The NYT mini-crossword today is all about the similarity between "Biden" and "bidet."

Is this in bad taste?

Now, that I'm staring at it, the words — all of them, taken together — seem to suggest a dossier-worthy tale about Joe Biden.

If you're wondering whether "Julia" was clued as "Fictional character in a much-mocked Obama slide-show," it wasn't. The clue was "Louis-Dreyfus of 'Veep.'"

Extra points for commenters who compose a story gliding through all 10 of those words in a lucid, tasty combination.

ADDED: My link on "Fictional character..." doesn't go to the slide-show itself but to an Atlantic article from 2012, "Obama's 'Life of Julia' Was Made to Be Mocked/It has easy-to-manipulate Web graphics, an oversimplified narrative, and hits a political hot spot: Barack Obama's new campaign tool The Life of Julia was apparently built specifically to be co-opted by right wing meme-makers." That article links (repeatedly) to the actual slide show with the URL barackobama.com/life-of-julia. But if you click on it, you get this:



The deadness of the "Life of Julia" link is something I commented on long ago, in October 2013, with "Is the old Obama campaign slideshow 'Life of Julia' anywhere to be found on the web?"

I have something I'd like to say about it, but I can't find it anywhere on the web. It's not at the link everyone linked to when everyone was talking about it, which was at the Obama campaign website. The campaign is over, so I guess there's no obligation to continue to host it, but this was an important historical document, and it shouldn't fall down the memory hole.

"The Life of Julia" has come to be cited — somewhat humorously — for the proposition that the government has lured women away from men, into a dependent relationship with the government, and this has had various ill effects. But I want to take a new look at why the graphic used a female character. Using a female screened out the reality that males rely on government programs too.

Surely, "The Life of Julia" is important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. This is the sort of thing Wikipedia is great at. But no. In fact, there's only one page in Wikipedia with both "Life of Julia" and "Obama" and "The Life of Julia"....



Campbell Brown??! Remember her?

In May 2012, Brown published a New York Times op-ed in which she criticized President Obama for sounding “paternalistic” when he speaks of women. Noting his repeated practice of describing women as “smarter than men,” she commented: “It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress.” Brown added that the women of her acquaintance “who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, ‘The Life of Julia,’ a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.” Brown outlined the lives of relatives of hers who have rescued from business failure by “Friends and family, not government.”

Hmm. That almost makes it look as though her conspicuous disparagement of "The Life of Julia" ruined her career! She was once important enough to have been impersonated by Kristen Wiig and Tracey Ullman. Couldn't find the KW one (it's not in this otherwise fantastic collection). Bit here's the TU:



IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth links to "Life of Julia" by putting the Obama URL into the Wayback Machine. I should have thought of that.

When Maureen Dowd used the word "editrix"...

I asked:

By the way, do you find "editrix" jaunty and amusing, annoying and groan-worthy, or evidence that Dowd isn't doing feminism right?

It doesn't really matter who the "editrix" in question was, but it was some former editor of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire.

I got a lot of interesting answers. Robert Cook went for what I see as the traditional feminist answer:

"Editrix" is anachronistic, as are terms such as "waitress" and "actress," etc. The terms "editor," "waiter," (now "server"), and "actor" are not innately masculine in their connotations, and so are suitable--preferable--when referring to females working at these jobs.

"Editrix" is anachronistic, as are terms such as "waitress" and "actress," etc. The terms "editor," "waiter," (now "server"), and "actor" are not innately masculine in their connotations, and so are suitable--preferable--when referring to females working at these jobs.

Mary Beth did the research:

Yeah, like early 20th Century, when the word was first used. Google Ngram shows it becoming popular in 1911, except for one fluke blip in the graph in 1838. It actually looks like it's becoming more popular.

We don't need gendered nouns in a non-gendered language so the use of one seems like an affectation. It was still the most interesting thing in what I read.

Though rhhardin joked us in a childish direction — "Editrix is for kids" — quite a few minds went straight from "-trix" to "dominatrix." Owen said:

"Editrix" should be "editrice." Sounds less like black leather and fishnet stockings, more classy.

And Ignorance is Bliss said:

I find a sudden urge to check if PornHub has and editrix category, just to see what that might involve.

And I think that's something of what's going on in the mind of tim in vermont:

As a man, I can only say "editrix" communicates female power and competence. But we men know nothing, we think that the sexes are different in many ways not visually obvious.

Similarly, FIDO:

["Editrix"] is perfect for a controlling female authority figure, adding a little panache to an otherwise dreary field.

I'm front-paging all that because I thought this was quite a coincidence yesterday: I was continuing my reading of Mary McCarthy's "Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue" (in the essay collection "On the Contrary: Articles of Belief"), first blogged about in this post on April 3d (which I was reading because I'd done the research and discovered that it is the first published appearance of the word "Orwellian" (in 1950)). And I encountered the word "editress."

Unlike the older magazines, whose editresses were matrons who wore (and still wear) their hats at their desks as though at a committee meeting at the Colony Club, Mademoiselle was staffed by young women of no social pretensions, college graduates and business types, live wires and prom queens, middle-class girls peppy or sultry, fond of fun and phonograph records....

But beyond the attempt [by Vogue] to push quality goods during a buying recession like the recent one, or to dodge responsibility for an unpopular mode (this year’s sheaths and cloches are widely unbecoming), there appears to be some periodic feminine compulsion on the editresses’ part to strike a suffragette attitude toward the merchants whose products are their livelihood, to ally themselves in a gush with their readers, who are seen temporarily as their “real” friends.

