"One of the first questions men ask Angela Liu on dating apps is 'What are you reading?' The question is a softball for Ms. Liu..."

"... a self-proclaimed lover of literature. 'I really care about the human condition and emotions and stuff,' she said. What she has noticed, however, is that many men aren’t into those kinds of books, and a question that may have been intended to screen her often ends up backfiring. 'I can’t stand dudes who just read self-help books or things specifically related to the job that they’re doing and that’s all they read,' Ms. Liu, 27, said on Friday at a book club for singles in Manhattan."

From "Is Reading the Hottest Thing You Can Do as a Single Person? Pop culture has conditioned us to believe that a meet-cute that doesn’t happen in a bookstore is hardly worth having. But is being an avid reader truly essential to romance?" (NYT).

By the way, what are you reading? Is it some self-help or job-specific crap or something that shows you care about emotions and stuff?

Me, I'm reading "The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century" (Amazon Associates link). Excerpt:

Is it wrong for President Trump to use the White House Rose Garden to deliver what turned into a campaign speech?

Yesterday's speech was similar to his long, extemporaneous rally speeches — except it didn't have the exuberant energy and humor. I wrote about it in the previous post — reacting to Charlie Sykes's trashing of the event — and at one point I said, "The main objection is that he's in the Rose Garden setting, and he's making the case against his political opponent." After publishing, I had the question I've put in the post title.

There is something called the Rose Garden strategy. From the Political Dictionary:

A Rose Garden campaign is when an incumbent president takes advantage of the power and prestige of his office to help him run for re-election. The phrase originally referred to a president staying on the grounds of the White House to campaign as opposed to traveling throughout the country....

The term “Rose Garden campaign” was first used by then-candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976. At the time, Carter was challenging the incumbent president Gerald Ford. Carter complained that Ford was using a “Rose Garden strategy” to get himself free publicity, staying in the public eye by signing bills and making pronouncements....

That implies doing presidential work in a way that implicitly makes the case for reelection, not using the Rose Garden as a platform for campaign speeches.

On a metaphorical level, a Rose Garden strategy refers to any time the incumbent president distributes political favors or largesse as part of his re-election strategy. This can mean offering economic packages to certain key states....

Obviously, that's a worse problem than choosing your backyard as the location for overtly political speeches!

The Political Dictionary cites a NYT article from May 2019, "Why Trump Can't Get Enough of the Rose Garden":

Hey, guys...

Why is everyone missing the best line of this video?

Where she talks about feminism’s great task: “the general reprogramming of most people’s minds?” https://t.co/IFjv8P98r9

— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) September 11, 2019

I like the part about the etymology of "guy." I didn't know it's from the name Guy and the specific Guy, Guy Fawkes. I checked in the OED and this is the official origin of the common noun "guy."

It began with the effigy of Guy Fawkes, burnt on Guy Fawkes day. The effigy was called "a guy": "Once on a fifth of November I found a ‘Guy’ trusted to take care of himself there, while his proprietors had gone to dinner" (Charles Dickens, 1863).

From there it became "A person of grotesque appearance" — especially with respect to clothing, as in "We have far too many sculptured ‘Guys’ in the metropolis" (1880 Daily Tel.).

Finally, it was just "A man, fellow. originally U.S." Early examples:

1898 Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Sentinel 22 Jan. 4/7 I s'pose you got a Bible you'll let a guy look into.
1904 Cincinnati Commercial Tribune 29 June 4 Mr. Bryan is a hefty guy when it comes to Democratic conventions and the platforms thereof.
1928 D. H. Lawrence in T.P.'s Weekly 7 July 333/3 I say to Mother: Show me somebody happy, then! And she shows me some guy, or some bright young thing, and gets mad when I say: See the pretty monkey!

The OED has a "Draft addition" from October 2011 accepting the word "As a form of address to a man" and "Also in plural as a form of address to a group of people, in later use sometimes a mixed or all-female group."

1930 J. Dos Passos 42nd Parallel i. 102 Say, yous guys, this is fellowworker McCreary....
1993 M. Crichton Disclosure i. 22 Fuck 'em all. This reorg sucks. I'm with you on this one, guy....

