How ugly was he?

That's from my son Chris, who, as I told you before, is in the midst of a project of reading a biography of every American President. He reads his books in book form, so he texts photos of paragraphs when he's got something to share.

The paragraph above comes from Ron Chernow's "Grant" (commission earned).

How ugly was General Benjamin Butler? Pictures, here, at Wikipedia. He looks bad, but not as bad as those words make him sound. As Chris put it: "You have to really hate someone to describe them that way."

Here's Butler's General Order No. 28 (with rhetorical flourishes that may remind of a certain modern-day President):

Chris and I independently thought that seemed like a Trump tweet! The capitalization is so evocative. And that willingness to use strong interpretations of law to intimidate those who are affronting you....

Maybe Trump is tapping into a deep vein of American rhetoric.

"Former President Joe Biden’s advisers convinced the aging commander in chief to hold an early summer debate with Donald Trump last year by insisting it would allow him to reach the “widest audience possible'..."

"... a leaked memo reveals. The six-page document dated April 15, 2024 — 73 days before the disastrous forum that tanked Biden’s re-election bid — bizarrely capitalizes and bolds any references to the 46th president. 'By holding the first debate in the spring, YOU will be able to reach the widest audience possible, before we are deep in the summer months with the conventions, Olympics, and family vacations taking precedence,” reads the memo.... 'In addition, the earlier YOU are able to debate the better, so that the American people can see YOU standing next to Trump and showing the strength of YOUR leadership, compared to Trump’s weakness and chaos,' it continues...."

I'm reading "Biden advisers pushed early Trump debate to reach ‘widest audience possible,’ leaked memo reveals" (NY Post).

The bold and capitalized YOU and YOUR looks like something from a scammy advertisement aiming to separate weak-minded seniors from their life savings.

I don't for one minute believe the advisers believed the assertions in the memo. I will be presuming that they could see he was going to be incapable of appearing competent and that they needed to push him to release his hold on the nomination, and they only wanted to do that once the primaries were over and it was too late to do anything but advance Kamala Harris. So they conned him into humiliating himself in the debate and giving the media the basis for declaring him unfit — as if they just noticed — and demanding that he withdraw.

The advisers were not mistaken. They knew what they were doing. They were lying. And they were devious. Let me restate that. THEY knew what THEY were doing. THEY were lying. And THEY were devious.

That's my presumption. Prove me wrong.

"DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study 'large scale social deception.' GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!"

Writes Trump on Truth Social, here.

This is also Trump on Truth Social: "DOGE: Why was Politico paid Millions of Dollars for NOTHING. Buying the press??? PAY BACK THE MONEY TO THE TAXPAYERS! How much has the Failing New York Times paid? Is this the money that is keeping it open??? THEY ARE BUYING THE PRESS!"

Is he saying there's an obligation to give back the money, that it was fraudulently obtained? Perhaps it's more of an appeal to give the money back as a gift, now that the taxpayers are seeing what happened and disapproving.

Trump doesn't take much care with these "truths" — that's what the press secretary calls them, "truths." He wrote "How much has the Failing New York Times paid?" when he must mean "How much has the Failing New York Times been paid?" He took the trouble to add "Failing" (idiosyncratically capitalized), but he omitted a word and left the meaning reversed.

"We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have."

"We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!"

Writes President Trump, at Truth Social.

I like how he capitalized all the C words — Canada, Cars, Country, Cherished.

AND: There's one question — and I've raised it before — which is why would Canada be only one state? Why not 2... or 10... or more? The answer is:

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

"They’re unable to see properly, they’re confused, they’re having hallucinations. And we’re talking about scary hallucinations; it’s nothing that’s fun."

Said Darren Roberts, quoted in "How Can Tainted Spinach Cause Hallucinations? A food recall from Australia sheds light on an unusual aspect of brain chemistry" (NYT).

The belief is that there's some other plant in there with the spinach and that it's "'anticholinergic syndrome,' a type of poisoning mainly caused by plants in the Solanaceae family, which includes nightshade, jimson weed and mandrake root."

"Then I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house."

"Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet."

Wrote Rose Macaulay, in "The Towers of Trebizond" (1958).

I ran into that quote because — as you see in the previous post — I looked up "muse" in the OED. 

Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name.

I don't want to give in to the very overdone distraction, but staring me in the face is "Why bell hooks didn’t capitalize her name/Born Gloria Jean Watkins hooks was looking for a way to honor her maternal great-grandmother" by Clyde McGrady:

Author bell hooks opted not to capitalize her name, hoping to keep the public’s focus on her work.

