"The urge to bring back old words is evergreen..."

"... general interest articles on the subject abound, and the political landscape inspires regular pleas on social media to restore potent pejoratives such as 'lummox,' 'bloviate,' 'bumptious' and 'hoodwink.' Some requests are whimsical, too, like that of a user on Bluesky who suggested, 'We should bring back the word "spake," e.g. "Thus spake my friend Jeff."'... Whether these campaigns are sincere or silly, we may be closer to a wordy renaissance than we think.... Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century coinage, 'brain-rot,' is now the ruin of modern minds. Calling someone a 'goon' is no longer just a 1920s habit. We’re saying 'sheesh' again, apparently, and even the president has spoken of skedaddling. Is there a science to this kind of resurgence?"

I'm reading "Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents/The strange resurgence of words like 'yap' and 'skedaddle'" (NYT).

1. I'm all for reaching out to more unusual and interesting words and fighting the tendency to withdraw into a smaller and smaller vocabulary. I hope these kids today are doing it because it's fun, it's mind-sharpening, and it's aesthetically pleasing. We're not talking here about showing off or making other people feel dumb, I don't think. This isn't a William F. Buckley move.

2. "Bloviate" — just a few days ago, I had a post titled "Bloviate." It's a Warren G. Harding word. Harding was born in 1865, so he's hardly at the grandparent level for today's "kids." More like great-great grandparent or even great-great-great grandparent. As for Henry David Thoreau, he was born in 1817, so that would put him at the great-great-great or great-great-great-great level. But he's no one's great-great-etc. grandfather. Like so many of these kids today, he was childless.

3. Did Thoreau ever opine about kids? Yes: "Children appear to me as raw as the fresh fungi on a fence rail." More aptly, on the subject of whether one ought to have children: "The only excuse for reproduction is improvement. Nature abhors repetition. Beasts merely propagate their kind, but the offspring of noble men & women will be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are."

4. I didn't remember that "brain-rot" — 2024's Word of the Year — came from Thoreau.

Bloviate.

From a biography of Warren G. Harding:

That was sent to me by my son Chris, who is quite far along toward his goal of reading a biography of every U.S. President. 

In the 22-year history of this blog, I've never used the word "bloviate." Twice, though, I've quoted someone else:

1. My November 1, 2019 post, "An impeachment trial would help Joe Biden — because Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker would all face the obligation to do their job as Senator," quoted NY Magazine writer Ed Kilgore, who wrote:  "[An impeachment trial] could be a boon to non-senators — particularly Joe Biden, who can bloviate to his heart’s desire about the lessons he learned on impeachment and all the issues involving Trump during his 44 years as a member or presiding officer of the Upper Chamber...." 

2. On October 7, 2004, the first year of this blog, I quoted Al Franken, who was boasting about his radio show on the radio network Air America: "We do a different kind of show. I'm not the mirror image of Rush Limbaugh. I do a totally different kind of show. I don't bloviate for three hours and pull stuff out of my butt and mislead and lie. We're very scrupulous about our facts. I'm proud of that." (I do go on to quip about whether Franken "did in fact bloviate," so count that as my using the word if you must, but I'm really still essentially quoting him.)

In both of those instances, the user of "bloviate" is insulting someone else. President Harding, the popularizer of the word, used it about himself, self-deprecatingly. 

***

Here's the biography — commission earned — "Warren G. Harding: The American Presidents Series: The 29th President, 1921-1923." Warning: It's by John Dean. Chris says: "It’s part of a series of very short books that I use when the options are very limited." He's relied on that series to read about William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, and Benjamin Harrison.

"The threat to democracy — indeed, the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants..."

"... who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI — racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people."

Said Stephen Miller, at yesterday's press briefing.

Want to see a murder?

Libs in the White House press corps screamed at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that Elon Musk is “unelected!”

What happens next is a fatality.

I promise you - this is the single best video on the internet today:pic.twitter.com/Nxcw0qTtj1

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025

ADDED: In the same vein, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

 

"Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again."

That's the last line of a post I wrote on May 23, 2023 — "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy': 'We must return normalcy to our communities.'"

