"I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, pushing this new HBO show "Mountainhead," in "From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right" (NYT).

No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day’s news cycle. But art can help; it’s not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy.

I liked "Succession" and will give this show a try, but the trailer did not appeal to me. Was that music needed to mask the deficiencies of the script and the acting? 

"I hope you rich folks don't mind slumming it in the humble abode of the poorest billionaire in the gang" — that's the first line in the trailer! I can't believe present-day billionaires would talk like that. It sounds like the way a high-school student in the 1960s would write dialogue for a rich guy. Remember when any time a door was opened to reveal the innards of a mansion, some character would say "Welcome to my humble abode"?

I don't mind unrealistic dialogue if it's brilliant somehow — comically, tragically — but that's just so embarrassingly dumb. I don't get it. "Succession" was great. But I see this show was written and filmed very quickly:

"Suggestions that the number of people wanting to separate is growing worries me.... [Premier Danielle Smith] is manipulating the people of this province..."

"... into believing that we should seriously look at separating. It is just ludicrous. Not all of us think like that. I absolutely disagree."

Said Kathleen Sokvitne, a citizen of Calgary, Alberta, quoted in "'We're Canadians': Some Albertans divided about separation in cross-province checkup/Republican Party of Alberta leader says membership has doubled since the federal election" (CBC).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok:

1. What does "checkup" mean in this Canadian newspaper headline...? 

2. In the US, we'd just say "poll," right? (Or "survey") 

3. If Alberta became the 51st state, there would be a lot of odd language and spelling quirks that might make Albertans feel/seem like outsiders. 

The OED word of the day is "sonnettomaniac."

That is, a person who's crazy for sonnets.

Are words constructed out of "-maniac" really deserving of dictionary entries? Perhaps, in the case of "sonnettomaniac," it was valuable to nudge people to spell it the way it was spelled in the time when people really were sonnettomaniacs.

The OED proffers a quote from 2011: "After the decline of the previous century's 'sonnettomania,' the popularity of the sonnet would never scale such lofty heights again in the course of the twentieth century."

10 things I've asked Grok in the last 2 or 3 days.

1. Is it honest for me to say: I have no idea whether Trump has any idea whether Mitch McConnell had polio?

2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?

3. What is the origin of the phrase "take up the mantle"?

4. What have smart people had to say about the tendency to see images in words, including things that are not really relevant to the etymology of the word? For example, one might imagine that "ostracize" is connected to "ostrich" or "marginalize" relates to "margarine."

5. What is the argument that the crows in "Dumbo" are not a racist stereotype?

6. Does RFK Jr. speak of himself in terms of "Camelot"?

7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?

8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?

9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?

10. What if you had to argue that "The fog comes /on little cat feet" is actually very depressing and pessimistic?

"Their suggestion was slovenly. Also slipshod, slapdash, shoddy, and schlocky — and those are just the ‘s’s."

Said Stuart Silverstein, speaking of esses, who has proved that Dorothy Parker wrote some things published in Life Magazine in the 1920s and who doesn't want to simply stick this material at the end of the third edition of her book "Not Much Fun," as the publisher, Scribner, requested.

Quoted in a London Times piece that highlights its opinion that the stuff is bad: "What would you do for money? Dorothy Parker wrote bad poetry/Verses anonymously published in Life magazine in 1928 have been identified as the work of the American poet."

The four poems are all about a daring girl who goes for a ride in some fellow’s car and all are titled Maybe She Didn’t Have On Her Walking-Shoes. The last of them, and perhaps the best, is a limerick about a “young lady named Maude/Who drove out with a man in a Faude” and has the payoff line: “And everyone murmured ‘My Gaude!’”

How is that bad in some way that other Dorothy Parker things would not have to also be called bad?

"President Trump has ushered in an age of political theatre – a collective adrenaline rush that has enabled him to not only move masses of people into his camp..."

"... but also masses of people away from ours. It does not serve us to underestimate the historic nature of what he has achieved. In fact, it’s important that we recognize the psychological and emotional dimensions of Trump’s appeal. We need to understand it to create the energy to counter it. MAGA is a distinctly 21st century political movement and it will not be defeated by a 20th century tool kit.... [W]e must immediately get about the task of creating a new party. It will be….  A party that listens more, and makes people feel that their thoughts and feelings are as important as their wallets. A party that advocates unequivocally for the working people of the United States. A party with the humility to recognize we need to look in the mirror, and be willing to reinvent ourselves...."

Writes Marianne Williamson, announcing that she's running for chair of the Democratic National Party.

ADDED: I like how she spelled "theatre"... especially while touting herself as in touch with the mind of America. "Theatre" is British English. "Theater" is American English.

"By the way, do you want hors d’oeuvres or anything?"

Said Trump, quoted in "Read the Full Transcript of Donald Trump’s 2024 Person of the Year Interview With TIME." 

