Earlier in 2015.

"Great style and substance. We looked at this one and talked about it for 15 minutes," I said last May, about this:



And here's something else I had last May, "Masculinity is hard," about an Elspeth Reeve TNR piece called "No Campaigns for Manly Men," which took the position, as I put it, that "without the broad, loud-mouthed, bullying Chris Christie in the presidential race, we have no 'manly men.'"

You might want to challenge that characterization of Christie, but that's the way Reeve presents him as she sets up her argument that the real men are gone.

Who’s the manly man’s man of the right? It’s not a politician like Ted Cruz, who exudes “televangelist” more than “cowboy.” It’s not a pundit like Glenn Beck, who cries over the Constitution and sells premium dad jeans. Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal—they’re all kind of cute, and certainly non-threatening. Jeb Bush is selling himself as the Smart Bush.

It was so pre-Trump back then. 

Actually, Trump is mentioned in the Elspeth Reeve article. She consults the linguist Geoff Nunburg and he found it "hard to think of manly men," so he switched the subject to assholes:

Assholes do very well on the right in particular. I wrote a book about assholes, I feel like an expert on the subject. And they do very well on the right. I mean there was a period in which Donald Trump was leading the Republican polls. And it isn’t as if there is anybody in America who doesn’t think Donald Trump’s an asshole. But he’s like, our asshole.

Our asshole. It's not exactly a campaign slogan, but think about it. 

Masculinity is hard.

I was just noticing a few days ago that Elspeth Reeve seems to have the Hillary + gender gig at the New Republic. She's the one who wrote the much-linked "Why Do So Many People Hate the Sound of Hillary Clinton's Voice?"

Her new one is "No Campaigns for Manly Men." Supposedly, without the broad, loud-mouthed, bullying Chris Christie in the presidential race, we have no "manly men." You might want to challenge that characterization of Christie, but that's the way Reeve presents him as she sets up her argument that the real men are gone.

Who’s the manly man’s man of the right? It’s not a politician like Ted Cruz, who exudes “televangelist” more than “cowboy.” It’s not a pundit like Glenn Beck, who cries over the Constitution and sells premium dad jeans. Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal—they’re all kind of cute, and certainly non-threatening. Jeb Bush is selling himself as the Smart Bush.

"Manly man’s man"? What is this category we're supposed to believe in and care about? Is a "manly man’s man" something beyond a mere "manly man" or a "man’s man"? What the hell are we talking about? Reeve doesn't proceed to analyze what manliness means to people as they search for a political leader. She just consults the linguist Geoff Nunburg:

“It’s hard to think of manly men,” Nunberg mused. 

Is musing manly? Nunberg's got nunthing.

Guys like Jim Webb of Virginia. 

I guess that's Reeve's prompt to the musing Nunberg. Subtext: Democrats have a manly man.

“Christie was going to be that but Christie’s a joke.” Or at least, people are starting to see him as one, Nunberg said. He could only think of the manly man’s cousin: the asshole. Nunberg explained: "Assholes do very well on the right in particular. I wrote a book about assholes..."

Nunberg opines that Ted Cruz is "clearly an asshole," which makes Nunberg sound like an asshole. I mean, the guy wrote a book about assholes. Asked to talk about manliness, his instincts were to shift to a topic he understood (assholes), to push his own book, and to take an easy swipe at a convenient other ("the right").

Masculinity is hard.

"Why Do So Many People Hate the Sound of Hillary Clinton's Voice?"

A piece by Elspeth Reeve, who seems to have the Hillary + gender gig at the New Republic.

Clinton "has a loud and clear voice," Stanford linguist Eckert says. "A ‘nice’ woman tends to have a breathy voice," she explained, sounding a little Marilyn Monroe-ish. "There’s nothing breathy about Hillary Clinton’s voice. And if somebody doesn’t want a woman to be powerful they’re not going to like that voice."

Nunberg agrees: "People have become so conscious of the semi-coded ways in which people communicate these sexist notions of aggression." Like Frank Luntz noting he would get "hit" by Media Matters, for example. "Voice will be the place where that comes home to roost. ... It’s just another way of saying ‘shrill.’"

"There are notes and notes, of course: notes to oneself and notes to others; notes taken, made, jotted, and passed."

"Mash, doctor's, suicide, and condolence notes. Field, class, and case notes; notes for general circulation; foot and head notes, notes of hand. But it's the bookish notes that academics care most about, the ones that intervene between the things we read and the things we write."

Geoffrey Nunberg has notes from his notes as a note-taker at a conference on notes.

For [Walter Benjamin], the rise of note-taking signaled the book's reduction into a purely transitional object, "an obsolete mediation between two different filing systems." Everything that matters, he said, could be found in the card boxes of the researcher who wrote it, which the scholar studying it had merely to incorporate in his own card index.

Ha ha. Brilliant. And archaic. Card boxes.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.

"The most overrated essay in the modern canon... turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless."

I'm just noticing how harshly Stanley Fish slammed George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." This is in a review of a book that I've been reading lately: Geoffrey Nunberg's "Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show." Great title, no? It's a book about using language to sell your political program. Nunberg is quite taken with how well the right has done this and is trying to prod liberals to do better:

[A]ll Nunberg can think to do is claim for the left an advantage that is irrelevant to his book's project: "Liberals have a linguistic advantage of their own, in the form of truth." That is to say (and he says it), the right's success is built on a structure of "distortions." "We" are truth tellers; "they" are political liars.

This notion is particularly odd given an earlier section of the book in which Nunberg does a nice critical number on what is surely the most overrated essay in the modern canon, George Orwell's turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless "Politics and the English Language." Commenting on Orwell's distinction between words politically inflected and words that plainly name things, Nunberg points out that plain language is as political as any other and will probably be all the more effective because it "seems to correspond to concrete perception." The point, as he has been saying all along, is not to strip all of the political overlay from your language but to make the language that carries your political message the lingua franca of the public sphere.

Perhaps Orwell's essay fails to impress Nunberg and Fish because, over time, we citizens have gotten deeply in touch with our natural human revulsion for elaborate euphemisms and bureaucratese. The last sentence of Orwell's essay is: "One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs." Maybe enough time has passed, and we've absorbed his lesson. The jeering has gotten easy and reflexive. We forthrightly love straight talk these days, and we're not bamboozled by, but instinctively mistrust those who get caught up roundabout rhetoric -- as Senator Kerry learned in the last election.

Dammit, I love the old Orwell essay.

Let's all go read it again. Or just read Orwell's great set of writing rules:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

We've seen it before, but it's still helpful. (Now let me read this one more time before posting and see if I can find some words to cut.)