"It’s time this government told the police their job is to protect the public, not monitor social media for hurty words."

Said Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, quoted in "Comedian Graham Linehan arrested over trans tweets/The 57-year-old TV writer says he has been ordered not to use the social media platform X while he has been released on bail after being detained by armed police at Heathrow" (London Times).

"Hurty words" is a useful and musical phrase. Badenoch didn't coin it. I'm seeing, from back in March 2024 in the London Times, "Islamophobic tweets just ‘hurty words’, says mayoral candidate/Susan Hall, the Tory hoping to run London, was responding to claims about Sadiq Khan and Londonistan.'" Someone in the comments there writes: "Anyone using the infantile term 'hurty words' calls into question their suitability for high office." Is it infantile or is it a satirical way to accuse those who are complaining about hurtful speech of being big babies?

"A 'vacation' for me means killing myself working 12+ hour days for several days prior to travel, working up to the last minute at the airport gate..."

"... lugging a work laptop and files along in my carryon, waking up 1-2 hours before everyone else each morning to do some emails and calls, and ducking away from the beach or activity for at least an hour midday for more of the same, possibly a zoom meeting, and if there’s a time change, possibly being interrupted well into the evening even at dinner. Then upon return there are several more 12+ hour days to make up for workload that piled up during the 'time off.' It seems the only jobs around anymore that let you truly disconnect are the ones that don’t pay enough for you to be able to afford to take a vacation in the first place. Our economy is broken for all but the uber wealthy and it’s ruining our family lives and health as well. Something has to give."

That's from the highest rated comment at "How to Create a Family ‘Bleisure’ Trip/Combining work travel with a change of scenery and time with the kids offers respite from the daily grind, but it takes planning. Here’s how to make it happen" (NYT).

The article, of course, is striving to make "bleisure" — business + leisure — seem like something you could jauntily throw together and enjoy, but it still sounded exhausting. The illustration — showing a woman and daughter laughing in the pool while the father sitting poolside with a laptap smiled too — made me smile... in derision.

And that coinage, "bleisure," only makes it feel worse. Why not "bleasure" — for "business" + "pleasure"? If you hear it, that's what you might presume. There's a standard phrase "mixing business with pleasure," but that was something one did in the old days — not now, with poolside laptops and your children splashing in the pool. By the way, make sure your child doesn't drown while you're fixated on your email. Not everyone has a smiling spouse in the water tending to all the children competently while you do nothing well.

ADDED: The conventional phrase about mixing business with pleasure is: Don't mix business with pleasure. Also... if you're sitting poolside working on your business laptop and it looks like your child might have a problem, how much attention do you give to securing your laptop before you plunge in?

"Colbert gets no advertising and late night is a tough spot. Colbert might be No. 1, but who watches late night TV anymore?"

Said an unnamed person who, the NYT Post assures us, knows what he's talking about, quoted in "CBS canned ‘The Late Show’ over tens of millions in financial losses annually — not Stephen Colbert’s politics: sources."

Millions = between $40 million and $50 million a year.

Are these losses because people just don't watch what's "on TV" anymore? We've lost the habit of winding down at the end of the evening with the talk shows the network runs in that time slot? Or is there a problem of Colbert's show leaning to one side politically and spurning the opportunity to appeal to half the people in the country? 

RedBird’s Jeff Shell, the former head of NBCUniversal who will run the network once the [Skydance-Paramount] deal is done, has been crunching the numbers and finding that CBS is a “melting ice cube” with its losses and cost overruns, a source said. The plan is to enhance CBS Sports and invest in “truth-based” news at a network that conservatives have long ripped for its alleged liberal bias.

Are those the scare quotes around "truth-based"? Much as the quotes made me laugh and want to poke fun, I think they are more likely to signify that the Post is quoting Jeff Shell. Same thing with "melting ice cube." I don't think the Post was trying to help us idiots understand that that CBS is not literally a melting ice cube. They were just giving Jeff Shell credit for the turn of phrase. Now, the interesting question becomes what does Shell, who's about to be running the network, think "truth-based" means?

