"President Biden promised to usher in a golden age of bipartisan cooperation, but instead he is showing a reverse Midas touch..."

"... taking issues that once united Republicans and Democrats and making them partisan and divisive," writes Marc A. Thiessen (at WaPo).

Until Biden came along, every single covid-19 relief bill was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses.... For Biden, who promised to put his “whole soul” into uniting Republicans and Democrats, passing a bipartisan covid bill should have been a layup. I mean, Trump did it five times. But instead, the president has turned unity into division by using covid relief as a pretext to pass all sorts of liberal spending projects that have nothing to do with the pandemic....

There has long been strong support among Republican leaders for an infrastructure package of as much as $1 trillion. But instead of uniting Republicans and Democrats around a bipartisan deal, Biden is using infrastructure as a pretext to spend more tax dollars on things that have nothing to do with infrastructure. A Politico analysis of his $2.25 trillion proposal found that only $821 billion, or 37 percent, is focused on traditional infrastructure items such as transportation, electricity and Internet....

How does Biden justify the hyperpartisan start to his presidency? Just as Democrats redefined “infrastructure,” the president is now trying to redefine “bipartisanship.” Biden recently declared, “I would like . . . elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters.”

FROM THE EMAIL: Iain writes:

The President has spent his entire career as a windsock, showing us all the direction of the prevailing winds that would keep Joe Biden in public office and in the public eye. He's always been a partisan hack, but with his own electoral interests front and center. That he is now touting division as unity and partisanship as bipartisan is a sign of either his cognitive decline and weakened independence or of his reading that this is the way the wind is blowing. Or both. Wind direction, or the perception of it, can differ if there is an obstacle between you and the wind, or something that alters the wind in a small area to appear directionally different from the actual prevailing winds. Time will tell, I suppose, which way the winds are actually blowing.

And Bob Boyd writes:

"Biden...promised to put his 'whole soul' into uniting Republicans and Democrats"

That's like promising to put a mouse turd into a double batch of oatmeal cookies.

The tiniest word that is recognized as a word — in the sense that there's an OED entry — is "fancyette."

It's a noun made out of the noun "fancy" — meaning fantasy or figment of imagination — and the ending "-ette" — meaning a small version of something. The OED defines it as "A little fancy" and says it's "Apparently an isolated use." The one example of the use — perhaps the only example — is:

a1834 S. T. Coleridge Marginalia in Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. (1882) Jan. 125 [Two Fancyettes, as Coleridge names them, at the end of a volume of Fichte].

So the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote marginalia in a magazine 140 years ago, and no one else has picked up this word. It's a wonder anyone ever saw it. Imagine scribbling your opinion in the margin of a magazine, adding an ending to an existing word, and having your passing fancy — your fancyette — preserved in the eminent dictionary. Just you, that one night, reading Fichte or whatever.

It's strange. How does that get to be a word? It's a wordette. See? I can make a word with a noun and an "-ette." It's easy to do. We do language tricks like that all the time. But how does it get into the OED? Is it a little joke? A jokette? ("Jokette" is not in the OED. "Wordette" is not in the OED.) Or is it something big? — massive reverence for Coleridge.

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Iain writes:

Apparently Coleridge was famous for his marginalia. I didn't know this until a few years ago when I read H. J. Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. The author, a professor at University of Toronto, was the editor of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge Marginalia Project, volumes 3-6! (who knew?). I bought the book as soon as I heard of it, and enjoyed it. It came to my attention during a party at the Yale Divinity School, where my wife was pursuing her M.Div. She introduced me to the Divinity School Librarian, and a portion of our conversation went roughly as follows: 

Me: I don't usually take books out of libraries because I write all over my books, and libraries tend to frown on that 

Librarian: Have you ever read Marginalia? 

Me: No. 

Librarian: It's a wonderful exploration of marginalia and its use over time 

Me: Sounds interesting. 

My wife: Oh, that will look great on your bookshelf right next to your history of the footnote 

Librarian: Is that Grafton's history of the footnote? 

Me: Yes it is! 

My wife: I'll leave you two alone now...'bye!

Footnote: Marginalia was the original name of this blog, and the first post on this blog was, in part, about librarians disapproving of marginalia:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.