That was back when DeSantis was endeavoring to replace Trump by being essentially Trump minus the weirdness. Yes, there was talk of weird-versus-normal just like there is today. I said:

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, "normalcy": "We must return normalcy to our communities."

A couple hours ago, I put up a post that began to go through the transcript of yesterday's DeSantis event. I casually noted 2 things that called to mind former Presidents: 1. The Reaganesque "well," and 2. JFK's favorite word "vigor."

Getting back to the transcript just now, the next sentence I read is "We must return normalcy to our communities."

Normalcy! I can see wanting to resonate with Reagan and JFK — so presidential! — but Warren G. Harding? Here you have one of the famously bad Presidents, and the word is absolutely associated with Harding.

Harding said: "America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration."

From the "Back to Normalcy" chapter of the 1931 classic "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s":

[Harding's] liabilities were not at first so apparent, yet they were disastrously real. Beyond the limited scope of his political experience he was “almost unbelievably ill-informed,” as William Allen White put it. His mind was vague and fuzzy. Its quality was revealed in the clogged style of his public addresses, in his choice of turgid and maladroit language (“non-involvement” in European affairs, “adhesion” to a treaty), and in his frequent attacks of suffix trouble (“normalcy” for normality, “betrothment” for betrothal). It was revealed even more clearly in his helplessness when confronted by questions of policy to which mere good nature could not find the answer. White tells of Harding’s coming into the office of one of his secretaries after a day of listening to his advisers wrangling over a tax problem, and crying out: “John, I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! what a job!” His inability to discover for himself the essential facts of a problem and to think it through made him utterly dependent upon subordinates and friends whose mental processes were sharper than his own.

In the transcript, DeSantis only said "normalcy" once — and never "normality." He also said "normal" twice: 

If there’s no accountability over any individual or entity of course they’re going to behave differently than if you have normal accountability....

My grandfather worked in the steel mill in western Pennsylvania. I just know instinctively what normal people think about all this stuff. I have a good sense of when the legacy media and the left are outside of where the average American is....

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

For a longer version of that quote, read my post from June 2010, "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves." The post title is a quote from Michelle Obama. There was also this quote from Maureen Dowd: 

Of the many exciting things about Barack Obama’s election, one was the anticipation of a bracing dose of normality in the White House.

That was back when the abnormality was George W. Bush. The idea of a President as weird as Donald Trump was nowhere in sight. It's hard even to remember what was supposedly so un-normal about Bush. Remember when his brother Jeb stood on the debate stage next to Trump and pathetically relied on the assumption that we'd have to pick him over that unacceptably weird guy Trump? It didn't work, though it worked when Joe Biden stood on the debate stage next to Trump and argued, essentially, you'll have to take me over Trump because I'm the only thing here that approaches normality? That did work though.

Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again.  

"For men who are allegedly so 'proud' of being straight, they seem to show real incompetence at attracting women to their event."

"Seems more like a 'I-Struggle-With-Masculinity' parade to me. Hope they grow enough over the next year to support / join LGBTQ fam next #Pride."

Tweeted Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in what I judge to be apt, light-hearted pushback (reported at The Hill).

Here's the video that accompanied her gentle mockery:

The #StraightPrideParade now on its way to City Hall Plaza. #Boston25 pic.twitter.com/44RayYZVRU

— Kelly Sullivan (@ksullivannews) August 31, 2019

What's with "Make Normalcy Normal Again"? What a sad slogan! If you were genuinely proud of what you are, why would you need You, the Individual to also be the norm? And if you are genuinely needy, why would it be enough to be recognized as — of all things — normal?

Also, guys, when you're marching in a parade about your pride, don't be staring down into your cell phone. That's no way to express pride. It is a good way to express neediness. Has anyone "liked" me in the last few seconds?

And maybe refrain from giving the finger?



I mean, is that your plan for the return to normalcy?

By the way, "normalcy" is a word tightly connected to one President, the President most well known for being bad, Warren G. Harding. His famous quote:

"America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality."

