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.”
I keep seeing the term without an explanation of its origin. It wasn't easy to Google — especially with all the clutter having to do with Trump's recent tweets, which we're already discussing here. This post is just about the term "The Squad."
While the House’s liberal superstars are adept at promoting their progressive positions and routinely generate headlines for breaking with the party line, they have not made a habit of lobbying their colleagues to defy Ms. Pelosi en masse. Last week, the foursome known as The Squad...
I asked Pelosi whether...it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?” The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known.
The term is not explained in the Dowd column (and isn't used in the HuffPo piece).
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they have no following in Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York shot back that she and three of her fellow liberal freshmen, darlings of the left known collectively as “the squad,” are wielding the real power in the party.... The contretemps began when Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, asked Ms. Pelosi about the squad’s fury over the border aid package... The squad and its allies argue that they are tapping into the real energy in the Democratic base with their uncompromising and unapologetic stances....
Again, the term is used with no explanation. Further down, we see:
“AOC and The Squad have changed the entire national debate,” said an email rehashing the spat from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which offered a colorful “I STAND WITH AOC” sticker to anyone who donated to their work “electing more AOC’s to Congress.”
That suggests that the women came up with that name for themselves. Why would they do that? Maybe they're taking an epithet and wearing it with pride. I don't know.
There's also this other usage of "squad" in that article:
“This is an inevitable tension between a few progressives with one priority, which is their ideology, and a speaker with many priorities, including preserving the majority in the House, electing a Democratic president against Trump, and responding to the consensus of her caucus,” said Steve Israel, a Democrat and former representative of New York. “To the extent that it distracts from Donald Trump and becomes a circular firing squad among Democrats, it can be lethal.”
I am going to guess that talk of a circular firing squad — there's been a lot of that — led to calling the 4 Congresswomen "The Squad." That would explain why the explanation of the origin is suppressed. Too violent. Too much like a death threat.
Consulting Urban Dictionary, I can see that the use of the term could be experienced as racist: "Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."
How embarrassing! Embarrassingness increases the likelihood that this is the real origin of the term, since the source of the term isn't talked about.
I get the feeling Maureen Dowd heard the term and thought it was hip/cute/clever and she went public with it without understanding the problem with it. Now, they're stuck with it and vulnerable if anyone is ever curious enough to ask about the origin.
Is the entire cup thrown at the person or just the contents? I'm not sure, but this "milkshaking" seems to be the same activity as pie-throwing (where, usually, it's shaving cream in a pie tin, smashed into a person's face). I guess for milkshaking you don't need to get as close, and it's easy to buy your loaded weapon in a fast-food joint. In the UK, there's debate about whether this should actually be called "violence," but obviously it is.
Milkshaking is a term that refers to the use of milkshakes and other drinks as a means of political protest in a manner similar to egging.
Well, with egging, the hard shell is always part of the projectile, and you've got to hit hard enough to break the egg.
The target of a milkshaking is usually covered in a milkshake that is thrown from a cup or bottle.
Usually... so perhaps sometimes the cup is also thrown.
The trend gained popularity in the United Kingdom in May 2019 during the European Parliament election and was used primarily against right-wing and far-right politicians and activists, such as Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Carl Benjamin, and members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party.
Robinson was the first one to be milkshaked, and when he got milkshaked the next day, he punched the person who did it.
In American slang, "milkshake," used as a noun, refers to a woman's body "and the way she carries it." Urban Dictionary has various entries for "milkshake," the verb, going back to 2005, including the idea of throwing a milkshake at someone, from 2013. That doesn't have the political-theater angle, just a mindless prank, done from a moving car, aimed at a random pedestrian. The British activity is also there, entered 2 days ago.
And here's the rather extensive Wikipedia article on pie throwing. Excerpt:
The probable originator of pieing as a political act was Thomas King Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine. In 1970, Forcade pied Otto N. Larsen, the Chairman of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; his action was called the first Yippie pieing[.] Aron Kay, also a Yippie, went on to take up Forcade's pieing tactics. Kay pied, among many others, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol....
