"Porexia."

A newly coined word for people who've gone all obsessive about the size of their pores.  And speaking of words...

High-definition television has arguably upped the ante. Consider the celebrity with glistening teeth and yogic arms, but a jarringly pock-marked nose in close-ups. Viewers think, “If her pores look like that, what do mine look like?” said Dr. Mary Lupo, a clinical professor of dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine.

... somebody needs to tell the New York Times that pock marks are not pores.

And maybe somebody needs to show these porexic whiners what real skin damage looks like.

In this time of "truthers," "birthers," and "deathers," it's hard not to look at the word "mother" and think...

... this must be somebody with a crazy-ass theory about moths.

Wisconsinquences.

Unintended Wisconsinquences.

Qaddafidils.

As in: Pushing up Qaddafidils. Could someone illustrate my coinage by photoshopping (or drawing) a daffodil combined with Qaddafi?

Or Gaddafi/Qaddhafi/Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Kaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi/Qadaffi or however the hell you spell that in Latin letters.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O makes this:



Chip Ahoy makes this:

The 2010 "word of the year" is "refudiate."

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary:

An unquestionable buzzmaker in 2010, the word refudiate instantly evokes the name of Sarah Palin, who tweeted her way into a flurry of media activity when she used the word in certain statements posted on Twitter. Critics pounced on Palin, lampooning what they saw as nonsensical vocabulary and speculating on whether she meant “refute” or “repudiate.”

From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used “refudiate,” we have concluded that neither “refute” nor “repudiate” seems consistently precise, and that “refudiate” more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of “reject.”

Congratulations to wordsmith Sarah and to all her detractors and fans. We just can't get enough of Sarah and her unique way of expressing herself.

Was there much competition? The rest of the short list, in alphabetical order, was: bankster, crowdsourcing, double-dip (describing a recession), gleek, nom nom, retweet (did "tweet" win in some previous year?), Tea Party, top kill, vuvuzela, webisode.

So the real question is: Why not Tea Party? My political sensors detect liberal bias. There were 2 words associated with the conservative backlash against Obama and the Democratic Congress, and one carried the connotation that the backlash is full of stupid people. If you say, then why wasn't "tea bagger" on the list? The answer is obviously that it's too scurrilous for the dictionary folk. The best argument against the liberal bias theory is that "refudiate" is a coinage that can be used in all sorts of places. It functions as a new word, not simply a name to designate a new thing.

"Obama = Keynesian?" sign makes Rally for Sanity folks insane...

... and stupid:



Via Weekly Standard.

Bleh. I don't like saying Rally for Sanity folks. Help me pick a better coinage:

What should we call the Rally to Restore Sanity folks?
	Sanitarians
	Sane Freaks
	Reasonable People
	The Enemy
	Sanitizers
	Sanity's Little Elves
pollcode.com free polls

Isn't Apple about love? Where's the love Apple?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Appholes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

A great coinage: "Appholes."

CONFESSION: The video clip looked beautiful in full screen size on the 27" screen of the iMac I picked up at the Apple store 2 days ago. So crisp I exclaimed "He needs to get his knuckles waxed."

Tea Party-haters see racism everywhere — except in themselves.

Yesterday, we were talking about the Flickr page set up to collect photographs of Tea Party signs with grammar and spelling errors. The page is called "Teabonics," a term intended to express how stupid Tea Partiers are. But the coinage "Teabonics" is a play on "Ebonics." The word "Ebonics" isn't supposed to make fun of mistakes made by black people. It embodies the claim that speech that may sound nonstandard is, in fact, a language with its own grammar, that may be studied and learned.

Working on this post, I saw that Language Log had written about "Teabonics," and I assumed I would get some good analysis about the misuse of "Ebonics" in coining the new word. But here's what I found:

Teabonics?

March 31, 2010 @ 6:38 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Humor

Pictures here.

Including some nice examples of Muphry's Law in action....

Muphry's Law? Muphry's Law? Ha! Hang on a second, I need to recover from deep pangs of irony. Mock spelling, and you'd better make sure you never ever ever ever ever make a typo.

It takes more than 2 hours before anyone shows up on the popular linguistics blog to take Liberman to task for failing to see the swipe at black people:

Elizabeth Herrington said,
March 31, 2010 @ 8:47 pm

This is funny, sure. But we need to remember Ebonics (inglorious word it be) is based on a grammar. Teabonics is just plain ignorance.

***

Lance said,
March 31, 2010 @ 9:07 pm

... I'm sort of sorry that LanguageLog is propagating this. The common tagline is that "linguists are calling [this] Teabonics"; except that, as Elizabeth Herrington says above, recognizing Ebonics is deeply rooted in linguistic concepts, whereas this is just making fun of misspelling. And while I'm in favor politically of making fun of tea-partiers, I'm professionally against calling it "Teabonics", which elevates this to actual academic study and debases Ebonics as being equivalently illiterate.

So, why the blindness to racism? I suspect that it is a combination of the conventional liberal self-love — the mind-dulling confidence that they are the good people — and the embarrassing secret that the study of Ebonics was never truly grounded in respect for black people.

CORRECTION: "Muphry's Law," spelled like that, is something that has been talked about in the past on Language Log. Liberman's writing "Muphry's Law" would be an example of Muphry's Law if the term "Muphry's Law" hadn't been coined to refer to things like that. Thanks to the commenter Dewb for pointing this out.

"Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife."

"But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people."

Wow. That's Maureen Dowd. (Obama's in trouble!) She's writing about the importance of reaching people on a "visceral" level, the way Sarah Palin does.

Dowd quotes a "spiritual therapist": "[Palin's] alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that."

Obama's admirers have loved his thoughtful thinkiness, his cerebreality. But that's getting old and cold.

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.....