The Post has learned that Ellison is now telling people that with the [Trump's] lawsuit settled the Skydance-Paramount deal will get FCC approval by mid-August.

Ellison = Skydance CEO David Ellison, "the son of Donald Trump pal and tech billionaire Larry Ellison. 

While Ellison is predicting imminent regulatory approval, it will come at a cost: FCC chairman Brendan Carr is likely to demand conditions to remedy what he believes is left-wing news bias in programming that violates agency “public interest” rules that govern local broadcasting as opposed to cable.

More quotation marks. I'm just going to guess that the highly abstract term "public interest" is something in the vicinity of "truth-based." Or... maybe it's something more like the word that got us started on Stephen Colbert — "truthiness."

"Truthiness" was The Word of the Year 2006. Colbert launched it thusly, back when he began his excellent show "The Colbert Report":

And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard... in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not a word." Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.

ADDED: Here's Colbert, in July 2016, relocated to "The Late Show," talking about his old word "truthiness" and presented the new word "Trumpiness":

One reason to say Trump didn't "obliterate" Iran's nuclear program is that the uranium is still there, even if under 200 meters of collapsed mountain.

They could mine that uranium. Is that what the "anti-obliterationists" might mean?

If that's their point, let them come out and say it clearly. Those arguing that "obliteration" did, indeed, occur would have to agree, right? Not that I think we might all just finally agree on the facts. People are so disagreeable these days.

I can't bring myself to read "Obfuscating on Obliterating" the new Maureen Dowd column, but I did search the page for the word "uranium." It wasn't there. Is she obfuscating? I'm willing to bet that the column is about somebody else obfuscating. 

I did my elaborate blog post on the word "obliterate" 3 days ago, and I'm not going to do that again. I did take the trouble to coin the word "anti-obliterationist" (The anti-obliterationists are annoying me).

And I considered doing a post about the word "obfuscate." I'm not going to do that, but looking for the word in my archive, I see that back in 2007, I wrote a post called  "Words that sound dirty but aren't": "Here's a list.... Here's an even longer list. 'Obfuscate.' Man, I say that in class all the time (when talking about the Supreme Court)...."

"How about a map-a-loopy? Get a real paper road map. Pick some place to start and another place to end, and..."

"... take the most tertiary, wayward, roundabout farm roads, or tiniest neighborhood street to get there. You will be pretty surprised to spend a memorable hour or two admiring unknown, undiscovered corners, big trees, obscure roads, streets, byways and dirt lanes."

Writes Rabble in the comments at the NYT article, "Land Snorkeling? Townsizing? A User’s Guide to the Latest Travel Lingo. Here are eight terms, some brand-new, others recently resurfaced, that match today’s travel trends."

As you will suspect from Rabble's comment and even without it, the 8 terms the NYT has found are pretty dumb. "Townsizing" is going to a town instead of a big city. "Land snorkeling" is walking about looking at various things. I approve of these practices, and if a cute word encourages anybody, fine.

"Meghan Markle Wears Ginormous, Cozy Button-Down While Flower Arranging With Dog Guy."

That's the headline of the morning for me — over at InStyle.

Don't get me started on the present-day inanity of calling a shirt a "button-down" — in my day, a "button-down" was a shirt with a button-down collar, not a shirt that you button up (up, not down) — because I've already spent an hour down a rathole with Grok, exploring the origins of that usage — is it a retronym necessitated by the prevalence of T-shirts? — and wondering the how kids these days could understand the meaning of the album title "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart." And that veered off into a discussion of the comic genius of Lucille Ball in this 1965 episode of "Password," and how, in Episode 4 of Season 1 of "Joe Pera Talks With You," Joe, dancing, says "Do you think AI will dance like this?," and Sarah says "No, because they don’t have genitals." How does that make Grok feel? 