I corrected the spelling of "hors d’oeuvres." TIME wrote "hors d’Oevres." I think it's funny, both Trump suddenly offering hors d’oeuvres and TIME, which would probably jump at any chance to portray Trump as dumb or lowly, not managing to spell "hors d’oeuvres" correctly in a written transcript. Come on! If there's one spelling you've got to know you need to check before publishing, it's "hors d’oeuvres." 

This is my second post today about Trump tending to the food needs of his guests. Isn't that nice?

ADDED: It's also funny that he used the phrase "hors d’oeuvres." Why wouldn't everyone, by now, just say "appetizers"? Maybe to someone paying close attention to catering, hors d’oeuvres conveys food to be taken up with the fingers and not needing a plate. It's outside of the meal, not the first course of a meal. One might stick to the silly old phrase for precision, but I like to think Trump used it to be disarming to his guest, the TIME interviewer, to create a spelling challenge (which TIME failed), and to call out to onlookers like me who are listening for verbal music.

What is the plural of "mosquito"?

The question occurred to me after I wrote "mosquitos" in the comments to the previous post and saw that someone else had written "mosquitoes." My version looks spiffier and more Spanish — and the word is, the OED says, "A borrowing from Spanish" — but "mosquitoes" seems to coordinate with "tomatoes" and "potatoes." Why does that "e" intrude itself in the plural? (It can even over-intrude, as it did on poor Dan Quayle, who is remembered these days only for misspelling "potato.")

Anyway... take your pick. Both "mosquitoes" and "mosquitos" are correct. I give you this image from the OED, which treats both plurals equally and which also shows you the wild history of the spelling of "mosquito," beginning with "muskyto":

"If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with, no more appeasement."

Said Ronald Reagan, in 1970, talking about dealing with unrest on college campuses, quoted at the time in "Ronald Reagan Is Giving ‘Em Heck" (NYT)(free access link).

Later he said the remark was a "figure of speech" and that anyone who took it seriously was "neurotic." Within a few days, four students were shot at Kent State.

I ran across that because I'd noticed that the NYT was spelling "bloodbath" as 2 words — "Trump defends his warning of a ‘blood bath for the country" — in its current reporting. I had 2 theories about why:

1. A compound word takes a long time to become standard. When we see "bloodbath" as one word, it feels more like a stock term. Trite. By spacing it out as 2 words, you might get people to think that Trump put it together in his own fervid brain. But maybe...

2. The NYT has a style guide, and it decided long ago that "blood bath" was the correct configuration, and people at the Times are meticulous about writing it the same way every time.

To narrow my 2 ideas about twoness and oneness down to one, I searched the NYT archive for the 1-word form. I found many examples of "bloodbath," including Reagan's crazy idea of sticking it to the students. There was also Russell Baker making jokes about Richard Nixon's "bloodbath" theory of Vietnam (in 1970, deploying a fictional character he called "Dandy"):

"People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to match their fears to their actions."

Said Chris Ellis, a U.S. Army colonel who researches the prepper movement, quoted in "US 'prepper' culture diversifies amid fear of disaster and political unrest" (Reuters).

Researchers say the number of preppers has doubled in size to about 20 million since 2017. Much of that growth is from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump's 2016 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, more frequent extreme weather and the 2020 racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd.... 

"People used to say, 'It snew last night' or 'It's snowen all week' – and not so long ago."

I'm reading "An alternative vocabulary of winter" by Ruth Walker (in the CSM).

That article is a decade old. I dyggyd it up this morning because — waiting for the blizzard — I wondered why the past tense of "snow" was not "snown," like the way the past tense of "show" is, at least sometimes, "shown."

From the article:

"They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like: 'Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.'"

"Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: 'Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?'"

Said Jodie Foster, quoted in "Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with" (The Guardian).

"For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed... a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions..."

"... that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students. When, as a student at Harvard Law School, I was booed and hissed and told to 'go die' for articulating pro-life or other conservative views, exactly zero administrators cared about my feelings. Nor did it cross my mind to ask them for help. I was an adult. I could handle my classmates’ anger. Yet how sensitive are administrators to student feelings under other circumstances? I had to chuckle when I read my colleague Pamela Paul’s excellent column on the Columbia School of Social Work and she quoted a school glossary that uses the term 'folx.' Why spell the word with an 'x'? Because some apparently believe the letter 's' in 'folks' renders the term insufficiently inclusive. I kid you not...."The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes.... "

Writes David French, in "What the University Presidents Got Right and Wrong About Antisemitic Speech" (NYT).

French concludes (and I agree): "[P]rotect students from harassment... But do not protect students from speech.... The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more."

"'F*** the rich. F*** the police. F*** the state. F*** the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'"

Wrote Gabriel Sims-Fewer, owner of pay-whatever-you-want café, The Anarchist, quoted in "Go woke, go broke: Toronto 'anti-capitalist' anarchist café where customers 'pay what you can' shutters after a year after failing to make enough money. Owner slammed cops as 'pigs' and late Queen as a 'parasite'/The Anarchist in Toronto, Canada has shuddered after a year in business/The cafe had a 'pay what you can' model and was 'anti-capitalist/Shop's owner cited 'lack of generational wealth/capital seed' as the reason" (Daily Mail).

