"Almost anyone, with a little exaggeration, would make a good comic character. There is no lack of raw material. Not only the woods, but the streets and houses are full of it."

Said Frank King (1883-1969), quoted in "Growing Old in Gasoline Alley: Ninety-four Years And Counting" (Comics Journal).

For a while, King focused exclusively on the car talk of his regular cast (Walt, Doc, Avery, and Bill), and then in 1921, Colonel McCormick’s cousin, partner and head of the Tribune-Daily News syndicate, Captain Joseph Patterson, decided that the cartoon would be even more popular if something in it appealed to women. "Get a baby into the story fast," he commanded the flabbergasted King, who protested that Walt, the main character, was a bachelor. It was then decided to have Walt find a baby in a basket on his doorstep—which he did on Valentine's Day, 1921.

"Inviting the administration now to participate in an after-the-fact constitutional law seminar with yet-to-be-named witnesses only demonstrates further the countless procedural deficiencies..."

"... that have infected this inquiry from its inception and shows the lack of seriousness with which you are undertaking these proceedings. An academic discussion cannot retroactively fix an irretrievably broken process."

Wrote White House Counsel Pat Cipollone in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Nadler. The hearing in question, is scheduled for December 4th, and — as Cipollone understands "from rumors and press reports" and not from any official notice — "will consist of an academic discussion by law professors."

ADDED: I must say that as a longtime law professor, I'm finding the disrespect for law professors inadequate. You heard me right. I do not for one minute believe that the 3 lawprofs the Judiciary Committee will put on display will be speaking as if they are conducting something that deserves to be called an "academic seminar." But I understand Cipollone's refraining from getting into the problem of the politicalization of the academic field of constitutional law.

AND: "Seminar" is an interesting word. It's only been in the English language since the late 19th century, according to OED. It was originally something done in German universities, "a select group of advanced students associated for special study and original research under the guidance of a professor" and it came to mean "a class that meets for systematic study under the direction of a teacher." The oldest appearance in English is:

1889 A. S. Hill Our English v. 209 In New York and Washington, if I am not misinformed, ‘seminars’ are periodically held, at which a clever woman coaches other clever women in the political, literary, and ethical topics of the day.

Clever women. You can really feel the insult in "clever." In Samuel Johnson's dictionary (1755), the entry for "clever" is: "This is a low word, scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation; and applied to any thing a man likes, without a settled meaning."

"Tesla’s Elon Musk, definitely a visionary brain genius and not at all a manic idiot spaz and brazen fraud, has invented the future of mass transit for which we so desperately clamored."

"A narrow, jagged death-tunnel through which, uh, one Tesla-brand car at a time can, ah, drive ... the person who owns it, plus maybe two or three other people ... from one place to another ... at 49 miles per hour."

Mocks Albert Burneko at Deadspin.

Didn't we all agree back in 2006 that the word "spaz" isn't acceptable? That was when Tiger Woods called himself "a spaz," and the British press reacted very negatively. Here's what Language Log wrote at the time:

So how did the word spaz become innocuous playground slang in the U.S. but a grave insult in the U.K.? There's no question that spaz is a shortened and altered form of spastic, a term historically used to describe people with spastic paralysis, a condition... now commonly known as cerebral palsy.......

Here is the earliest cite [for the derogatory use] in the OED, from film critic Pauline Kael in 1965, along with another cite I found from that year in a New York Times column by Russell Baker:

1965 P. KAEL I lost it at Movies III. 259The term that American teen-agers now use as the opposite of 'tough' is 'spaz'. A spaz is a person who is courteous to teachers, plans for a career..and believes in official values. A spaz is something like what adults still call a square.

"Observer: America's New Class System," New York Times, Apr. 11, 1965, p. E14 Your teen-age daughter asks what you think of her "shades," which you are canny enough to know are her sunglasses, and you say, "Cool," and she says, "Oh, Dad, what a spaz!" (Translation: "You're strictly from 23-skidoo.")

So by the time Kael and Baker noticed teenagers using spaz, the sense had already shifted to 'uncool person,' without reference to lack of motor coordination.... [T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with... Steve Martin... playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz"...

For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s... the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....