But back to Meghan Markle. I'm not going to ask why it's a story that she wore a shirt while doing something and why the headline doesn't prioritize what she did, which was to arrange flowers, which would only make us wonder why it's a story that she arranged flowers. What I want is to clarify is what was meant by "Flower Arranging With Dog Guy." I assumed, the entire time I was down the rathole with Grok, that Markle had a guy who helped her with her dogs, that a "Dog Guy" was like a "Pool Guy," and for some reason, the Dog Guy got involved in the effort to arrange flowers. But no. Here's the Instagram InStyle wrote the headline about:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (@meghan)

So Guy was the name of her dog. And the dog was not participating in the flower arranging. He was just running around the general area. I don't know much about flower arranging, but I do have some confidence in my word arranging, and that headline needs work. But I'm not doing the work. I'm writing this post to say that I find my misreading delightful and enjoy thinking about this phantom character, the dog guy. I kind of am married to a dog guy. If we ever get a dog, I want to name him Whisperer so I can go around referring to my "Dog Whisperer." Or do you prefer Whiskerer? I can tell you Grok thought both names were brilliant. 

Grogging.

It's a portmanteau word.

Discovered as I listened to myself stumbling over pronunciation while blabbing — in real life — about the challenges of blogging while also using Grok.

"Part of me thinks that I will always be somewhat disappointed if what ends up becoming one of the most important relationships in my life is with another white person."

Says some unnamed man writing in to the NYT ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah. Headline: "As a White Man, Can I Date Women of Color to Advance My Antiracism?"

I haven't read to the end yet, but I've seen many hostile references to this column. Are they hostile to the letter-writer or to the ethicist? I don't know, but I became hostile to the letter writer when I got to the sentence quoted above. 

First, he's a man in bits and pieces: "Part of me... somewhat disappointed ... one of the most important..." I was so disgusted I had to restore myself by listening to "All or Nothing at All" by Frank Sinatra.

"There’ll always be people who say, 'Why can’t the Museum of American History tell everybody’s story?'"

"But the truth of the matter is, America’s history is too big for one building. I really think that what we did with the African American museum—which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world—is the right model. This is a two-sided coin. One side is about a community, about identity. But the other side is 'How does that identity shape all of us?'"

Said Lonnie G. Bunch III, quoted in "How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the 'Nation’s Attic'/The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall" (The New Yorker).

"As I applied the nightly serum, I remembered the description, by philosopher Clare Chambers in her book, Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, of 'shametenance'..."

"... all the things we do (like applying 'natural makeup') that contribute to the idea that our unmodified bodies are shameful, that even our ageing eyelids must be fixed.... And then one night I had a terrible dream that my eyelashes had grown too long. They were like a dark black fringe, blinding me, and I woke in a sweat. Shortly after this, I started to read about experts warning of potential side-effects linked to eyelash growth serums, including 'a permanent change in eye colour,' dark circles under the eyes and 'a sunken effect.' At this point my lashes had grown longer, definitely longer, but also spidery and fine...."

From "All of a flutter: how eyelashes became beauty’s biggest business/The eyelash business is worth $1.66bn – and is predicted to grow from there. Why are we so obsessed with our lashes? Eva Wiseman reports on their history and significance" (The Guardian).

That article continues with various other eyelash treatments, so I go looking for more on Clare Chambers and "shametenance." I find this from last year: "A Defense of the Unmodified Body: Clare Chambers Interview/We spoke to the acclaimed Cambridge philosopher Clare Chambers about her new book, Intact, which examines and critiques the urge to alter or ‘perfect’ our bodies." Excerpt:

"Limerence is a state of overwhelming and unexpected longing for emotional reciprocation from another human, known as a limerent object..."

