BBC tries to get its mind around the way it seems to be okay in the United States to say...

... kick ass.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Kentucky, where a high-profile campaign has been launched to change the state's official slogan from "Unbridled Spirit" to "Kentucky Kicks Ass."...

According to Griffin VanMeter, one of the marketing professionals behind the rebranding push, the slogan was chosen to encapsulate the area's unpretentious dynamism.

"What it means to us is that instead of physically kicking someone's ass, it's evolved into a rallying cry that people can get behind," he says. "It's also a little risque which makes it that much better."

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.

What's the "word of the year"?

According to the American Dialect Society. Phrases get to be words in this competition. Guess: YOLO, #hashtag, Gangnam style, fiscal cliff, 47 percent?

"EPIC!! #uwmadison #snowday #snowfight #Draco #Madison #Wisconsin #bascom."

"All my residents came back from the Bascom Hill snowball bruised, battered, & bleeding. #HoFoProblems Good thing it was a #lakeshorevictory"

Collected tweets — with pics — of the latest classic Madison snowball fight.

What are #HoFoProblems? I don't know, and that tweet seems to be the only tweet on Twitter with that hashtag. Urban Dictionary suggests that "Hofo" is short for "homophobic" or — less likely — a combination of "ho" and "mofo."

IN THE COMMENTS: James said: "HoFo is a House Fellow." HaHa.

"Cornball brother."

There's a current controversy about some ESPN commentator musing over whether RG3 is a "cornball brother."

"My question, which is just a straight honest question: is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?" [Rob] Parker asked... "Well... he's black, he kind of does his thing, but he's not really down with the cause, he's not one of us. He's kind of black, but he's not really the guy you'd really want to hang out with, because he's off to do something else.... I want to find out about him.... I don't know because I keep hearing these things. We all know he has a white fiancee. Then there was all this talk about he's a Republican...."

All right. I just want to talk about the word "cornball," which strikes me as a very old fashioned word. I mean, I thought it was weird hearing Marlon Brando use the word in his 1953 movie "The Wild One":

Kathie Bleeker: Well, what d'ya do? I mean, do you just ride around or do you go on some sort of a picnic or something?

Johnny: A picnic? Man, you are too square. I'm... I... I'll have to straighten you out. Now, listen, you don't go any one special place. That's cornball style. You just go.

Brando's Johnny was the leader of a motorcycle gang that rode into a small town and scared people like Kathie Bleeker. I saw that movie when I was in college, circa 1970, and we thought it was very funny that Brando said "cornball." For years, perhaps decades, we amused ourselves by saying "That's cornball style," Brando-style, usually with an added, "Man, you are too square."

But maybe "cornball" has made a comeback, maybe specifically in the context of "cornball brother." I check Urban Dictionary, and (unsurprisingly) it's got a couple of completely new entries inspired by the RG3 flap: "A classy, intelligent African-American athlete. The kind of guy who dominates his enemies and doesn't fall in line with the opinion of douchebags — a freethinker and warrior." Fine, but not responsive to my inquiry. "Cornball" was the April 13, 2005 Urban Word of the Day with the definition: "Of a cheesy, corny, and otherwise over-the-top feelgood nature. Virtually any inspirational quote that makes you shudder." (The example given is of George Bush saying something deemed "cornball.") There's another entry — with more down than up votes — from 2005:

Its that dumbass motherfucker that says stupid ass shit and acts like a moron... STOP DOIN THAT! U AINT GOT NO FRIENDS GO HOME!

Okay, so... let's look at the Oxford English Dictionary, where if we skip past the references to "a sweetmeat made of popped corn or maize" — "Nanny remained near the dutch oven to keep us supplied with red-hot pones, or corn-balls" 1843 — we get to the metaphorical use of "a 'corny' person," with the first appearance being a mere 1 year before "The Wild One":

1952   R. C. Ruark in H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang (1960) 124/2   Eisenhower on no account can be called a cornball.

Now, the use of "corny" to refer to a kind of person goes back to 1932, according to the OED. The derivation is obvious as the word means "Of such a type as appeals to country-folk; rustic or unsophisticated; tiresomely or ridiculously old-fashioned or sentimental; hackneyed, trite; inferior."

1932   Melody Maker June 511/1   The ‘bounce’ of the brass section... has degenerated into a definitely ‘corny’ and staccato style of playing.
1935   Peabody (Mass.) Bull. Dec. 42/2   Corny—Derived from cornfed, meaning [music] played in country style, out of date, hill-billy, or in a style of pre-1925....

That's as much light as I can shed right now on the word cornball, which — you get my point — seems to be a word that is itself cornball.

Michelle Obama does not know how to kiss up to people in Wisconsin.