I love that the OED has a completely gratuitous, random "fuck."

Anyway, should you address groups that are not all men as "guys"? You should know that some people will (in some situations) regard you as casually noninclusive.

What if the people you're addressing are are male? I know of a woman whose husband fell into a fury and berated her publicly for referring to him and his male friends as "guys." He heard it as a putdown. I wasn't there, so I can't tell how wrong he may have been. I could imagine a woman saying "guys" in a negative way. In which case, it's not the word. It's the inflection.

How about addressing just one man as "guy"? Reminds me of this old Right Guard commercial:

American history question of the day.

In which American presidential election were the major party candidates the least well-educated?

I have an idea of what the answer might be but don't know for sure. Trump famously said "I love the poorly educated"...



... but what does the label mean and who gets it? For the purposes of my question, I would consider the level of education reached, the quality of the educational institutions, and the difficulty and sophistication of the program pursued.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lloyd W. Robertson said:

I think you have to speak of different eras. Before 1900, it would have seemed ridiculous to expect an Ivy League education or something similar; there were lawyers, but as traditionalguy points out, that didn't necessarily involve what we would call formal education. John Quinicy Adams was almost unbelievably well educated in the "classics," with a lot of help from "amateurs" who were themselves well educated (including in law). Polk graduated with Honors from UNC Chapel Hill. Without more checking, I would just say that was very unusual at the time.

In the 20th century you have more "Ivy League" presidents, often with a gentleman's C average. Hoover was a brilliant engineer, an early Stanford grad, and surely one of the four or five highest IQ presidents (despite being remembered for his failure in the Depression). He made a reputation for finding ore where others had failed, working in many countries, making his way through obscure documents in many languages, hiring and organizing work crews, transportation, food distribution, etc. Johnson vs. Goldwater in 1964 may indeed set the standard for "little higher/formal education" for both major party candidates.

Johnson/Goldwater was indeed the idea I had when I wrote the post.

Anyway, to make the question work, let's begin at 1900. That was William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. (1896 was also William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, so we could just as well say let's begin in 1896, but it would make no difference.) WJB graduated from college and law school (Union Law College, known today as Northwestern University School of Law), so 1900 is not the right answer to my question. As for McKinley, he went to Allegheny College for one year and then went back home "after becoming ill and depressed."

I thought of the question this morning because I happened to be reading about Barry Goldwater, and I was surprised to see how little education he had:

After he did poorly as a freshman in high school, Goldwater's parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia... He graduated from the academy in 1928 and enrolled the University of Arizona. Goldwater dropped out of college after one year...

As for LBJ, he went to college, but (constrained by poverty) an undistinguished place, Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

"Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions..."

"... (1) a high enough degree of general wellbeing to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; (2) an advanced state of social atomisation and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; (3) a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection, I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty one times higher than in Israel)…The irresisitable proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down the streets and shout: ‘We are all writers!'”

Wrote Milan Kundera in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (1979), quoted in "The write stuff: A brief overview of typomania and graphomania," a blog post by Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.

Griffith also quotes an 1896 NYT article "Bryan’s Mental Condition" (Bryan = Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan):

“The habit of excessive writing, of explaining, amplifying, and reiterating, of letter making and pamphleteering, forms a morbid symptom of known as ‘graphomania’. Some men may overload their natural tendency to write, but a certain class of lunatics use nearly all their mental activities in this occupation, to the endless annoyance of their friends, relatives and physicians”.

ADDED: I'm looking up this word after confessing to Meade that I wrote 6 1/2 pages in my handwritten notebook before 4:46 this morning, before beginning my first blog post, which was published at 5:21 a.m. The post you are reading now is the 6th of the day. And I've written in the comments too.

A passage in my casebook that I've read many times struck me as funny this year — after the presidential election.

I'm preparing my class using my all-time favorite casebook —  "Religion and the Constitution" — and I got to this passage in the section about teaching evolution. I'll boldface the thing that hit me in a new way:

Those terrible mountebanks.

I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive — all the way back to 1852 — and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").

Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."

I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"