Did she ever admit that this strategy backfires, that this effort at minimizing her name maximizes her name? It's like the old saying if you want people to listen to you, whisper. Maybe that's what she wanted! Why not? 

But over her decades at the forefront of Black feminist writing, the punctuation choice became a constant curiosity....

McGrady's word choice is a curiosity. "Punctuation"? Capitalization isn't punctuation.

Early on, hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, wanted a way to honor her maternal great-grandmother while detaching herself from her work. She wrote dozens of books using her great-grandmother’s name but didn’t capitalize it.

I think this means that the great-grandmother's name was bell hooks. But McGrady is forcing me to guess... and then go to Wikipedia to check and I see that the great-grandmother's name was Bell Blair Hooks. An excellent name, and much cooler than Gloria Jean Watkins... though perhaps there's a feminist issue in the preference for Bell Blair Hooks over Gloria Jean Watkins. What's in a name? A lot, when you're a wordsmith!

What does "detaching herself from her work" mean?

"Why We’re Capitalizing Black/The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity."

The NYT explains its policy change. I assume the answer is: We're doing it because it's something we can do, and we want to do something.

It makes me think of the phrase: I wouldn't lift my little finger to help you. By pushing the shift key when typing the "B," they are, at least, lifting their little finger...

But are they helping? Are people with this characteristic helped by a gesture that says — or is supposed to say — you have a shared cultural identity with the other people who have the same characteristic?

Let's read the argument. First, the Times tells us that before 1930, it used the word "negro" — uncapitalized — to refer to black people, and W.E.B. Du Bois led a campaign to demand capitalization, writing that "The use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans and two hundred million human beings is a personal insult."

There's no link to the full text of the letter, and I tried to find it. I'd like to know whether Du Bois's argument included the fact that the word for white people — perhaps "Caucasian" — was capitalized. If so, his name and eminent reputation are misappropriated in the argument today, when the word for white people is "white," and it is not capitalized. The "insult" back then would have been in denying black people equal treatment, whereas the decision today is about giving them distinctive attention.

"Power and oppression, as defined by ethnic studies, are the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see 'Western' mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence."

"This definition of ​legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise​ people and communities of color. This ​erases the historical contributions​ of people and communities of color."

Is this for real? I'm reading a document (PDF) that purports to be the Seattle Public School's K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework. I'm seeing — at The American Conservative — "Woke Math In Seattle" by Rod Dreher, so I presume it is real.

I'm mostly worried about wasting kids' time with repetitious ethnic studies ideology, time that could be spent learning useful substance, like math. But maybe there are lots of kids who just won't learn math or have a horrible attitude about math because they see it as hostile territory, the domain of other people. But what's the way to get over a negative orientation toward math? It's hard to believe that intensifying feelings of oppression and victimhood will stimulate positivity!

Where does Power and Oppression show up in our math experiences?

● Who holds power in a mathematical classroom?
● Is there a place for power and authority in the math classroom?
● Who gets to say if an answer is right?
● What is the process for verifying the truth?
● Who is Smart? Who is not Smart?
● Can you recognize and name oppressive mathematical practices in your experience?
● Why/how does data-driven processes prevent liberation?

Are we capitalizing "smart" in Seattle now?  Who gets to say what words are capitalized?

What is the process for assigning conceptions of bigness and smallness to letters and would you recognize it if it were oppressive?

Do you know the President of the United States "Uses Random Uppercase Letters" (NYT)?

Who in the Sam Hill is Scott Free?

I'm reading "'Who is Scott Free?' A search for meaning after Trump’s misuse of a medieval idiom" (WaPo).

This is after Trump tweeted:

Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time,'” Trump began. “You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get..... his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free.

He made it look like a name — "Scott Free." He does weird capitalization, such as "Taxis," but next to "Scott," a first name, "Free" sure looks like a last name. Okay, he's got us paying attention again.

WaPo's Meagan Flynn instructs:

But, of course, what Trump meant was “scot-free,” a centuries-old phrase meaning to escape punishment, which has nothing to do with a person named Scott....

Does it have anything to do with a type of person, a Scot?

[A]ccording to the 2008 book “Common Errors in English Language” by Paul Brians... [p]eople might think the term has something to do with Scottish people (or an unfortunate “Scott”) or that it is “scotch-free,” somehow related to whisky.

I know I'm picturing Mel Gibson crying "Freedom" while getting disemboweled.

Others, Brians noted, have erroneously believed “scot-free” alludes to Dred Scott, the slave who sued for his freedom only to lose in an 1857 Supreme Court case.

Well, that would be stupid, unless you want "scot-free" to mean not free.