Yesterday in Racine, she began with: "For the next 16 days, coming here to Racine is the closest thing I'm going to get to being at home in Chicago, so you know I'm happy."

People in Wisconsin tend to exhibit antagonism toward Illinois, and I don't think they enjoy hearing that what's nice about Wisconsin is that it's close to Chicago. There's a word for it: FIB.

By the way, what is Michelle wearing? It looks like something designed by Dmitry of "Project Runway."

IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

She pronounced "Racine" as "RAY-seen." I grew up pronouncing it "RUH-seen"

I said:

Remember when John Kerry came to Wisconsin and mispronounced "brat."

From a Straight Dope forum on the topic of how to say "Racine":

Wisconsinite born and raised; I pronounce it "Ruh-seen." My Chicago-suburban born-and-raised husband, who spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, calls it "Ray-seen."

This guide to Wisconsin pronunciation has "Ruh-seen." on the audio but also: "Locals argue between RAY-seen and ruh-SEEN." Miscellaneous Racine information:

In 1887, malted milk was invented by William Horlick in Racine. The garbage disposal was invented in 1927 by architect John Hammes of Racine.

Also at the Straight Dope forum: "I thought this was the playwright Racine, so I voted the second..." The French influence! Well, Racine was, in fact, settled by the French:

On October 10, 1699, a fleet of eight canoes bearing a party of French explorers entered the mouth of Root River. These were the first Europeans known to visit what is now Racine County. Led by Jonathan Paradise, they founded a trading post in the area that eventually became a small settlement on Lake Michigan near where the Root River empties into Lake Michigan. "Racine" is French for "root."

Both of the argued-for pronunciations are wrong if you want to go with the French. The first syllable "a" should be more like the "a" in "cat" (and not "brat"!).

AND: Commenter Mr. D said:

She said "Ray-seen" because that's how Chicagoans pronounce the name of Racine Avenue in Chicago. They used to call the Chicago Cardinals football team the Ray-seen Cardinals because their field was on Racine Avenue.

Ah-ha!

"Some grub with POTUS?" — a subject line on email from the Obama campaign.

"Ann -- You, President Obama, a table, chairs, and some grub," it begins.

Grub! What sort of people think how hard and how long to come up with another way to make a chance at eating dinner with Obama enticing and come up with some grub?

"Want to give it a shot?" I'm asked, with a link to a site where I can contribute to the campaign. There follows this picture:



And I'm told "It'll be pretty awesome." Awesome... grub... It's like suddenly, simultaneously, I'm an air-headed teenager...



... and Wooster from "Wagon Train."

"I Miley'd the s**t out of this Saturday."

That's how you say you cut your hair really short when you are the creator of the hot HBO series "Girls."

Romney said "bless his heart" about Obama.

How disrespectful is that?

A preemptive “don’t even try it” to the media: It is not racist in the slightest.

Here's the Urban Dictionary's top entry for "bless your heart":

1. This is a term used by the people of the southern United States particularly near the Gulf of Mexico to express to someone that they are an idiot without saying such harsh words.

2. "You are an idiot but I like you and care about you so I dont want to hurt your feelings."

 ADDED: Here's an old Metafilter discussion:

"Well, bless your heart!" and "How nice for you!" are two of my favorite barely-veiled criticisms. Can you provide me with some more?...

"Isn't that special."...

"Duly noted."...

"Good luck with that."

"Thank you for sharing."...

"I'll keep that in mind." 

Business clichés.

89 of them.

ADDED: #53 might strike lawyers as misguided:

It’s not actionable enough/what’s the deliverable? = You guys do the work on refining the idea. I’m too tired.

Years ago I worked at a market research firm that had a video ad that it used to show prospective clients. It went on and on, but the repeated tag line was: Above all, it's actionable!

I thought it was embarrassing and all the actionable business was funny, but I had never seen the word and simply assumed it had the intended meaning — that the firm was good at springing into action and getting things done.

When I got to law school and saw the meaning the word has in tort law, I experienced a strange mixture of pity and mirth.

Looking at the OED today, I see the tort law meaning — "Giving cause for legal action" — goes back to 1601:

1601   W. Lambard Archion (1635) 102   Baited, & bitten with libells & slanders that be not actionable.

The other meaning — "Able to be acted upon or put into practice; useful, practical" — goes back only to 1913:

1913   C. Frederick New Housek. xii. 192   Refuse to let the mind wallow and dawdle around a problem without arriving at definite, actionable conclusions.

Here's a recent one:

2004   Jrnl. Amer. Med. Assoc. 14 Jan. 184/2   The availability of advanced technology has changed the nature, scope, and potential of drug utilization programs to provide valuable, actionable, patient-specific information to prescribers.

You'd think the AMA folk would be more sensitive about tort law.

Rush Limbaugh makes a sex joke about President Obama: "I've laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton."