From Wikipedia, "Return to normalcy":

Return to normalcy, a return to the way of life before World War I, was United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan for the election of 1920. Although detractors of the time tried to belittle the word "normalcy" as a neologism as well as a malapropism, saying that it was poorly coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality), there was contemporaneous discussion and evidence that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.

I can't help thinking that whoever put the word "normalcy" in the straight-pridesters slogan intended to screw with the heteronormalists.

ADDED: In "A Hard Day's Night," Ringo, the original incel, is incited to go "parading," and seconds after he responds to the incitement to parade, Ringo gives the Hitler salute!

"Before the cares of the White House were his own, President Harding is reported to have said that government, after all, is a very simple thing."

"He must have said that, if he said it, as a fleeting inhabitant of fairyland. The opposite is the truth. A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man's social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed. To that end, they rested the structure of our central government on the system of checks and balances. For them, the doctrine of separation of powers was not mere theory; it was a felt necessity. Not so long ago, it was fashionable to find our system of checks and balances obstructive to effective government. It was easy to ridicule that system as outmoded — too easy.... A scheme of government like ours no doubt at times feels the lack of power to act with complete, all-embracing, swiftly moving authority.... I know no more impressive words on this subject than those of Mr. Justice Brandeis: 'The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but,  by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.'"

Wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1952, concurring in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.

The DNA tests on Warren G. Harding are in and the truth is out at last.

Love child: yes. "Black blood": no.

The Nan Britton affair was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House. It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country.

Nan Britton was right.

If you're going to run for the presidency from the Senate, you shouldn't rack up years of experience. You have to go early.

I had been thinking that it's ridiculous for Rand Paul and Ted Cruz to imagine that they're ready to run for President. They're first-term Senators, as was Barack Obama. But Barack Obama won, and suddenly, I'm thinking that wasn't a fluke. That is, in fact, what you must do if you're running as a Senator.

I'm thinking this as I'm reading Robert A. Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV." Read this:

Putting the hard in Harding: "The Letters That Warren G. Harding’s Family Didn’t Want You to See."

"Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief untilI take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts."

Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied. . . . Wouldn’t you like to hear me ask if we only dared and answer, 'We dare,' while souls rejoicing sang the sweetest of choruses in the music room? Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake — for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond?

ADDED: What do you make of "sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake"? I was entertaining the theory that "Superior" was his name for his penis (like John Thomas in "Lady Chatterley's Lover").

"This cheap and tawdry imitation of English royalty."

That's what Woodrow Wilson said [CORRECTION: caused a senator to say] about the State of the Union address, as quoted in this NYT op-ed by Francis Wilkinson, who says the President's constitutionally required annual message ought to be delivered in writing. That was the way Thomas Jefferson did it. It's not that Wilkinson's against speeches. In fact, he's a speechwriter. But:

When presidents exhale the breath of history — "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," or, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" — they invariably do it someplace other than in the State of the Union. A rhetorical omnibus making all local stops, the speech conveys a year's worth of departmental hackwork. In "Lend Me Your Ears," William Safire's compilation of great speeches, not one State of the Union address makes the table of contents.

And then there's the way the State of the Union isn't about the state of the union:

The State of the Union is all about His Majesty, the president. Is he master of Congress or supplicant? How far will his poll numbers rise? How did he perform? Mr. Bush may not like French, but the address is the embodiment of "L'état, c'est moi," transforming citizens into subjects, much as Jefferson feared....

Manipulation is the essence of the game, after all, and because no one ever stops playing it, the president is expected to exploit his free shot at the goal for all it's worth.

But what's the problem, really? I know a perfect way to force the President to deliver his speech in writing, in my little world. I leave the TV off, and I read the text in the paper. You can do it too. So let George Bush have his fun tonight making a roomful of erstwhile blabbermouths sit there and listen to him for an hour and perform the tedious clapping/not clapping ritual. And skip the commentators. You don't need to know the precise number of times they clapped and the lengths of the various clappings.

I see there's a second State-of-the-Union-is-no-damned-good op-ed. It's got a hilarious quote from one of Warren Harding's SOTUs:

"The motor car reflects our standard of living and gauges the speed of our present life. It long ago ran down Simple Living, and never halted to inquire about the prostrate figure which fell as its victim."