's the other way around. The man is the condescender in this particular portmanteau word. 

So the feminist blogger has the difficult struggle with other people condescendingly explaining things to her. Is there any awareness that she is condescendingly explaining things to other people?

Potter proceeds to enumerate 3 "dangerous topics for the feminist blogger": race, sexual assault, and sports. The dangerousness seems to register in the form of people who simply argue with the feminist blogger. For example, Potter says that when she writes about race, "weirdos" speak up and say... well, she doesn't say what they say, only that "They all seem to think that people who write about race have the same power over other citizens that you would normally attribute to, say, the federal government, a state legislature or the Supreme Court." That's pretty vague, and I'm not sensing what the "danger" is.

Anyway, Potter's blog — published at the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education —  is called "Tenured Radical." Tenured Radical is a delightful phrase to head an essay boasting of one's own courage in the face of adversity.

UPDATE: I respond to Potter's reaction to me.

"Mendoucheous."

Fred4Pres, commenting in the Laurence Tribe post, uses the world "mendoucheous." An obvious portmanteau word, it's easy to understand, but I go and look it up in Urban Dictionary anyway, because I want to see if it has (semi-)official recognitions, and it is listed and defined, but no one's voted on it yet...



I give it the thumbs up.

First!

NYT: "Obama Takes Questions From His Tweeps."

Yikes. Yeeps. The NYT deploys a slang word that — at this moment — has fewer than 100 total votes at Urban Dictionary.

1. Tweeps

A user-created conjunction from Twitter and Peeps usually referring to the followers of the person using the word. Part of the various lingo resulting from www.twitter.com

"Oprah: Thanks tweeps for your good thoughts…" - Real quote from Twitter.com

2. tweeps

the words 'tweet' and 'peeps' combined. only used to describe the folks that have a twitter account...

3. Tweeps

Tweeps are tweens or teens that hang out with adults 25 years or older on a regular basis. For the adult, this should be a little creepy, since most people their age would like to hang out and party with real adults. Tweeps usually result in tweeping and the adult usually becomes a tweeper.

Definition #3 is not doing well in the thumbs-up/thumbs-down game. I don't think Obama has that kind of tweeps.

In other Urban Dictionary news, the word of the day today is "fuck." I'm not sure why. You'd think they'd have already gotten around to the famous word. It's no upstart like "tweeps." Maybe the President of the United States tweeting with his tweeps makes you think: fuck.

But I like seeing Obama constrained to 140 letters. He's often verbose and I'm all tr;dl.

"The president didn't have enough backbone. He became too milquetoast... He actually surcame too easily to big business and big banks..."

Surcame?

IN THE COMMENTS: Someone calls this solecism "ebonics," and I say:

No, this is nothing like ebonics. It's the opposite of ebonics, if anything. Cornel West may be black, but his speech is not at all ebonics. It's pretentious straining at erudition, which is why it's so damned funny when he screws up.

I would not put up a post making fun of someone who lapses into an ebonics-type usage. I don't see the value in mocking that. I do see big value in puncturing a puffed-up academic — even though political correctness nags at me to refrain from making fun of the way a black person speaks.

I do have some sympathy for West here, though, because I think PC folk have failed — over a long period of time — to give him the feedback that would have kept him from developing this absurdly inflated style of speech, with its danger of missteps like this, and the self-serious demeanor that makes his mistakes especially funny.

Is it wrong for me to wait too long before writing about what the NYT public editor has written about why the NYT took so long to write about the ACORN story?

Somehow I, a lone blogger, feel that it is wrong for me to wait, so how absurd it feels to me that the Times, with all its resources, waited as long as it did.

You can read what the public editor, Clark Hoyt, has to say on the subject here. Note the URL. I love the way the URL generator coined the word "pubed" out of public editor. It's not a new coinage though. Urban Dictionary has already defined "pube" — usually a noun — as a verb. Definition #5:

to place a hair from the pubic male region on a piece of food to be served to a customer usually though not necessarily, by a worker of the establishment

"i was pubed last night by the guys at jj's" (past tense)

There's got to be an analogy here, but I will move back to Hoyt's gentle probing of his employer. I'll skip a lot of the details, which you either know or can read at the first link. I'll just quote a couple things I want to comment on.

Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com.

And Hoyt yelled "You lie!" No, he probably didn't, but come on. They had to be lying. I'd prefer to think they were lying. How could they be that out of the loop? It takes 2 seconds to glance at Drudge and Memeorandum. If you have any interest in current events, it's harder not to do than to do.

And what's with "Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire." Isn't the Times in the business of looking for facts? A great newspaper should be setting the "fires"  — breaking stories — not covering stories that other people have broken, which is what the Times was left doing with ACORN.

[O]n Sept. 16, nearly a week after the first video was posted, The Times took note of the controversy, under the headline, “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe.”...

By stressing the politics, the article irritated more readers. “A suspicious person might see an attempt to deflect criticism of Acorn by highlighting how those pesky conservatives are at it again,” said Albert Smith of Chatham, N.J.

I thought politics was emphasized too much, at the expense of questions about an organization whose employees in city after city participated in outlandish conversations about illegal and immoral activities....

Emphasizing the politics was a way of pretending that the earlier story wasn't news fit to print. It wasn't so embarrassingly late to be talking about the politics of it all.

[The reporter Scott] Shane said he thought it was correct to approach the Acorn sting as a political story. Absent that aspect, he said, the discussion of prostitution by low-level employees was not compelling news.

Some conservatives think O’Keefe and Giles were doing work that should have been done by the mainstream media. But most news organizations consider such tactics unethical — The Times specifically prohibits reporters from misrepresenting themselves or making secret recordings. And the two were sloppy with facts.

All that may be true, but why hasn't the Times ever investigated ACORN in all these years? Why was it left to a couple of quirky amateurs to bring some light to a huge shady operation. Follow great journalistic ethics and investigate some things and bring us some facts.

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

So you're assigning somebody to get the clues you've been too lame to pick up, and yet you don't want people to be able to send him clues because — you've got to be kidding! — he'd get too much email. Who with any level of connectedness has not learned to deal with a ton of email?! Come on. I want to just yell "bullshit!," but I'll spell it out. I get 100s of email messages every day, and it's not even my job to pick up clues. I deal with it, and it's not even that hard. You have an email address that is different from the one you use with people you know and trust, and you scan the first lines as they appear in the inbox. From that alone, you can see what's going on, and you can choose to click through to whatever you want and spend as little as half a second reading it if you are any good. Damn, if your clue-getter isn't able to do that, you might as well give up and write more stories about what middle-aged moms in Park Slope are saying about popsicles and iPhones.

And as for the desire to avoid excoriation in the blogosphere... have a nice day.

"You Lie!" defined as: "The classiest way to respond to anyone you disagree with."

"You lie!" is the Urban Dictionary Urban Word of the Day.