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh was riffing on Obama's seeming turnaround on the Keystone Pipeline. You might think he wouldn't dip back into sexual imagery so soon after the Fluke incident:

Obama could not stop this pipeline if he wanted to. This leg of the pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas was in the works. He doesn't have the authority to stop it.... He's just glomming onto it. It's like trying to be present when the Ten Commandments are given at the burning bush and claiming you wrote 'em. 

Note: The burning bush and the 10 Commandments are separate events in the Bible. Back to Rush:

I'm almost speechless here with the absolute brazenness of this. I wouldn't be surprised if Obama says, "I've laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton." That's where we're heading with this. The guy who steadfastly opposes drilling for oil and has not issued any permits to speak of, particularly since Gulf oil drilling moratorium -- the guy who has made his name opposing the Keystone pipeline -- is now out taking credit for it....

Several paragraphs later:

And that's why I think it isn't gonna be long before Obama starts bragging about how much pipe he's laid. He'll start comparing himself to other presidents. "I've laid more pipe than any president except Bill Clinton." He's gotta throw Clinton in there for credibility.

See? That's a scripted joke. Said twice, word for word the same. There's no question "laid pipe" is slang for having sexual intercourse. It's not unusual for Rush to throw sexual double entendre into his monologues. He has a way of saying things very clearly and pausing so that listeners who enjoy that kind of thing can laugh and his more puritanical listeners can not notice or pretend they don't notice.

Now, I don't really have a problem with him saying this, and I don't think it's like using an inaccurate prostitute metaphor over and over to make fun of a student who isn't much of a public figure. I think we should make fun of Presidents, and the joke is straightforward hilarity, not a component of a confusing argument about health care insurance. So it's funny, and it's against not one but 2 Presidents, and I always appreciate reminders of the way Bill Clinton treated women. In fact, I think Rush's joke may be a salvo in the much-vaunted "war on women": You think I'm bad to women? Remember how awful Bill Clinton was!

The trouble with that is it's very hard to say anything negative about Barack Obama's interaction with women. (Remember when Christina Romer tried? (She got her double entendre wrong!)) If you have to dredge up Bill Clinton, maybe it's not worth doing. But there is a larger, significant enough, point: The Democratic Party wants women to think it's all about women's interests, but they will subordinate these interests to their political interests whenever the interests diverge. That was the horrifying spectacle of the Lewinsky scandal.

"The ESPN editor fired Sunday for using 'chink in the armor' in a headline about Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin..."

"... said the racial slur never crossed his mind - and he was devastated when he realized his mistake."

[Anthony Federico] said he has used the phrase "at least 100 times" in headlines over the years and thought nothing of it when he slapped it on the Lin story.

Federico called Lin one of his heroes - not just because he's a big Knicks fan, but because he feels a kinship with a fellow "outspoken Christian."

Swift move, playing the Christian card. I'm sure the right-wing commentators will now be super-motivated to defend this poor man.

But let me say something cold-hearted: This is what happens when you use clichés. George Orwell told you long ago — in "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Not only did you use one, your defense — other that that Christian business — is that you've used that same tired old figure of speech over and over and over again.

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

... and chink in the armor.

Nobody even wears armor anymore, and the word "chink" is only used — other than in its moronic racial denotation — in that dying metaphor. Here's my rule: No one should ever use the expression "chink in the armor" again. Fire everyone who lets it go out in a final draft of anything.

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.

"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.

When a book falls into my hands, I open it up and read a sentence — and maybe that ends up being the only sentence I read.

Today's book just came in the mail. It's "The End of Straight Supremacy: Realizing Gay Liberation," by Shannon Gilreath. The sentence happened to be:

Feminists have persuasively shown the connection between sexualized violence, which, if we are being generous, might be the kind of "idea" First Amendment mucks are apparently concerned about (violence in the head), and real violence, inflicted through sex in the home or in the street, against women.

Mucks? I guess that's short for "high-muck-a-muck." Which means: poohbah.

And my response is: Pooh. Bah.

"Lots of photos of Perry having nothing whatsoever to do with this story, and not a single one of the rock. Well done, WP!"

The first comment at a Washington Post article about how Rick Perry, early in his career, used to host events at a hunting camp where there was a rock that had the word "Niggerhead" painted on it.

Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s. There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property. In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country. Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.

Does this have anything to do with Rick Perry (who, asked about the rock, said the word is an "offensive name that has no place in the modern world")? Well, yes, if you're inclined to think that Perry's rural Texas background has bred something nasty into him:

Perry has spoken often about how his upbringing in this sparsely populated farming community influenced his conservatism. He has rarely, if ever, discussed what it was like growing up amid segregation in an area where blacks were a tiny fraction of the population.

So what's he hiding, eh?