But really, scot-free traces its roots back to a medieval tax called a “scot” that arose in the 14th century, according to Merriam-Webster. The Vikings could also be to blame for the origin of the phrase: “Scot” is derived from the Old Norse words “skot” and also “shot” — yes, like shooting a gun or taking your shot. The Gaelic Etymology of Languages of Western Europe, an 1877 dictionary, explains that shot and scot meant the same thing at that time, as in a “contribution that ... is ‘shot’ into the general fund.” Back in those days, if you skirted around the tax, you... were scot-free....

And, now, who is Sam Hill?

Sam Hill is an American English slang phrase, a euphemism or minced oath for "the devil" or "hell" personified (as in, "What in the Sam Hill is that?"). The "Sam" coming from salmon (sal(o)mon an oath) and "Hill" from hell. Etymologist Michael Quinion and others date the expression back to the late 1830s; they and others consider the expression to have been a simple bowdlerization, with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an unknown origin.

But H. L. Mencken said it might be "Samiel" (one the name for the Devil, and some people point to a shopkeeper in Arizona named Sam Hill or various other characters actually named Sam Hill.

I see that term "minced oath" has a Wikipedia article:

A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo term to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics. Some examples include "gosh" (for God), "darn" (for damn), "heck" (for hell), "fudge" or "eff" (for fuck) and "shoot" (an exclamation for shit). 

And that gets me back to the problem I blogged about yesterday, a propos of Michelle Obama saying "shit." I was fine with her saying "shit." I just didn't like New York Magazine calling that "swearing." An "oath" — like "swearing" — is a solemn declaration to God, and that is something that you may think should not be debased. Talking about sex or excrement is a different matter.

Anyway, Trump got attention for a minor foible once again. I'm interested to hear what Scott Adams has to say about this. He's got to do this one in his podcast today, no? It's got the name "Scott."

"Even Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, never made an impassioned Beijing-style speech about women in Saudi Arabia being obliterated under a black tarp."

"During the first gulf war, fought in part to protect the Saudis from an encroaching Saddam, a group of Saudi women — artists and academics — got excited by the presence of American female soldiers and went for a joy ride. The clerics branded the drivers 'whores' and 'harlots.' They received death threats and lost their jobs. Driving by women, banned by custom, was made illegal. America was mute. Our government did not even fight for the right of its women soldiers protecting Saudi Arabia to refuse the Saudi directive to wear an abaya and head scarf when off the base."

From "Step Away From the Orb" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"The Orb" refers to this:



That is our President, Donald J. Trump, and much of the column is, as you might expect, about him. I chose to highlight the "Even Hillary Clinton" part. There's also an "Even Barack Obama" part:

Even Barack Obama, who had no love lost for the Saudis, refused for eight years to release a classified document from 2002 detailing contacts between Saudi officials and some of the 9/11 hijackers, including checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers and a connection between a Bandar employee and a Qaeda militant. (Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, wrote charitable checks that ended up in the hands of two hijackers.)

And there's a set of matching photos of Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush bowing their head to receive an idiotic medallion from a Saudi King. Dowd begins with a story about the time "a Saudi muck-a-muck" slid a velvet box of "expensive jewelry" across the table to her and, after she refused, attempted to hand it to her under the table.

ADDED: "During the first gulf war..." — odd not to capitalize "gulf." It's not as though "gulf" is a type of war (as in "trade war" or "war of nerves"). It's the Persian Gulf. If "Persian" were attached — and why isn't it? — the need for capitalization would be obvious. Elsewhere in the NYT archive I'm seeing either "Gulf War" or "Gulf war." I'll give this my "Althouse the pedant" tag, but I'm not just nit-picking. I'm noticing what is downplayed and wondering why.

When is a claim not a claim?

I'm reading "Trump’s claim that he prevented air-traffic deaths is his most questionable yet" by Philip Bump at the Washington Post (and similar attacks on Trump elsewhere).

But what Trump tweeted was:

Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news - it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!

Those are 2 separate sentences. They do create the impression that they have something to do with each other, but he's only claiming that he's been "very strict on Commercial Aviation." (Don't get me started on the capitalization.) He never says because of my strictness there have been zero deaths. If you see a claim, you made an inference.

Yeah, he made you do that, but you are so tiresome, looking for ways to get excited about Trump. Well, you did help him make an otherwise boring set of facts viral. Now, we're all seeing that he's "very strict" and there are "zero deaths." That's something to feel good about... unless you just really need to feel bad about something.

Look at that headline again: Trump claimed that he prevented air-traffic deaths. No, he did not make that claim! If you want to trash him for getting anything wrong, don't get things wrong!

