"I ought to mention that he marked the parenthesis, in the air, with his finger. It seemed to me a very good plan."

"You know there's no sound to represent it — any more than there is for a question. Suppose you have said to your friend 'You are better to-day,' and that you want him to understand that you are asking him a question, what can be simpler than just to make a '?' in the air with your finger? He would understand you in a moment!"

Wrote Lewis Carroll in "Sylvie and Bruno," describing the gesture made while singing the words "this was their wish" in this stanza of a song:

“The Badgers did not care to talk to Fish:
They did not dote on Herrings' songs:
They never had experienced the dish
To which that name belongs:
And oh, to pinch their tails,' (this was their wish,)
'With tongs, yea, tongs, and tongs!'”

I print the entire stanza because of the badgers, of course, this being Wisconsin. But why — you might ask, marking the air with a "?" — am I fooling around inside "Sylvie and Bruno" this evening? I have an answer!

I was reading the Wikipedia article "Air quotes," which naturally traces the origin of air quotes. It gives Lewis Carroll credit for arriving at the basic idea — albeit only with parentheses and question marks — all the way back in 1889.

The oldest definite use of air quotes seems to be Glenda Farrell the 1937 screwball comedy, "Breakfast for Two":



Isn't that wonderful! But air quotes got too popular in the 1990s and became subject to derision, notably by Steve Martin, Chris Farley, and Dr. Evil. And here's George Carlin in 1996:



People got the message and restrained themselves, but air quotes were still around enough to make their appearance in the fall of 2002, in the thing I just watched that got me started on this little research project, Episode 3 of Season 9 of "Friends" — where Joey (ostensibly the dumbest person in the group) does not understand how air quotes work:

When the Wisconsinite Reince Priebus was Chief of Staff, Trump would question him about the Wisconsin animal, the badger: "Are they mean to people? Or are they friendly creatures?"

According to "Trump repeatedly asked Reince Priebus if Wisconsin badgers are 'mean to people,' how they 'work,' and what they eat..."  at Business Insider, quoting from a new book, "Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington."

Which makes me wonder: Can badgers swim in a swamp or do they sink?

The book is written by Daily Beast reporters Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng, and that makes me wonder, does a daily beast sink in a swamp, and what would happen if a badger and a daily beast got in a fight? Would the badger tear the daily beast to shreds or would the daily beast skitter away and scribble scurrilous — squirrelous? — things?

From the book:

The president would also ask if Priebus had any photos of badgers he could show him, and if Priebus could carefully explain to him how badgers 'work' exactly.

He wanted Reince — resident White House badger historian, apparently — to explain to him Wisconsin's obsession with the animal, how the little critters function and behave, what kind of food they like, and how aggressive or deadly they could be when presented with perceived existential threats.

Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a 'personality' or if it was boring. What kind of damage could a badger to do a person with its flashy, sharp claws?

An obviously enthralled president would stare at Priebus as the aide struggled for sufficiently placating answers, all the while trying to gently veer the conversation back to whether we were going to do a troop surge in Afghanistan or strip millions of Americans of healthcare coverage.

Placating?! Why would Priebus seek to placate in the middle of a hilarious conversation with the funniest man in the world?! What a missed opportunity! And wasn't Trump essentially talking about Priebus when he talked about badgers and whether they have a personality or are boring. I don't know what words Priebus said, but he answered quite clearly: We badgers are very boring and have no sense of humor or inclination toward building camaraderie and having fun. We won't banter and we don't fight. There's nothing like flashy sharp claws or flashy anything. Just dull dull dull, exactly what you New Yorkers expect.

Thanks a lot, Reince. Thanks for representing Wisconsin so well and then padding away to tattle to the daily beast.

"In the post-Honey Badger era, it’s become increasingly common for large corporations to appropriate viral memes for their own marketing purposes."

"Critics argue that the creators of these memes, who are often teenagers and frequently people of color, rarely have the opportunity to monetize their work. 'Want to profit of[f] your meme? Good luck if you aren’t white,' read a 2017 headline in Wired magazine after Kayla Lewis, who goes by Peaches Monroee on social media and is credited with creating the phrase 'eyebrows on fleek,' launched a GoFundMe campaign asking for donations so that she could start her own cosmetics line. Before launching the campaign, the magazine noted, Lewis hadn’t made any money off the phrase, even after companies like IHOP, Taco Bell, and Forever 21 used it. And meme creators only have a small window of time to monetize their viral fame before the Internet moves on to something new, [argued the lawyer for Christopher Gordon AKA Randall]. 'My client is a creative genius,' he said. 'He had a bolt of lightning, 86 million views on YouTube, was basically a celebrity around the country for about three years and he had a brief window of time to strike while the iron was hot on that. He should be the one — not the defendants in this case — to capitalize on that.'"

From "Honey Badger may not care, but the ‘creative genius’ who took him viral just won a big victory" (WaPo). Gordon was sharp enough to have trademarked the lines "Honey Badger Don’t Care" and "Honey Badger Don’t Give a S—."

Note that Gordon's original viral video wasn't made by him at all. It was National Geographic video. He just provided the audio track.

ADDED: It's inherent in the nature of memes and virality that people repeat something. "Honey badger don't care" would be nothing if people hadn't passed it on and found it fun to repeat. I'd be very careful about letting people own catch phrases. How are the rest of us supposed to speak? All our words are stolen if you get too picky about what it means to steal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula says:

There is a nascent post to be made in analyzing the Honey Badger video now in the context of The Era Of That's Not Funny.