Though pieing may not have been a political protest before 1970, pieing appeared — almost appeared — in the great 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," and the context was distinctly political:
But for a last-minute change of Kubrick’s heart, the moment of reckoning was to be preceded with a riotous battle with pastries from the War Room buffet table. The fight, which was shot but cut out before the final print, begins with Soviet Ambassador de Sadeski (Peter Bull) responding to the threat of a strip search by hurling a custard pie at US general Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), which misses and hits the American president.
“Gentlemen,” rallies Turgidson, holding his wounded leader (Peter Sellers) in his arms, “our beloved president has been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of his life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation!” Chaos ensues in fast-motion, in a manner recalling the silent slapstick of Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops....
"Eventually, Strangelove fires off a gun and shouts ‘Ve must stop zis childish game! Zere is Verk to do!’ The other characters sit around on the floor and play with custard cream like children building sandcastles. ‘I think their minds must have snepped from the strain,’ Strangelove announces."
Pie throwing goes way back — to stage shows and silent movies. The first is the 1909 film "Mr. Flip." There are many many pie-in-face bits in the movies but (judging from the Wikipedia article) the ultimate was this 2-minute sequence from "The Battle of the Century" (1927) with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy:
Stop! Stop! This has gone far enough! Love thy neighbor!
The top-rated definition is "Word describing a friend that is a taker and not a giver - someone that never shows up or pays for a tab or helps in any way. Not a true friend."
That's the only marginally accepted Urban Dictionary definition. There are 2 other definitions, but they are massively down-voted: 1. "Another word for an insecure, psychotic, nerd who has problems distinuishing real life from the internet," and 2. "A synonym for a woman's genitalia." The second definition is especially bad because it defines the word as a noun and then, to make it worse, uses it in a sentence as a verb — as if you could "marginal" someone. It should at least be "marginalize."
ADDED: Obviously, Urban Dictionary is trying to prompt people to get in there and make some Trump jokes. I don't know if you participate in writing Urban Dictionary definitions, but feel free to write your "marginal" definition in the comments here.
In “What Happened,” her account of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton describes the pressure not to come across as angry during the course of her entire political career — “a lot of people recoil from an angry woman,” she writes — as well as her own desire not to be consumed by anger after she lost the race, “so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations,’ rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.”
Miss Havisham was "rattling around" over a marriage that never happened, so it's irksome to see her used as Hillary Clinton's point of reference. Hillary Clinton is all about a marriage that did take place, and it would be interesting to know what she would have been without Bill.
But the topic here is female anger.
If an angry woman makes people uneasy, then her more palatable counterpart, the sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. It’s as if the prospect of a woman’s anger harming other people threatens to rob her of the social capital she has gained by being wronged. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized.
That's the discipline. If you're set on looking beautiful and commanding empathy, you've accepted the subordination and made yourself small. I think this is an important topic, and I like the photo illustrations at the link, but the essay is not to my taste. Quoting Hillary. Quoting this wretched nonsense from Audre Lorde: "I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter." Wolf's lip??
Here's the whole Lorde essay, in case you think more context will help.
Wait a minute! I googled "wolf's lip" and got some major help from Urban Dictionary ("Picture the side of a dog's mouth, the back part with wrinkly skin and folds of dark moist flesh"). Did the NYT understand what it was quoting?!
IN THE COMMENTS: Rob said:
"[T]he sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant." Now we know why Cory Booker publicly anguished about hurting and having tears in his eyes.
From last night's Cory Booker comments thread, Hoodlum Doodlum says "This one goes out to Corey and T-Bone" and points us here:
The NYT reports on Cher's speech at a very Cher-friendly fundraiser in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And I watched the full video here and did my own transcription.
Cher is talking about getting to know Hillary through much experience doing teas with her, and Cher says she told Hillary, "You are so much fun and you are so warm and you are all these things I've never seen when you speak."
Cher asked Hillary why and, as Cher tells it:
She said because she got so crushed — I hope she doesn't mind my telling this story — too late now!— and she said because she got so crushed by the G.O.P., just for trying to set up health care, and she never thought it would be so personal, and she said it made her kind of pull in and she's shy, so it was difficult, and so she kind of kept that with her, but, you know, she is shy, and she's not the greatest speaker in the world, but...and this is what I believe, and this is what I know: She will work every moment of every day.... This chick is just tougher than Chinese algebra.