And then in 2014, Weird Al Yankovic had to apologize for this song lyric:

Saw your blog post
It's really fantastic
That was sarcastic
'Cause you write like a spastic

Anyway, I wouldn't use "spaz." It makes an insult out of comparing somebody to a disabled person. You shouldn't want to cause that collateral damage.

That said, Musk's Tesla tunnel is absurd.

The "skeeviness" of the 1990s "gave us the Trump Teens."

That's the puzzling teaser on the front page of the NYT right now:

Who the hell are the Trump teens?, I wondered long enough to decide to write this post. It's hard to get used to the expression "the teens" to refer to this decade we're in. The first two decades of the century have been this weird anomaly, interfering with our conventional style of talking about decades. It's messed with our minds.

"Our poor monkey brains just can't deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators, especially with respect to the logic of contemporary American politics."

Language Log indulges in more analysis than David Frum and The Atlantic deserve for publishing the ludicrous sentence "Many wavering Republicans will come home — even if the home to which they now return has changed in ways that render it almost indistinguishable from the dwelling it used to be."

How negative can you get?

Looking for "real-world examples with five or more negations in a dozen words, e.g. 'Not that I don't doubt that his reputation isn't undeserved.'"

"Cladly dressed."

A strange new phrase has appeared on the language landscape, and it's funny because it's so clearly wrong and it's so easy to understand where it came from and what it means. As Language Log says: "Presumably it's a garbled memory of 'scantily clad,' a phrase that involves two rare words often encountered together."

"Scantily clad" is one of the first language issues I addressed on this blog, back in March 2004. This was back in the days before posts had titles and before the word "listicle" existed, but the post is a listicle, and the 4th item is:

4. Kudos to Neil MacFarquhar for thinking of an adjective to precede "clad" other than "scantily." For decades, writers have searched their minds for an alternative and now, finally, a solution: "skimpily clad." (Read the article, too, to learn how "Abdel Hakim, a strapping young Saudi, kissed Kawthar, a raven-haired Tunisian beauty, and all hell broke loose." It's about reality TV in the Mideastern milieu.)

That was written before I read that Elmore Leonard denounced the phrase "all hell broke loose," or I would have mentioned it.

What's newly fit to print.

"Fuck Brooklyn!"

The notion that understanding the rule can save you from breaking it.

Language Log embarrasses The Wall Street Journal (European edition) by pointing at this headline which has 2 bad spelling errors:

"Prosector to Oscar Pistorius: 'You're Version's a Lie'"! 

(By the way, I think Language Log has a punctuation mistake there.)

Now, I think "Prosector" for "Prosecutor" is actually the worse mistake, because it got me thinking about what it would mean to be in favor of (i.e., pro) "sector." I thought of words like "bisect" and "dissect," which are based on a root that means to cut, and that sent me spinning into a contemplation of Pistorius's birth defect (fibular hemimelia) and the double amputation performed by the surgeons who could be said to be pro-sector.

But Language Log thinks the worse mistake is "You're" for "Your," even though that mistake — along with "it's" for "its" — is just about the most common typo there is. Language Log makes an amazing assertion:

"Where to keep your pubic hair."

"Cameron Diaz Encourages Women to Keep Their Pubic Hair in Her New Book."

Kinda like pressed flowers... or very unobtrusive bookmarks.

Speech's trends in America's United States.

Is the United States of America on track to become America's United States?

That's a question that crosses my mind after reading this Language Log discussion of the trend away from using "of" and toward using the possessive "-s" in phrases where there is no living entity to do the possessing. There's a nice graph at the link showing this historical progression in the State of the Union Address, which I guess some day will be called the Union's State Address.

Language Log did not use the phrases America's United States or the Union's State Address. Those are my comic projections into the future based on the discussion of the tendency to say things like "some of America's leading foundations and corporations" instead of "some of the leading foundations and corporations of America." But there are many examples — I went looking for them — of the continued use of the "of" formation, including one in the sentence from which I extracted "some of America's leading foundations and corporations":

And I'm reaching out to some of America's leading foundations and corporations on a new initiative to help more young men of color facing especially tough odds stay on track and reach their full potential.

Sometimes the 's feels right and sometimes we know it's wrong. Maybe you'll laugh — or get mad at me — when I point out that President Obama did not say "color's young men." But it makes you think: What do we believe we are saying when we use the possessive with inanimate things?