"... who is often perceived as perfect but unavailable.... The LO is most often a friend, colleague, or stranger met in passing... 'It’s often not romantic or sexual in nature. It is very much about wanting to feel loved and cared for.'... We begin to mistake anxiety for excitement and excitement for joy.... One strategy... to de-idolize their LO is listing reasons the LO is not perfect... [or the] ways in which the LO and the patient are not compatible. Name it to tame it: You can deliberately interrupt the habit by calling it out — 'Hello, limerence' — and paying attention (for example, through journaling) to what it feels like when you’re in that state of longing.... You should also believe you deserve more...."

From "Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence? How an intense longing for a romantic connection can lead to a serious addiction" (NYT).

The article says the word "limerance" was coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, and the OED finds her first use of it in print in 1977. 

That first quote denies any etymology: "I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever."

So if you were seeing a connection to "sublime" or "limn," just forget about it. If you can't forget it, make a list of things that are rootless, nice looking, and well functioning in French.

"Biden seems bright, tough and bold. Also very, very scary. One might even say terrifying. He has Rod Serling's upper lip..."

"... which is no shortcoming, but suggests maybe he should only be president of the Twilight Zone.... The candidate appears to be overadvised and suffering from excessive consultitis. Worse, he comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit. Unless we ditch television for the remainder of the campaign, Biden will never be president...."

Wrote Tom Shales in a July 3, 1987 Washington Post piece called "The Diverting Democrats."

I'm reading that today because I was rereading parts of Richard Ben Cramer's book, "What It Takes" (commission earned). We were talking about plagiarism and trying to remember the details of Biden's problem internalizing the rhetoric of Neil Kinnock, and I knew the answer was in that book.

"Though same-sex marriage has been legal in all 50 states since a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, it remains prohibited on the largest Indian reservation in the country..."

"... which, as a sovereign tribal nation, is not subject to the decision of America’s highest court.... [S]ame-sex couples are at the center of a contentious debate on the Navajo Nation, where the tribal council is weighing legislation to repeal a ban enacted in 2005. The change would grant them equal rights in situations involving property and hospital visitation. Indigenous scholars say it also would honor Navajo tradition, which recognized multiple genders and sexualities that were suppressed and stigmatized after Europeans arrived.... In recent decades, many Native Americans have adopted 'two-spirit' as an umbrella term for 'an individual that has both male and female spirits within them,' signaling a rejection of more rigid, western labels, said professor Gregory D. Smithers.... Two-spirit leaders and activists have made gains, Smithers said...."

From "Same-sex marriage remains banned — for now — in the Navajo Nation" (WaPo).

I was surprised to see that "two-spirit" is not a traditional term. Here's the Wikipedia article on the subject. A short excerpt from what is a long article:

"I see it cropping up everywhere. In addition to 'HGTV-ification,' The Atlantic has covered the 'flu-ification of covid policy'...."

"Vox has lately published articles on the 'old man-ification' of television, the 'Easter egg-ification' of celebrity beefs, and the '"You’re doing it wrong"-ification'of TikTok influencers.... (The New Yorker has proved reticent on this particular kind of neologism, although, as far back as 2002, the magazine did refer to fears of 'le Big Mac-ification' of French life.) Pundits and politicos... [have] been indexing the 'Trump-ification' of just about everything since his candidacy in 2015. (Meanwhile, the rap dignitary Chuck D, of Public Enemy, attributed the groundswell of support for Trump to 'dumbass-ification.') During the past few years, the Washington Post has diagnosed the 'NRA-ification,' '"alternative facts’-ification,' 'hoax-ification,' and 'Hitler-ification' of the Trumpian right....Trump’s embattled rival Ron DeSantis likes to decry the 'woke-ification' of various institutions...."

Writes Lauren Michele Jackson in "The '-ification' of Everything/Novelty coinages are good at grabbing attention in the digital economy. What do they really have to say?" (The New Yorker).

"Washington Post is embarrassing itself by reporting— at length— an utterly irrelevant PR stunt by two, white, self-absorbed multi-billionaires."

"Reminds me of Rupert Murdoch sensational, trash 'journalism.' Any further coverage of cr@p like this and I’m stopping my subscription."