So she's tougher than Chinese algebra, but she got so crushed when the GOP opposed her health care plan. Which is it? Maybe she's tough in private, after she kind of pulls in. She's so shy and kind of kept that with her. Kept what with her? That crushed, pulled in feeling that she got when Congress didn't go along with that plan she worked so hard on?
She might not be that good at speaking, but she'll pull back into herself and work every moment of every day. Work work work! She may not talk too much — and we know she won't take questions from the press. It's just so crushing when they don't go along with everything she worked so hard on. But she will pull in and turn that crushing into hours and hours of work work work and if only you really knew her, as Cher does, you would know she's so much fun and so warm and... all these things.
But let's take a closer look at that Chinese algebra. Is that racist? Is that sexist? Math class is tough...
... as Barbie said long ago, outraging feminists. And I guess you throw "Chinese" on top of that and get some kind of reference to the stereotype that Chinese students are especially good at math. Why carelessly throw "Chinese" around to try to be funny?
But Cher didn't put those 2 words together all on her own. "Chinese algebra" is enough of an expression that it has an Urban Dictionary definition going all the way back to 2003: "a hard type of math." But I don't know if it was ever used to talk about math. It seems all along to have been a way to talk about erections. It looks as though the original use of the word was from Tom Waits, back in 1976, "Pasties And A G-String":
She's a-hot and ready, creamy and sugared
And the band is awful and so are the tunes
Crawlin' on her belly, and shakin' like jelly
And I'm gettin' harder than Chinese algebra-ssieres...
So Cher thinks Hillary is as hard as Tom Waits watching an erotic dancer. But shy, too! Very very shy. Shy and crushed and pulled in. It's so difficult! So keep it all deep within you and work — work every moment of every day.
This topic arose in the comments to my post last night that took The New Yorker to task for publishing the sentence: "In India, Hindu supremacists have adopted Rush Limbaugh’s favorite epithet 'libtard' to channel righteous fury against liberal and secular élites." In fact, Rush Limbaugh never says "libtard."
I added: "'Libtard' is an offensive word, unnecessarily dragging in disrespect for the mentally challenged." I have always heard the word as a combination of "liberal" and "retard." But in the comments, MadisonMan asked: "Does the 'tard' come from retard, or bastard?" I think it's obvious: 1. "Retard" is often shortened to just "'tard" and no one ever says "'tard" to mean "bastard," and 2. The contempt expressed in the use of the word seems to be about stupidity and not orneriness.
The [the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party's] dominance during this election campaign has had unexpected benefits, including reviving the belief that secularism is a value — even if it’s a value that needs reviving, and redefining. In rambunctious Twitter arguments, “sickular” is often used as a pejorative term, along with “libtard,” a composite for “liberal bastard.” This language, however extreme, is a sign that between the small but noisy groups of Hindu supremacists and the small but equally vociferous groups of committed left-liberals lies a vast middle ground.
I don't know if that columnist got it right, and who knows how the word "libtard" came into being in India? It didn't come from Rush Limbaugh, but did it come from other Americans? If so, was the "tard" misunderstood as connected to "bastard" or was the NYT op-ed writer — Nilanjana S. Roy — just innocent of the American word "tard" and making her own assumption? Roy is a novelist born, educated, and living in India. She's not a good source of the origin of the American epithet "libtard," which seems to have a life of its own in India.
ADDED: On the positive side, no one will ever say "Your word is your bond" again. You're going to need another bond. Or screw the bond. No one cares about your bond anymore.
MORE: Why was I wondering about some other speech? It's just so stupid to copy Michelle's speech that I theorized that Melania's speechwriter found some obscure speech to use and it just happened to be the same one Michelle's speechwriter used. These speeches are so generic, but good Lord, change the words. Swap in synonyms. What are they paying you for?
"Then we had a guy accidentally shooting his mother-in-law through the wall of her trailer when his target was actually an armadillo ('That bullet couldn’t have taken a more American journey if it had punctured a Kraft single, ricocheted off a Nascar trophy and got lodged in a painting of Elvis and Jesus holding hands at a rodeo,' observed Williams). But neither of these news stories could even come close to the report that succeeded in taking home the 2015 'Mercun Award crown..."