Reading on, we see that — according to Perry — Perry's father leased the property in 1983, and the first thing he did was paint over the word on the rock. And every time Perry saw the rock, it was painted over. But WaPo found 7 individuals who say they remember seeing the name on the rock during the time when Perry's father's name was on the lease. And:

Longtime hunters, cowboys and ranchers said this particular place was known by that name as long as they could remember, and still is.

“The cowboys, when they were gathering cattle, they’d say they’re going to the Matthews or Niggerhead or the Nail” pastures, said Bill Reed, a distributor for Coors beer in nearby Abilene who used to lease a hunting parcel adjacent to the Perrys’. “Those were all names. Nobody thought anything about it.”...

“You know, Texas is a little different — you go where it’s comfortable,” Reed said. “. . . It would have been one thing if [the Perrys] had named it, but they didn’t. So, it’s basically a figure of speech as far as most people are concerned. No one thought anything about it.”

No one thought anything about it. Those who are looking for a racial issue to play know how to jump on a phrase like that. Okay, then, let him who is without sin cast the first rock.

Christina Romer, the woman who was taken aback when the man (Obama) said "It’s clear monetary policy has shot its wad."

It was Romer's first meeting with the President-elect in November 2008. According to Ron Suskind's book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President," Obama had "a woman problem: too few of them in key jobs" and he was trying to bring in Christina Romer. And "It’s clear monetary policy has shot its wad" is what Obama said to her before even "hello." Is that how you talk to a woman?

Remember the old movie line "You had me at hello"? According to Suskind, "For Christina Romer it was love at first sight." What woman in love wants to say "You had me at shot its wad"?

It was a strange break from decorum for a man who had done so outstandingly well with women voters. The two had never met before, and this made the salty, sexual language hard to read. Later it would seem a foreshadowing of something that came to irk many of the West Wing’s women: the president didn’t have particularly strong “women skills.” The guy’s-guy persona, which the message team would use to show Obama’s down-to-earth side, failed to account for at least one thing: What if you didn’t play basketball or golf? Still, for the moment, the comment didn’t faze Romer. She was curious to hear what he thought.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Obama extended his hand, now ready to greet her. “I guess we need to focus on fiscal policy,” he said.

“No, you’re wrong,” Romer corrected him. “There’s quite a bit we can still do monetarily, even with the historically low interest rates.”

Isn't that just like a woman... not understanding that the need for a refractory period?

IN THE COMMENTS:jakebadlands said:

Not only does this phrase have other, non-sexual meanings, is the sexual meaning even the primary one?

Though being in the presence of Mr Obama, I imagine Ms. Romer's thoughts could not help but turn to the sexual.

X said:

says more about Romer and her dirty mind that lacks knowledge of guns.

EDH said:

Musket Love?

"The two had never met before, and this made the salty, sexual language hard to read."

I wonder if that "salty" part was a Freudian slip in Suskind's part?

The actual origin of "shooting your wad" is from musketry.


In some current American slang it is a reference to male ejaculation; however the phrase has a very long history covering most of the time that muskets have been in use up to the present. The wad is a piece of paper put in the muzzle along with the projectile and gun powder. If the shooter is too hasty -- say in a tense battle -- they may not include the projectile. The result is a fire without the intended bullet; only the wad will fly out...a wasted shot. Hence, "shooting your wad" can mean expending your energy fruitlessly. The OED also references the wad as in a roll of paper money; in this case "shooting your wad" means blowing all your cash at once. [Link.]

"Get nice and rowdy. It's a 4:15 game, plenty of time to get lubed up..."

Says Tom Brady to Patriots fans.

"Yeah. Start drinking early."

A Patriots spokesperson clarifies, saying that Brady wanted fans to "stay hydrated, drink a lot of water. Be loud. Drink responsibly."

This suggests new slang. Which do you like better?
	"I'm getting lubed up," when you're drinking water.
	"I'm staying hydrated," when you're drinking alcohol.
pollcode.com free polls

"If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished."

"Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning."

God's blog.

Later:

Wow. Just wow. I don’t even know where to start. So the man and his buddy the rib-thing have dominion over everything. They’re going to get pretty unbearable really fast. What You need to do is make them think that there were other, bigger, scarier creatures around a long time before them. I suggest dinosaurs. No need to actually create dinosaurs—just create some weird-ass dinosaur bones and skeletons and bury them in random locations. Man will dig them up eventually and think, What the f?

Is this humor from The New Yorker funny?
	Great if you're not religious, otherwise: awful.
	Funny for the religious and the non-religious alike.
	Amusing for (some) religious folk, pretty stupid to anyone else.
	The humor depends more on whether routine internet-related stuff still tickles you.
	Bad. Just bad. For anyone with or without a brain. With or without a God.
pollcode.com free polls

"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!