There is a problematic claim in Trump's tweet, that 2017 is "the best and safest year on record." Assuming the Bump column is correctly stating this, no one has "died in the crash of an American commercial flight" since February 2009. And yet Trump didn't say 2017 had the lowest number of deaths from crashes of American commercial flights. He said it was "the best and safest year." "Safest" would encompass death where the plane did not crash and nonfatal injuries from crashes and other occurrences. And "best" might refer all sorts of things.

So there's some issue there, but the issue raised in the headline — that Trump claimed that he prevented air-traffic deaths —  is... "More fake news from the lamestream media." (I put that in quotes because it's actually the last sentence of Bump's column.)

But really, what's the point of dinging him for that first sentence when the news looks like this?

"Raccoon in a Dumpster"? Who knew "Dumpster" is a brand name?

Did you, like me, have trouble with today's NYT crossword because the clue "Raccoon in a Dumpster" seemed to refer to something more specific — a fictional character? — than just a raccoon in a dumpster? I see Rex Parker — who bills himself as King of CrossWorld (as opposed to just another king of one of many crossworlds) — also got tripped up by the capitalization:

And then there was the SE [corner of the puzzle], where the capitalization of Dumpster (49A: Raccoon in a Dumpster, e.g.) really, really threw me. I thought "Raccoon in a Dumpster" was a show or a meme or something. A title, at any rate. Certainly not a plain old raccoon in a plain old Dumpster-brand Dumpster. Argh.

Speaking of tripped up, I would never — like Rex — have written in "LSD" for the clue "Hallucinogen nicknamed 'embalming fluid.'" It took me a while to get to the right answer — PCP — but I know enough about LSD to know that "embalming fluid" is not an apt descriptive.

Anyway, here's the Wikipedia article for "Dumpster," which I'd never before understood as a brand name:

The word is a genericized trademark of Dumpster, an American brand name for a specific design.... The word "dumpster", first used commercially in 1936, came from the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardized containers onto garbage trucks, which was patented by Dempster Brothers in 1935. The containers were called Dumpsters, a blending of the company's name with the word dump....

Genericized. We should have been saying "Dumpster-brand garbage containers" all this time.

By the way, the answer for "Raccoon in a Dumpster" was "forager."

ADDED: I'm not coordinating my themes with James Lileks, but he happens to be writing about the NYT crossword this morning. Nothing about Raccoon in a Dumpster. He's talking about the perennial charge that the NYT crossword is old and white:

So the crossword is old and white. So what? Well, it’s in the Times, and thus it should be inclusive, and that means abandoning terms that Young Persons of Color don’t get, or, if they do get them, don’t find them appropriate for the newspaper....

This is a problem Rex Parker often writes about. I think what's more important than abandoning any terms is not having the puzzle full of words that older middle-class white people know fairly easily but other people would have to look up. It might be fun for me to fill in the names of characters from 1960s TV shows but just a drag for somebody who was born in 1995. As for now-frowned-upon terms like "Eskimo" — which Lileks discusses at the link — the problem is more the casual reliance on the word. It shouldn't be appearing in puzzles frequently, and it should have a clue that acknowledges that it's not currently in use, not something light-hearted like "______ Pie.'"

"Do not capitalize court, motion, movant, debtor, trustee, order, affidavit, stipulation, mortgage, lease or any of the other numerous words that are commonly capitalized.”

The Judge is angry. Angry about Capitalization. It's getting on his Nerves. Could you lawyers please just write like a Normal Person.

It's the Cancer Awareness Light-Up Pen.

The fine print says:

A portion of your purchase will be made to various cancer support programs throughout the united states whose mission is to provide the ongoing research and education it takes to find a cure. Thanks for your support!

And thanks for your spurious failure to capitalize "United States." It helps us not trust you. I don't know what you think you're saying you're going to do with "a portion of [my] purchase," but I'm here to say that if I buy that awful pink fuzzball, I will be taking my entire purchase with me.

"Early Detection Saves Lives" and "Lights As You Write" — nice capitalization. Too bad it doesn't light up when you have breast cancer.

A really lawrev-y thing to do ...

... would be to call into question my inconsistent capitalization of the term "Law Review" in the two posts below that talk about law reviews. And if you were asking that yourself or you think it's a really interesting issue, then you probably are lawrev material. It's certainly not that I don't care about about capitalization and consistency. I think I was following some damn principle about Law Review as the grand institution and law review as just some given law review. Just like I might talk about law or Law. And wouldn't you like to have a heated debate about whether that principle is right or is worth the look of inconsistency? If so, I'm telling you, you really are Law Review Material. You're LRM, man.