"Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities. There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information. Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated."
Said Leon Wieseltier, Maureen Dowd, in "What A.I. Kant Do" (NYT). Wieseltier is identified only as "editor of the journal Liberties," but I needed more context, so:
Yes, tell me about the the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty under siege by the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived.
I wondered why Dowd — or whoever wrote the headline — went with the stale pun "Kant" when they could have used "Oh, the humanities!" But though I came up with that on my own and was going to use it as a kicker at the end of this post, a quick google showed it's been used and used and used.
It was even famously used, 15 years ago, as a punchline on "The Big Bang Theory":
"Well, then, prepare to be terrified. If your friends are unconvincing, this year's donations might go to say the geology department... or worse it could go to the liberal arts. Millions of dollars being showered on poets literary theorists and students of gender studies"/"Oh, the humanities!"
Read Hayes, a research scientist and criminologist at the University of Florida and the executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, said it was possible that Mr. Augustine’s use of uncooked pasta — which he described as “off the charts” — was meant to simulate the shifting sound of the pieces inside the box.
So this guy was able — at least 70 times — to return boxes and get a refund without it being noticed that the box did not contain the original Legos? It was enough that the box sounded as though it contained Legos. This worked 70+ times?! And the police act like it's cute and make puns.
"The line about her having great jeans — several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok that this is a 'pro-eugenics ad.' Whether or not that’s the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencers, pop stars and musicians that feels tethered to the values of another time."
That's a gift link. My last of the month. In case you want to see the ads people are so worked up about. I've avoided talking about them because I don't want to help make them go viral. But they've obviously gone massively viral, so expect more of the same.
It's a pun: "good genes"/"good jeans." You'd think it would have been noticed, used, and groaned over decades ago and that it would be completely uncool to bring it up now. But what if it's cool precisely because people are sensitive and fearful about a perceived rise in enthusiasm for white supremacy. It's needling those poor souls. It's transgressive. Is that where we are?
By the way, Deepika Padukone used the pun 3 years ago, for Levi's jeans:
"'In that studio, I met a lot of people that help me feel safe and feel able to create whatever I want without thinking: Am I going to sell this or is this going to be something that people are going to want in their stores?' said Ms. Muñoz, who now lives in El Paso and has a studio in Guadalajara, Mexico."
I'm expending one of my 10 gift links on this one because I want you to see some of the godawful pottery the NYT is promoting for artists and empowerers of people of color. I found this article at the top of the NYT home page, right next to "Trump Favors Blunt Force in Dealing With Foreign Allies and Enemies Alike." No pun intended, I'm sure.
I'm old enough to remember the kind of gigantic atrocious ashtray that was regarded as an "art piece on your coffee table," back in the heyday of tobacco smoking.
Smoking paraphernalia "joined the world of home decor" a long time ago.
By the way, did you ever look and look and finally find a place where people helped you feel safe and feel able to create whatever you want without thinking and then you relocated to Mexico?
Now, get out there and be creative. Creative for the people. Of color. Perhaps orange. Or avocado....
"... dyed yellow in the bathtub, paunch visible: 'My Body.'... He was comically underactive, congratulating himself for what [his biographer] calls 'peregrinations,' and work-avoidant: 'Upstairs to get typewriter ribbon,' he’d say, jumping up from the piano. 'It’s the only way I get exercise.' He had a weakness for puns that some found fatal. 'Lust Horizon,' he proposed as an alternate title to Billy Wilder’s 'Kiss Me, Stupid,' his last Hollywood collaboration, and a bomb. After repeated falls he called himself a 'rhapsody in bruise.'..."
I was just rearranging my bookshelves, mostly planning to trash decrepit mass-market paperbacks, but I'll keep this. It was, undoubtedly, bought by my parents and read — perhaps only up to page 163 — and then migrated to my house after my parents were both [word in the upper right hand corner, above].
Writes a commenter at WaPo, reacting to "Hong Kong’s landmark Jumbo floating restaurant sinks at sea": "Even before the pandemic, the restaurant, which served Cantonese fare, was accumulating debt. But Hong Kong’s early move to ban tourists hit Jumbo Kingdom and other attractions hard."
ADDED: I was curious about the origin of the term "under water" (or "underwater") to refer to negative equity, and I surprised to see that the earliest example in the OED is from Madison, Wisconsin's own Capital Times (and as recent at 1975):
Every foreclosure of an underwater real estate mortgage..is greeted with cheers. Evidence that the economy is doing less to help itself is taken as a guarantee that the Fed will do more.
I couldn't find an explanation of why this figurative use became standard, but perhaps water metaphors are common in discussions of money. We speak of sinking or staying afloat. There's "liquidity."
Is "solvent" a water image? I see that "solvent," meaning "Able to pay all one's debts or liabilities," goes back to the 1600s:
1653 H. Cogan tr. F. M. Pinto Voy. & Adventures lxxviii. 315 Certain Chineses, who were not men solvent, but became bankrupts. 1664 Addit. to Life Mede in Mede Wks. (1672) p. xxxvi Mr. Mede began..to refuse.., and objected, How shall I be able to be solvent in convenient time?
"Solvent" is the present participle of the Latin word "solvĕre," which means to explain or clear up or answer. But "solvent" has also meant "Dissolving; causing solution" or a substance that turns other substances to liquid. This is the same entry, so it's the same word.
Interestingly, "solvent" itself has a figurative use. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Silence is a solvent that destroys personality" (1841).
ADDED: The "puns" tag is for something Meade says. I make a remark that presumes familiarity with a song that I'm just going to make sure everyone is familiar with:
Inside, the article is titled "What Charles Portis Taught Us."* Charles Portis —who died this week at the age of 86 — was the author of the book "True Grit."
