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Category Archives: Language

Defining our terms

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Maggie Haberman is getting a bit of blowback in the twittersphere for her failure to call a lie a lie. You can pick up on the conversation here: http://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1000755597283905537 Her point, if you can call it that, is that if Trump chooses to believe something he spews, it is not necessarily a lie. It seems […]

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Memo to NY Times: Words have meanings

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Today the New York Times once again goes into the hinterland, to understand the yahoos that are destroying this country. This time it’s the gun loving yahoos, particularly the ones who just can’t live without their assault weapons, particularly the AR-15, the weapon of choice for mass killers. Well, we’ve gone through this before with […]

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More on “shithole”

Sunday, January 14, 2018

I spend a lot of time playing *Words with Friends* with my brother-in-law, who lives in France. If you play the game you know that, unlike in Scrabble, if you play a word that isn’t a word, you simply get to try again, without losing a point. Also, the game has a built in dictionary […]

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Nazis don’t really care about free speech

Sunday, November 19, 2017

I am going to beat a still living horse, the media’s persistent willingness to buy into the terminology of the right. We’ve grown so used to terms like “pro-life” that even many on the left use them precisely the way that the right wants them used. What brings this to mind, yet again, is this […]

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Tell it like it is

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Atrios has nominated Jonathan Chait as one of America’s worst humans for suggesting that we lefties should not be applying the term “white supremacist” to Trump or his followers unless they themselves confess to being so. He links to this Chait takedown, to which the reader is referred. I find myself in agreement with Chait, […]

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Time to call a fascist a fascist

Sunday, August 13, 2017

I’ve written before (some might say ad nauseam) about the inability of the Democrats to push a consistent message; the ability of the right to label themselves in palatable ways (they’re “pro-life”!); and the willingness or helplessness of a compliant press to go along with their labeling. We’re seeing that in spades so far as […]

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Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it?

Friday, May 19, 2017

I once bought a Playboy publication. And I really did buy it just for the interviews, because it was a paperback collection of the best interviews up to that time (circa 1981). The Mel Brooks interviews were hilarious, by the way. But, I digress yet again. One of the interviews was with John and Yoko, […]

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More Democratic Incompetence

Sunday, April 30, 2017

If you go to this link you will find yet another story about Trump’s criminality. But let’s put that to the side. I want to concentrate on this paragraph: Senator Schumer released a statement on Friday about Trump’s tax reform principles: “Until President Trump releases his full tax returns, a cloud of suspicion will remain […]

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Grammar lesson

Friday, March 17, 2017

Typing remains painful for me, but I feel I must pound my keyboard, nonetheless, in defense of the English language and its punctuation marks. I refer to the Trumper’s defense of his wiretapping lie, an example of the reporting thereon here: “I think there’s no question that the Obama administration, that there were actions about […]

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Today’s Euphemism: the alt-right

Sunday, August 28, 2016

I don’t know where the term “alt-right” originated, but it masks the reality, like so many right wing buzzwords. “Pro-life”, “ethic cleansing”, “school choice”, “job creators”, and “death tax” come to mind. When a new word is substituted for the tried and true, it hides the reality, because it is free of the associations that […]

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