There are 2 other appearances of "editress" in the essay, including one, I realize now, that was in the excerpt I put up on April 3rd:

As an instrument of mass snobbery, this remarkable magazine [Flair], dedicated simply to the personal cult of its editress, to the fetichism of the flower (Fleur Cowles, Flair, a single rose), outdistances all its competitors in the audacity of its conception. It is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without contest or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself, one hundred and twenty pages of sheer presentation, a journalistic mirage....

I'm not going to insist that Maureen Dowd read my blog post, but if it's more than coincidence that her next column uses a feminine form of "editor," I wonder if she considered the word "editress" and opted instead for "editrix" and, if so, why? I think the answer is up there in what various commenters said: "editrix" sounds more exciting and dominating and "editress" is condescending. Mary McCarthy certainly meant to sound condescending as hell.

The OED says the "-trix" ending began in English with some words adopted from the Latin — administratrix, executrix, persecutrix, etc. And: "The suffix has occasionally been loosely used to form nonce-feminines to agent-nouns in -ter, as paintrix n. instead of the regular paintress. The commoner suffix in English is -tress suffix...." That is, when you go for "-trix" rather than "-tress" to goof around with feminizing one of those nouns about things people do, you're being weirder, and therefore going for an effect, like making us laugh or get excited, which is what Dowd did.

"If Trump wins, future elections will hinge on who has the dankest memes."

Said Mary Beth, in the comments to my June 17th post "The message is clear: Don't even try to understand."

I had forgotten this video:



I just stumbled into that old post today. "If Trump wins..." Well, Trump did win. And it was one thing to watch that video last June, but how about now? Did you laugh? Did Al Franken laugh — Al Franken, who says Trump never laughs?

ADDED: Speaking of never laughs, Kanye West — who appeared at Trump's side today — has long made a brand out of never smiling.

"... I saw this book from the 1800s and it was velvet-covered with brass and everything. I looked at all these people’s photos, and they look so real and their outfits were incredible and they weren’t smiling. People, you know the paparazzi, always come up to me, ‘Why you not smiling?’ and I think, not smiling makes me smile. When you see paintings in an old castle, people are not smiling because it just wouldn’t look as cool.'"

AND: In Trump's case, maybe he's not laughing because not to laugh fits his theme They're laughing at us...


ALSO: Here's a great example of Hillary relying on a laughing-it-all-off approach to dealing with a challenge — and Trump staying aggressively unjovial:

"In a perverse gesture, the gunmen separated the Muslims from the non-Muslims. The Muslims were given food and water."

From the CNN article about the Dhaka massacre, which I linked to last night. The commenter Mary Beth extracted the line I've quoted above and said "Perverse?"

"Perverse" is a key word in the American processing of the religious dimension of terrorist attacks.



I have a post from mid-June — just after the Orlando massacre — titled "President Obama's Sermon of 2 Perversions."

It happened to be Flag Day — today is Independence Day — and I quoted a line from the Supreme Court's famous case about pledging allegiance to the flag: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion...."



Obama used his position of authority to instruct us about what is orthodox in religion:

Since before I was president, I've been clear about how extremist groups have perverted Islam to justify terrorism. As president, I have called on our Muslim friends and allies at home and around the world to work with us to reject this twisted interpretation of one of the world's great religions.

I said:

There are many versions of all of the religions. How is he supposed to know what versions are perversions? It sounds awful: perversion! But how can it mean more than that it's religion that seems bad to him? In which case, it's still religion. It's religion he doesn't like.

"@Voxdotcom… has no idea of what Japanese popular culture is like, does it? Somebody needs to start calling this Vox-shaming, or something."

Says Moe Lane, linking to my post "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist" and something David said in the comments: "If examined closely Japanese popular culture would explode the brain of the average political correctness warrior in the USA."

"If Vox wants to criticize cultural appropriation [then] it should find writers who are a little less provincial and a little more experienced with the culture in question," says Moe Lane, embedding "a not entirely atypical example... chosen partially because the artist (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu) is both popular and known for her adoption of Western styles and themes – but mostly because it is, by our standards, highly insane," and I have watched this astounding video, which had me alternately laughing and saying "Oh, no!"



That was truly mindbending... a great escape from the dreary, daily American chidings about what is and is not appropriate.

ADDED: In the comments yesterday Mary Beth also pointed to the "PonPonPon" which she said was "pretty popular on the internet despite its racism." ("Skip to the 34 second mark to see what I mean.")

"We're not going to go hog wild."

Says Governor Scott Walker, announcing a plan for a "significant" cut in state income taxes.

ADDED: In the comments, Mary Beth said: "I'm surprised, and a little let down, that this post didn't also have a history of the phrase 'hog wild.'" Thanks for missing the kind of Althouse extras that I really do love to provide. And here they are. The OED has this:

hog-wild adj. U.S. completely wild or unrestrained; crazy (chiefly in to go hog-wild).

1893   Galveston (Texas) Daily News 11 Mar. 4/3   The state of Kansas has gone ‘hog wild’.
1940   C. McCullers Heart is Lonely Hunter i. ii. 26   This here white man had just gone hog wild. He were butting his head against the side of this brick wall.
2005   Time Out N.Y. 3 Feb. 82/1   New York City Ballet went hog-wild with promotions on January 22.

And here's a graph of the history of the use of "hog wild." For some reason, it spiked in 1942 and 1963. WW2 and the Kennedy assassination. Big events in those years. Any number of reasons to turn to "hog wild."

"She was wrapped in her fuzzy blanket, ready to listen to Taylor Swift or play Fruit Ninja on her iPod."

From an op-ed the NYT chose to publish in the wake of the Gabriel Giffords shooting. Please add this to the pile of evidence that the NYT aspires to be the newspaper for soft-hearted, soft-headed women.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth wins the thread:

I had a discussion with my daughter Amy the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was....

(Link added.)