Portis’s diffident, modestly gallant characters were a world away from the marital bonfires and priapisms of other male writers of his crop—Roth, Updike, Yates. His male heroes practiced a masculinity that by the standards of the day was uniquely (and unfashionably) nontoxic. It’s hard to imagine the bafflement with which Portnoy or Angstrom would have confronted a guy like Jimmy Burns, from “Gringos,” who tries to persuade two young women to move into his hotel with a come-on like this: “The doorknobs are porcelain with many fine hairline cracks. The towels are rough-dried in the sun. Very stiff and invigorating after a bath.”
“Only a mean person won’t enjoy it” is something a critic once wrote about “True Grit.” In part, I love Portis because I feel less mean when I read him. It’s not just that his novels are gentle and funny; it’s that Portis’s books have a way of conscripting the reader into their governing virtues—punctuality, automotive maintenance, straight talk, emotional continence. Puny virtues, as Portis himself once put it, yet it is a great and comforting gift (in these days especially) to offer readers escape into a place where such virtues reign....
I didn't like the phrase "non-toxic masculinity" when I saw it in the headline, but in the context of this essay, it's fine. It's explained and specific. Out of context, I don't like the way it implies that masculinity is bad and in need of toning down or that we only want men who make sure they are innocuous.
_______________________
"The pens, engraved with her signature, were intended as souvenirs for Pelosi’s allies. She carefully signed the documents, apparently stroke by stroke, using different pens for each portion of her signature. Then she distributed them to impeachment managers and committee members."
People got angry about pens, and a pun was in reach — "pen"/"pent" — and the headline writer strained for it, deploying that hyphen (putting the pun in punctuation).
It really is a strain, too, because not only was the "t" in "pent" a problem, but the whole idea of "pent-up anger" is wrong. I don't think the pens really made anyone angry. Trump supporters simply jumped at a great opportunity to savage and mock their opponents. And if that counts as anger, it wasn't "pent-up," because Trump supporters have been expressing themselves all along, every chance they get. We're very expressive these days.
Speaking of very expressive, here's Greg Gutfeld:
Here's @greggutfeld losing his mind over Pelosi giving away pens she used to sign impeachment articles, followed by footage of Trump giving away dozens of pens like candy mere hours ago following his China deal signing ceremony pic.twitter.com/91R27O5nim
And Rupar has lost his mind if he believes Gutfeld was losing his mind. Gutfeld was performing an excellent comic riff. It was effective and entertaining, and I presume Rupar knows it and is just rather dully using the boring internet approach of characterizing anything colorful as crazy.
ADDED: Trump's signing of the China deal is not like what Pelosi did at all. He quickly signs his name with one pen then hands a whole lot of pens over to be distributed as the ceremonial pens. Pelosi writes her signature in little segments, switching from pen to pen, so that each pen has the special magic of having been used to sign the document:
What can I add to the discussion? How can eye help?
ADDED: Maybe you think that's a cheap pun, but I was influenced by "The Book of Prince" (blogged here yesterday):
Even in longhand, he wrote in his signature style, an idiosyncratic precursor of textspeak that he’d perfected back in the eighties: “Eye” for “I,” “U” for “you,” “R” for “are.”...
He’d written about his childhood and adolescence in Minneapolis, starting with his first memory, his mother winking at him. “U know how U can tell when someone is smiling just by looking in their eyes?” he wrote. “That was my mother’s eyes. Sometimes she would squint them like she was about 2 tell U a secret. Eye found out later my mother had a lot of secrets.”
Is it not disturbingly long to us ordinary human beings? And yet we submit to enclosure in tubes hurled far up into the air. Is the buried tube more disturbing?
It's clever to call the company The Boring Company, and not because puns are so damned wonderful but because boredom is the opposite of terror.
These vandals are destroying or desecrating the vehicles in disturbingly imaginative ways, and celebrating their illegal deeds on social media — in full view of authorities and the public....
Lt. Michael Soliman, who supervises the LAPD Pacific Division’s Venice Beach detail, said he’s aware of some vandalism — his team has seen scooters left in a pile 10 feet high. But because people aren’t reporting such incidents, it’s not something officers are responding to, he said.
“If we have to prioritize the allocation of our time and resources, first and foremost we’re going to prioritize the preservation of life,” Soliman said. “Protection of property comes second.”
President Trump, who has faced unyielding — and bipartisan — criticism after saying that there was “blame on both sides” in Charlottesville, tweeted Saturday that he wanted “to applaud the many protestors in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate. Our country will soon come together as one!”
He also wrote: “Our great country has been divided for decades. Sometimes you need protest in order to heal, & we will heal, & be stronger than ever before!”
It was an abrupt shift in tone. The president posted earlier Saturday that it appeared there were “many anti-police agitators in Boston.”
That's not just a nonsense misspelling like covfefe. "Heel" has meaning, as a tweeter named @dexter_doggie barked: “Donald Trump intends to bring you to heel."
"So people who dislike puns tend to be people who seek a level of control that doesn’t exist. If you have an approach to the world that is rules-based, driven by hierarchy and threatened by irreverence, then you’re not going to like puns."
“I think another question to ask that’s just as relevant is why is sarcasm considered cool by the same people who often decry puns as uncool?” he asks. “Both are a way of saying one thing and meaning another. In an age of cynicism it’s safer, socially, to tear something down through sarcasm or irony than it is to build something up through punning.”
ADDED: Here's a well-reviewed card game based on puns: Punderdome.
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