From a WSJ report on "The Daily Show"'s awards based on the "popular social-media meme #Murica." The WSJ's link on the hashtag goes not to Twitter but to the Urban Dictionary, which defines the term in an openly bigoted manner: "The way un-educated Americans (generally rednecks, hicks, republicans, or very patriotic people) say America" and "The term 'murica' is the way how many people with extremely thick, American accents, pronounce 'America'. The term is used to denote extreme, extreme nationalism and patriotism, but not necessarily facism. It is generally seen as a derogatory yet humorous way to describe most Americans: fat, lazy, gunwielding, war loving, horse riding, saloon fighting, beer drinking, sex wanting or etc."
Said Bob Dylan about Brave Combo, "a regional band out of Texas that takes regular songs and changes the way you think about them."
Here's the "Hey Jude," with — of all people — Tiny Tim singing the lead. Here's Brave Combo doing my favorite Doors song.
And here's the place in Bob Dylan's book "Chronicles" where he's eating french fries with Tiny Tim and they're listening to Ricky Nelson on the radio:
At some point during the day, Tiny Tim and I would go in the kitchen and hang around...
One afternoon I was in there pouring Coke into a glass from a milk pitcher when I heard a voice coming cool through the screen of the radio speaker. Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, "Travelin' Man." Ricky had a smooth touch, the way he crooned in fast rhythm, the tonation of his voice....
Ricky's song ended and I gave the rest of my French fries to Tiny Tim....
"Tonation," like "potate," discussed earlier today, is, in the opinion of the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary, an obsolete and rare word. It means: "The action of toning or producing musical tones; the tones or notes so produced." As long as we're talking about french fries, "potate" can be slang for act like a potato, but the OED's obsolete and rare meaning is liquid or liquefied.
Only one Bob Dylan song mentions potatoes. If you know it before clicking, you get points in this game.
A trending word at Urban Dictionary. Don't confuse it with "potentate." Potentates don't potate.
By the way, there actually is an obsolete and rare word "potate," defined in the (unlinkable) OED as an adjective that perhaps means liquid or liquefied. The etymology is the classical Latin pōtātus, the past participle of pōtāre, which means to drink (as in the English word potable or potation). The etymology of "potato" is different, related to Spanish and French words where the second letter was "a," not "o," patata and patate.
Eight, nine, ten days hence,
He will be silver potate; then three days
Before he citronise: Some fifteen days,
The magisterium will be perfected.
That's alchemy talk. If you want to brush up on alchemy terms, here's "A Lexicon of Alchemy," also from 1612. "Magisterium" is defined as "a Chemical State which follows the process of extraction."
[Legal historian G. Edward] White compared Holmes’s solitary intellectual journey as a jurist with the solitary crusade that a soldier undertakes in war. If, White proposed, there is a connection between Holmes’s experiences as a soldier and his time as a jurist, perhaps it would be his "jobism" – a term understood as an unadvertised excellence at one’s professional duties, particularly in spite of a lack of access to knowledge of the grand strategy in which one is involved...
"DipNote"... I had to think about it for a few seconds. Dip? To me, a "dip" is a nutty and relatively lovable, lightheaded person. Donovan's "Epistle to Dippy" plays in my head. That can't be the intended association.
At Urban Dictionary, the top definition for "dip" is "to leave abruptly. To get the hell out of somewhere." That's sound State-Department-y, but not in a good way. Scrolling farther, there's "dip" as in smokeless tobacco, which can have a foreign-affairs lilt — Copenhagen, Skoal.
Edward Snowden answers questions, including "Edward, there is rampant speculation, outpacing facts, that you have or will provide classified US information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum. Have/will you?" His answer is such a conundrum...
This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk "RED CHINA!" reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.
... that the questioner comes back and demands "a flat yes or no." He says:
No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.
I still don't know the complete answer to the first question, however, which asked if he will provide — that is, in the future — classified information to the Chinese.
And, no, the old businessman meaning is not paid for with one's own money, like "out of pocket expenses." The new old meaning is unreachable by the normal means of communication (which, I suppose, is the coverage of a cell phone network).
The supposedly hip and young newer meaning seems to be just another way to say out of control.
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