I love the notion that the café had such depth of feeling that it "shuddered." When capitalist-pig owned places go out of business, they merely shutter.

That's the only reason I'm blogging that too-predictable news. Well, that and the fascinating phrase "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'" Canada normally flies under the radar, following the strategy of inconspicuousness that works all too well in this crazy world.

10 days ago on this blog, we looked at the question "Why wouldn't most people decide the best way to live is to be as inconspicuous as possible?" 

Do pay attention to inconspicuous things. And when you see them, don't be afraid to offset their inconspicuousness by using hyperbole. Phrases like "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada'" can help people think more deeply about things.

Or would you rather bray at obvious things like the way pay-whatever-you-want cafés go out of business?

Such a big roll.

"Members of an 'autonomous movement' called Tyre Extinguishers said they recently 'disarmed' 43 SUVs in 'one of the wealthiest areas' of Boston by letting the air out of the tires..."

"... The point of this extremely annoying if generally harmless act, according to the website of the Tyre Extinguishers, is to get people to ditch their SUVs for transportation that’s less harmful to people and the planet, like public transit or smaller cars.... The group doesn’t claim central leadership, stating that anyone 'can create your own tyre-extinguishing group,' but the spelling of 'tyre' instead of 'tire' betrays its U.K. origins...."

From "SUV Owners Beware: Climate Activists Are Coming for Your Tires/Members of a group calling itself Tyre Extinguishers recently deflated tires on 43 vehicles in Boston" (Inside Hook).

In case you were wondering what Antony Blinken is up to these days or just want to know which Bob Dylan song title is getting played with in high-level government.

Here's "A font feud brews after State Dept. picks Calibri over Times New Roman/‘The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin,’ read the subject line of a cable from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to U.S. embassies as part of an accessibility push" (WaPo).

Must I rail about "The Times They Are A-Changin'" again? I'll just quote something I wrote back in 2018:

[T]he old song... anchors Bob Dylan in his political protest time, from which he changed. But Baby Boomer politicos have always harked back to it, and it serves them — I'm not including me — right to have that song sung in their face now that they are old and not ready to roll over for whatever advancement the young people think is due.

I don't include myself because I've never liked the forefronting of Protest Bob.

"A bill to permanently 'spring forward' has been stalled in Congress for more than seven months, as lawmakers trade jabs..."

"... over whether the Senate should have passed the legislation at all. House officials say they’ve been deluged by voters with split opinions and warnings from sleep specialists who insist that adopting permanent standard time instead would be healthier, and congressional leaders admit they just don’t know what to do."

 From "Clock runs out on efforts to make daylight saving time permanent" (WaPo).

Great! I wish there'd be more of this admitting that they just don't know what to do. 

If Ron DeSantis asked me "How do you spell Lambeau?," I'd say "L-A-M-B-E-R-T."

But that's just my sense of political humor, and I have a long memory, and it certainly goes back to 2004, when John Kerry campaigned in Wisconsin and called Lambeau "Lambert." 

Anyway, here's the context for Ron's question "How do you spell Lambeau?," from the NYT article "Tom Brady and Ron DeSantis Are Said to Be on Texting Terms/The Republican nominee for Wisconsin governor, Tim Michels, told supporters recently that while DeSantis was watching a Packers game at Lambeau Field, he was texting the Buccaneers quarterback": 

"The... teacher... said, 'O.K., everyone, now we’re going to check in with how we feel we are doing in the "Best Self" exercise.'"

"A self-assessment of the self-assessment.... Afterward, a group left with one of the teachers to visit the 'sensory hallway,' an obstacle course of self-examination. On the way, they passed relics of previous emotional inquiries. A large poster board with the word 'Anxious' hung outside a classroom. One student had written, 'What if nobody likes me. What if that happens.' The first activity was emotional hopscotch—students jumped on a square that represented how they were feeling. The first few jumped on 'Happy!' A boy named JJ jumped on the square that said 'Sad.'... Next activity: a 'disposition board,' where the kids had to hop to positive-attitude words on the floor and say them out loud: 'Generosity!' 'Forgiveness!' 'Presence!' The last hallway station was an oversized Scrabble board attached to the wall, where students would decide on a collective mood.... After a brief but earnest deliberation, the kids decided on 'upbeat.' There was one dissenter. 'I am not upbeat,' JJ declared. He carried some giant letters to a faraway spot on the board and spelled out 'd-i-s-a-p-o-n-t-e-d.'"

From "Readin’, Writin’, and Regulatin’ Emotions/As Eric Adams, who has advocated for daily meditation in public schools, pushes mindfulness classes, the third graders at P.S. 60 in Staten Island assembled for a lesson on identifying and coping with their feelings" (The New Yorker).