"This is particularly pertinent in light of Bowser's dishonest effort (acting on behalf of the restaurant industry lobbyists) to overturn the will of the voters for the second time by repealing I-82. Even though tipping mainly benefits employers by transferring to their customers a large part of the responsibility for paying their staff, it would probably temporarily hurt workers to go cold turkey and just go on a tipping strike (although in the long run getting rid of tipping would help both customers and workers). But what about taking a baby step and reducing the going rate for tips from 20% to 15%? Since tips are now tax free, the net impact on workers should be minimal."
I had to ask Grok about that 1-82/Bowser business. Answer: here. It's the problem of the "tipped minimum wage." The letter-writer is not a selfish bastard but a progressive reformer. I think. But I bet the selfish bastards are out there, ready to scale back tips to capture the tax break intended for others. But most of us participate in the proud American tradition of generous tipping. That's how the norm crept up from 15% to 20%.
When you read "Bowser," did you immediately know it meant the mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser? I had no idea. It struck me as absurd. The only Bowser I could think of was Bowser, the lead singer of Sha Na Na.
Looking for something else — whether I'd ever blogged a particular video (I had) — I found this discussion, from 2009, of the use of "Obama" as a slang term:
LAST week, if you wanted to use the latest slang to tell a friend he was cool, you could have called him “Obama,” as in: “Dude, you’re rocking the new Pre phone? You are so Obama.”
"Eventually, the party’s going to have to move to younger people being in more control, and that’s natural, but this doesn’t feel like the moment yet."
That is so terribly depressing, but I was cheered up substantially by reading that Bauman is Bowzer from Sha Na Na!
Anyway, we seem to be hurtling toward a rematch of Biden versus Trump. Neither party seems able to break out of the spell cast by its ridiculous old man. On the Democratic side, they've got the incumbent, and they've got the problem of Kamala Harris waiting for her turn. They are locked in.
You'd think the Republicans have more hope of breaking out of the predicament. But the Republicans have Trump, a unique and perplexing problem. And the recent polls show Trump beating Biden:
I was just stumbling around in Wikipedia, researching the insult "greasy," skimming through the subject of the "greaser sub-culture" — "The band Sha-Na-Na models their on-stage presence on New York City greasers (the band members themselves were mostly Ivy Leaguers)" — which led me to the article on "Sha Na Na":
Conceived by George Leonard, then a graduate student in humanities, Sha Na Na began performing in 1969 at the height of the hippie counterculture, and achieved national fame after playing at the Woodstock Festival, where Rob Leonard, the president and bass singer of the band, sang the lead on “Teen Angel” when the band opened for their friend Jimi Hendrix. Their 90-second appearance in the Woodstock film...
... brought the group national attention and helped spark a 1950s nostalgia craze that inspired similar groups in North America, as well as the Broadway musical Grease (and its feature film adaptation), the feature film American Graffiti and the TV show Happy Days....
That was a culturally powerful 90 seconds!
From 1969 until 1971, the band played at, among other places, the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, opening for such bands as the Grateful Dead, the Mothers of Invention, and the Kinks. When Sha Na Na began headlining at other venues, one of their opening acts was Bruce Springsteen...
On their album The Golden Age of Rock and Roll, the lead singer taunts the audience on one of the live tracks by announcing, "We've got just one thing to say to you fuckin' hippies, and that is that rock and roll is here to stay!"
Americans are always looking back to a golden age. Compare "Make America Great Again." Question whether Donald Trump's present day version of "you fuckin' hippies" is any less satirical than Sha Na Na's. They're all Ivy Leaguers restyling American culture for the edification and education of the American People.
And how about those Ramones? How much of a comedy routine were they? And how did they interface with American politics? I'll just say that at the time, in the 70s, I regarded them as a comic act, and let me give you this from Wikipedia:
[Joey and Johnny] were politically antagonistic, Joey being a liberal and Johnny a conservative. Their personalities also clashed: Johnny, who spent two years in military school, lived by a strict code of self-discipline, while Joey struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcoholism....
LAST week, if you wanted to use the latest slang to tell a friend he was cool, you could have called him “Obama,” as in: “Dude, you’re rocking the new Pre phone? You are so Obama.”
This week? Best not to risk it.
Yeesh. If you risked it before, go ahead: risk it! You seem pretty un-risk-averse. Chez Althouse, we've been thinking it's amusing to say, whenever anything's not quite right: Why did Obama let that happen? Or just — with a tone of sad disappointment: Obama.
But anyway, "Obama" as an adjective for cool/hip? The point is that it didn't last:
The life of slang is now shorter than ever, say linguists, and what was once a reliable code for identifying members of an in-group or subculture is losing some of its magic.
The Internet “is robbing slang of a lot of its sociolinguistic exclusionary power,” said Robert A. Leonard, a linguistics professor at Hofstra in Hempstead, N.Y., whose slang credentials include being a founding member of the doo-wop group Sha Na Na, formed in the late 1960s. “If you are in a real inside group, you are manufacturing slang so that you can exclude the wannabes.”
And that becomes harder, he added, as the whole world has access to your language.
... whose slang credentials include being a founding member of the doo-wop group Sha Na Na... Ha ha. I like to think his linguistics scholarship focuses on the meaning of nonsense syllables in doo wop songs. (Because, really, WHO put the bomp?)
Nowadays, everyone can check Urban Dictionary. The exclusionary game is up.
No real definition for this word is possible at this time. Check back in 4 years by then a consensus by have formed. Each person projects his personal beliefs and values onto this word, and a standard meaning isn't possible at this time.
Hey, did it suddenly become hip and cool to be all clear-headed and rational?!
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