The pseudo-gay voice is obviously problematic.

He is also appropriating the Honey Badger's culture for his own benefit, and mocking it in the process.

The celebration of an animal for its violent and selfish tendencies is also troublesome: indeed, the video could be seen as a Trojan Horse for celebrating the American Conservative White Male.

To begin.

"How can we expect the world's poor to look after animals if we are slaughtering badgers."

I was puzzled by that comment, which appears at a Daily Mail article that's not about killing badgers but tickling gorillas — "The giggling gorilla! Adorable moment orphaned ape laughs as she's tickled by one of her rescuers." (Drudge sent me there. I guess we're supposed to be amazed that a nonhuman animal can laugh, but I don't think tickling is a very benevolent way to get someone — human or non- — to laugh for the camera.)

I had to search at The Daily Mail to find out what's going on about badgers, and I came up with this from a few days ago: "More than 19,000 badgers have been killed across the UK in the last three months as part of Government-backed cull to stamp out TB [in cattle]."

So, oddly enough, I'd say: kill the badgers and don't tickle the gorillas.

"A professor at the University of Iowa is concerned that the school’s hawk mascot, Herky, looks angry..."

"... and its appearance could be contributing to a culture of violence, depression, and even 'suicide.'"

“I believe incoming students should be met with welcoming, nurturing, calm, accepting and happy messages,” clinical professor of pediatrics Resmiye Oral, wrote in an e-mail to the school’s athletic department...

This is so 3 years ago. Remember the angst when UConn made its husky less nice?

UConn basketball coach Geno Auriemma said the logo “is looking right through you and saying, ‘Do not mess with me.’ This is a streamlined, fighting dog, and I cannot wait for it to be on our uniforms and court.”

In response, [the feminist student] wrote, “What terrifies me about the admiration of such traits is that I know what it feels like to have a real life Husky look straight through you and to feel powerless, and to wonder if even the administration cannot ‘mess with them.’ And I know I am not alone.”

It actually is kind of sad when you can't get it just exactly right — fighting and tough and yet infinitely lovable:

There are 2 serious books out right now about a man trying to live like a particular nonhuman animal.

These are nonfiction books, and they are being taken seriously. I read about them in Joshua Rothman's article in The New Yorker, "The Metamorphosis/What is it like to be an animal?"

Two men — Thomas Thwaites and Charles Foster — independently conceived of their projects. Thwaites, an artist, tried to be a goat and wrote about it in "GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human," and Foster, a veterinarian/lawyer/columnist, tried to be a fox and a badger and wrote about it in "Being a Beast."

These projects were entirely different from fictional efforts at inhabiting the existence of a nonhuman animal, such as Tolstoy's "Strider" (about a horse) and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (with a bit about a rat). As Rothman sums those up:

In these pastoral and sensual portrayals of the animal self, different critiques of the human self are embedded. For Tolstoy, the problem with people is that they’re marooned in their egos. The clearheaded directness of animals is a remedy for that self-obsession. For Joyce, the problem is that people are sleepy, numb, and incurious. We could learn, he thinks, from animals’ eager sensuality. Tolstoy’s animals teach us to be good; Joyce’s teach us to be alive.

What Thwaites and Foster were doing was different from that: They were using the animal not to understand humanity but as an escape from something they already believed about human beings. Thwaites finds "human personhood... stressful, absurd, and—worst of all—narcissistic" and wants to lose his ego. Foster finds human personhood dull and seeks a more vivid existence.

Rothman ends his essay like this:

There is an irony to these books: the more Thwaites and Foster try to change into animals, the more fully they become Thwaites and Foster. That’s not to say they never transform themselves... “Real, lasting change is possible,” Foster writes, “to our appetites, our fears, and our views,” and despite that change the self persists. This ability to endure through change is the miracle and mystery of selfhood. Rethinking who we are; dreaming up new ways of living; taking ourselves apart to build ourselves back up—for human beings, these activities are natural. They are our never-ending hunt.

That is, thinking beyond what is natural and trying being what you are not is even more human than continuing your conventional ways. A nonhuman animal would never even think of such a project, let alone attempt to execute it. And, that's why these projects are, on their own terms, incoherent. You're never less like a nonhuman animal than when you are trying to be a nonhuman animal. Only a human being would do such a thing.

"Quite a lot of being a badger consisted simply in allowing the wood to do to us what it did to a badger..."

"... being there when it rained; keeping badgers’ hours; letting bluebells brush your face instead of your boots."

... I learned to like that burrow... the shape of the window on the sunlit world that was the tunnel’s end; the exuberant spectrum of smells as I crawled up through a cervix of earth and leaf mould and out, panting from the effort. It was OK to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me.

"But people love badgers."

"This is not a campaign against some kind of airborne creepy-crawly, spreading disease as it feeds on the blood of poor, innocent cows. This is Old Brock they are trying to kill, the black-and-white gentleman of the forest, who adds dignity and substance to children’s bedtime stories, from The Wind In The Willows to Fantastic Mr Fox."

I know The Wind In The Willows and Fantastic Mr Fox, but who's Old Brock?

"'Old Brock,' as the badger is affectionately known to country folk, is a familiar part of Britain’s rural scene."