Where is the animal fire inside the clammily cool Prez? Maureen wants to know. Was it ever really there?

The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out.

The animating spirit...

Whose animating spirit provided the electricity back then? Did it come from him, or did we generate it from within as we looked at him and fell in love?

You know, I think what Obama seems to have become, he always was. Shake him all you want, Maureen, but you're like some Star Trek extra (in tights and a tunic) trying to coax heat out of the body of Mr. Spock. I'm afraid these earnest efforts are futile.

Do you have koodies?

What sounds like an old childhood insult — cooties — has become a — sort of — compliment aimed at kids.

koodie - noun Slang. A kid keenly interested in food, especially eating, cooking or watching reruns of Julia Child. A kid who has an ardent or refined interest in food; a mini-gourmet; usually trained by one or both parents to have an unusual, and sometimes fanatic, desire to eat unusual foods. Evolution from the now defunct word “foodie”.

Or should that be a kid who's been spending too much time around (possibly very annoying) adults and, if he should happen to enter the company of young persons, will experience ordinary social life as something more complicated than "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"?

No takes.

Actually, the books discussed at the link seem to be more about getting kids to be more adventurous in eating new foods and not to prefer packaged/junk food. That's all very nice, but it's not so much refinement. Kids shouldn't be picky eaters. And these koodies sound like a new kind of picky.

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."

My son Jac said it in 1989 when he was 8, and my ex RLC blogs it now under the title "Obviosophobia."

And it would be obvious — yet wrong! — for you to observe that he misspelled "Obviosophobia."

Now, I'm checking up on R's blog, and I see he's into old quotes — even as he quizzes his 12-year-old son about regret. He remembers: "Someone once called my work 'beautiful but not important.'" Bearing out the truth of Jac's childhood remark, he adds "What a perfect description of this world!"

Are you afraid of not saying things like that?

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.

"The engine of unbridled capitalism, with its unfair system of thought, has reached the end of the road and is unable to move."

"Selfishiness and insatiable greed have taken the place of such human concepts as love, sacrifice, dignity and justice. The belief in the one god has been replaced with self-belief."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the U.N. — as reported in the NYT.

Hey, I hope he really did say "selfishiness"? It's a cool coinage. Like there's something really suspicious about the selfishness of capitalism. And it stinks after 3 days.

AND: Elsewhere in today's U.N. speeches, Gaddafy said: "Perhaps tomorrow we will have a fish flu." Think about it.

Obama would like you to see government as religion.

He addresses a group of religious leaders:

“I know there’s been a lot of misinformation in this debate, and there are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness,” Mr. Obama told a multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders who support his goal to remake the nation’s health care system.

Bearing false witness? Breaking the 9th Commandment? So his opponents are sinners. I'm trying to imagine the separation-of-church-and-state freakout if George Bush had taken this approach to arguing for one of his policies.
According to the lede paragraph in the linked NYT article:

President Obama sought Wednesday to reframe the health care debate as “a core ethical and moral obligation,” imploring a coalition of religious leaders to help promote the plan to lower costs and expand insurance coverage for all Americans.

Strangely, the context of that quote — "a core ethical and moral obligation" — is missing from the body of the article. Was something cut? Was it too embarrassing? Too Bush-y? I have to go elsewhere:

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: OK, for some, that public option has gone over like a lead balloon. So how about plan B, morality? Is that the secret weapon strategy to get health care reform? President Obama went on a conference call today with thousands of religious people, arguing health care reform is a moral issue. The president also argued against what he calls "ludicrous lies" made up about his health plan.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: These are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation. That is that we look out for one other, that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. And in the wealthiest nation on earth right now, we are neglecting to live up to that call.

Now, we know that Barack Obama doesn't "keep" his actual brother — we remember George Hussein Onyango Obama, the brother who lives a hut — and it's clear that what he means is that government has the moral obligation to regard all citizens as brothers and sisters — I'm coining the word sibizens — and to care for them.

I'd really like to find the full text of what was — if I'm to believe Van Susteren — a big telephone call. It's not on the White House website. There's a bit more here (at ABC):

Mr. Obama called on the religious leaders to help him share the good word about health care reform and set the record straight.

“I need you to knock on doors, talk to your neighbors. I need you to spread the facts and speak the truth,” he said.

Sharing the "good word"? Good Lord! Is this the Gospel? Mark 16:

Later Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.

He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned."

Obama says believe. Believe or be condemned as sinners. And go forth into the world. Preach the good news. Speak the truth.

"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

Talk about the blue pill! Just wait until the government lays its hands on you. In Barack's name, you will get well.

Government as religion — it's a poisonous notion! But drink it, drink it. Believe! It will not hurt you at all!

ADDED:

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death," Obama said, according to [Rabbi Jack] Moline (paging Sarah Palin...), quoting from the Rosh Hashanah prayer that says that in the holiday period, it is decided "who shall live and who shall die."

Let's watch C-SPAN clips of Senator Obama fretting about the dysempathy of those terrible judges, Roberts and Alito.

Via Andrew Malcolm, who says:

[Obama expresses] admiration for and no reason to doubt the fine character of either man.

But, ultimately, Obama explains on Sept. 22, 2005, a nominee's character alone is insufficient to earn his support because both men, he alleges without detailing the merits of specific cases, too often side with powerful interests over others, with large companies against individuals, with prosecutors over defense attorneys.

He says he's seeking a judge who wants to "even" the playing field and that in a private meeting Roberts agreed. But Obama states that Roberts' words are unconvincing and contradicted by his decisions. "Ultimately," Obama says, "we need [to] give more weight to his deeds than his reassuring words."

Give more weight to his deeds than his reassuring words? The funny thing is: if the American people had done that, Obama would not now be in the position to appoint Supreme Court Justices.