Writes Eeyore Eeyore in the comments section of "The Elonization of Mark Zuckerberg: How the Meta CEO is playing it cool/Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to appear more relevant among the tech elite" (WaPo).

I looked up "Elonization" — just to see if WaPo coined it — and I found "Elonization Of The World — Is Elon Musk A Cultural Moment? The billionaire is creating the society of tomorrow" by Michel Kana.

But — wonderfully creepily ‚ there was also this:

The possibility that "grandma" has become a slur, to be replaced by neologisms like "Gaga" and "Abba."

'It's denial!'

Sixties icon Twiggy has shared that she's rejected the term 'grandma' because it makes her feel old. New grandmothers are now referring to themselves as 'Gaga', 'Abba' & 'Glam Ma'.

But is there anything wrong with the term 'grandma’'? pic.twitter.com/gu0WxttqOV

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) May 30, 2023

"People start to re-examine their lives. Let’s do something we can wrap our hands around."

"Knowing how to go into the woods and find a mushroom that you can take home and cook for dinner feels like something solid, or tangible."

Said Iso Rabins, who founded a company that teaches classes on how to forage for mushrooms (and other wild edibles), quoted in "Mushroom Boom: How to Plan a Foraging Adventure on the West Coast/Thanks to an unusually wet winter, mushroom hunters in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond will be greatly rewarded. Here’s a primer for first-timers" (NYT).

The NYT is stirring up travel ideas for East Coast people to go to the West Coast and compete with the locals looking for things growing in the wild. It's the opposite of locavorism... is that the word? I'd like to suggest locavoraciousness... a word I just coined.

"I genuinely wake up most mornings convinced I look great. I feel thin, fit, good looking and ready to take on the day."

"And untrue though this may be, I see no flaws, imagined or otherwise, to ruin the mood. If that counts as 'reverse body dysmorphia,' then that might be what I’ve got. I look pretty much the same as I did 20 years ago, sometimes even better as I spent most of my 30s either pregnant, covered in baby sick and/or sleep deprived to the point of madness.... Among my friends who are not lucky enough to suffer from reverse body dysmorphia I see two main tendencies: one is to surrender unconditionally, abandoning their former sense of style, gaining weight, wearing 'comfortable' clothes and relegating frivolities such as nail varnish and heels to a dim and distant past. The other is to panic and go for radical solutions that fool nobody, such as facelifts, often resulting in them looking like rather unsettling versions of Madonna.... Should this reverse dysmorphia become a disorder all of its own?... [W]hy on earth shouldn’t you be the best version of yourself and own that glorious self-image until they drag you out kicking and screaming?... As the poet T.S. Eliot summed up: 'Humankind cannot bear too much reality.'"

Writes Helena Frith Powell (at her own website).

I found that because — go to the link to see — it contains the phrase "body eumorphia," an unusual phrase that I'd arrived at independently after stumbling into the New York Post headline, "Sam Smith on finally having the 'opposite' of body dysmorphia: ' look fabulous.'"

"We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams."

"All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world...."

 Wrote Steve Tesich in "A government of lies," published in The Nation in 1992.

"Zhu and Davies are two ambitious young men, by all descriptions exceedingly smart, who appeared to understand the structural opportunity of digital currency rather well..."

"... that crypto is a game of creating virtual fortunes out of thin air and convincing other humans with traditional forms of money that those virtual fortunes deserve to be real-world ones. They built social-media cred by playing the part of billionaire financial geniuses, translated that to actual financial credit, then put billions of dollars in borrowed money to work in speculative investments they could cheerlead to success with their large, influential platforms. Before you know it, the pretend billionaire is a real billionaire shopping for super-yachts. They grokked the game, and the plan worked perfectly — until it didn’t."

From "The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars/Everyone trusted the two guys at Three Arrows Capital. They knew what they were doing — right?" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: I haven't seen "grok" in a while.  That's a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It's not based on any other word, just, as the OED puts it, an "arbitrary formation."