A plan for reviving the study of grammar.

Over at Language Log, here (recommending The Penn Treebank) and here:

A basic understanding of how language works should be part of what every educated person knows....

[A]t least in the U.S., my suggestion would be to turn away from English departments, and pursue a plan based on an alliance of linguists with people in computer science, psychology, statistics, medicine, law, sociology, business, etc., who increasingly see linguistic analysis (e.g. in the form of "text mining" or "text analytics") as an interesting object of study in itself, and as a means to enable research on other (applied or fundamental) topics. This alliance — which eventually might even include some people from Digital Humanities — is a plausible basis for college-level courses in "grammar" as practical text analysis.

There are more links in that passage than the one that I copied, by the way. That one just jumped out at me. There's no link, however, on "Digital Humanities," which puzzled me, so I googled and found a number of things, including — in The Chronicle of Higher Education — "Stop Calling It 'Digital Humanities'" and an easy-to-absorb Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

Tracing "Valley Girl" type "uptalk" back to Dust-Bowl era Okies...

... using the evidence of a recording of a 1940 interview with Woody Guthrie.
I should also forestall the readers who will respond "But it doesn't sound like Woody Guthrie is asking questions!" by asking them to apply the same judgment to Taylor Mali's famous "Totally like whatever" screed. And then to tell me what the difference between "yes/no question rises" and other sorts of final rises really is — after reading this.

"A century of complaints about business jargon."

At the beginning of the 20th century, people complained about “stop in,” “deliver the goods,” “win out,” “the straight dope,” “make good,” “get away with it,” “put one over,” “show down,” “come across,” “get wise,” “on the level,” “bawl him out,” “got his number,” “get his goat,” “get warm around the collar,” “hit the ceiling,” “fall for it,” and “get busy.”

All that seems so disconnected from business these days as we carp about "impactful," "going forward," "low-hanging fruit," and "at the end of the day."

Why blame business people? Maybe because we just don't like them too much anyway.

"A student, if he is on scholarship or has an ambitious mother, may actually try to earn all these merit badges."

"But if he has any spirit, he’ll murmur a well-chosen four-letter word and go out and get stoned. Or if he is exceptionally thoughtful, he may explore the contradictions embedded in these commandments...."

Writes Richard Lanham (in 1974, quoted by Mark Liberman, at Language Log) protesting the "commandments" laid down (purportedly) in books about writing style.

I detect some snobbery, as if it's low class to take the basics of writing style seriously. Those in the know can bypass that cant about clarity and... what?

ADDED: I've corrected this to show that Liberman was quoting Lanham. I knew Liberman was mostly quoting Lanham, but there are so many ins and outs of blocking and indenting that my eye lost track of where one author ended and the other began. I should have paid more attention to the reek of snobbery, because it's something people today are more fastidious about.

"Over the years, we've discussed Elmore Leonard at least as often as any other writer..."

Says Language Log (on the occasion of Leonard's death). What was it about Leonard's writing that caught the linguist's attention? There are a bunch of links to old posts. I clicked on "Elmore's Adverbs":

Spelling...

... rage.

"As frustratingly late as it was — Mr. Obama could and should have said years ago much of what he said today..."

"... there is no underestimating the importance of that statement."

So say the editors of The New York Times.

No underestimating?! What?

So if I say Obama's speech is the least significant thing ever said in the history of mankind, I'm still not underestimating it?

The editorial ends:

There have been times when we wished we could hear the right words from Mr. Obama on issues like these, and times we heard the words but wondered about his commitment. Today was not either of those moments.

There have been times when I have read the Times and wondered why the Times was putting things in those words and times when I have read the words out loud in an effort to hear whether these words were the right words. Today was both of those moments.

ADDED: Language Log has a post "Overestimating, underestimating, whatever."

It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. [pause] Or overestimating. Whatever."

"There is a statue outside the Federal Trade Commission of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man."

"This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses."

Wrote David Brooks, getting just about everything wrong.

Oh, well, we all get distracted and lose our minds when gazing upon extremely muscular men, do we not?

"Let's take a look at the prehistory of *cough*-style asterisking in comic strips..."

"... and the more recent usage as a form of 'cyberpragmatics.'"