Treasure Trove of Trash Talk

If we needed any more proof that swear words are a legislative and judicial Pandora’s Box of insanity, Jay Wexler brings up the recent hilarious Supreme Court case between the FCC and Fox TV. Justice Scalia made this curious remark:

“Don’t use golly waddles instead of the F word.”

Wexler suspected that Scalia improvised “golly waddles”[1] and consulted language expert and Harvard Psych prof Steven Pinker, who confirmed the invention, and who then proceeded to let loose this handy list of polite and/or archaic euphamisms for such things.

“I am pretty sure that Scalia made up ‘golly waddles’ on the spot. He needed a hypothetical term that was not “f*ck,” and so used that; I don’t think it was an allusion to any commonly used euphemism. On the other hand he was certainly influenced by the truncated profanities for “God” that are ubiquitous in polite speech, such as golly, gosh, egad, gad, gadzooks, good grief, goodness gracious, Great Caesar’s ghost, and Great Scott. Similar truncations pop up for just about every taboo term, including Jesus (gee, gee whiz, gee willikers, geez, jeepers creepers, Jiminy Cricket, Judas Priest, Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat), sh*t (shame, sheesh, shivers, shoot, shucks, squat, sugar), and f*ck (fiddlesticks, fiddledeedee, foo, fudge, fug, fuzz, flaming, flipping, freaking, frigging, effing). I’m not sure why he felt he needed a second word in his hypothetical euphemism, but it may have been inspired by the prevalence of two-part euphemisms for bullsh*t, like applesauce, balderdash, blatherskite, claptrap, codswallop, flapdoodle, hogwash, horsefeathers, humbug, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot.”

Truly amazing is the human capacity for human linguistic invention, especially in finding safe alternatives for the “magic” words. I wonder if any of the outmoded examples were as weighty in their heyday. People forget that a lot of swear words from a hundred years ago are teethless and innocuous today.

UPDATE: After ruminating on “golly waddles” I think Scalia may have meant “mollycoddles.”

1.) Of course, Scalia is old as the hills, so you never know if he’s using some Depression-era Jersey slang.

Chunks of Childhood

I wrote this on Facebook today, and thought it was worth sharing:

Once you’ve been tagged you have to write a [note] with 15 weird/random facts about you. I was tagged by Jill, so I’m doing my duty. This one seems to have a childhood theme to it.

1. I don’t think I ever learned how to properly untie my shoes until college. I used to always pull the loops rather than the ends. I have no idea why.

2. When I was 4, I knew every make and model of every car on the road in the US. Or so my mom tells me. I have no recollection of this whatsoever.

3. When I was 2 or 3, I left the house in my pajamas at 8am and went across the street to our neighbor’s house for cookies. I think Mrs. France called my mom to let her know. Mom was looking everywhere for me. So yeah, I’ve had this cookie thing for a long time. It may be congenital, because….

4. …My dad always had a stash of Butterfingers. He called them his “medicine” and kept them on a high shelf away from our stuff.

5. In 1982 or so I burned my Star Wars AT-AT into plastic glop on a snowy day. I was burning a hole in the underbelly (like Luke!) when it caught fire. I learned that when plastic catches fire, there’s no stopping it. I threw snow at it, but eventually gave up and threw it in the fireplace.

6. Elizabeth Evans and I would constantly re-enact the scene in E.T. where Eliot’s mom hits E.T. in the face with the refrigerator. Guess who played E.T.? I wonder if chronic mild head trauma has cumulative effects over time…

7. In the days before video rentals, and yes I’m old enough to remember them, my dad had a friend dub Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back onto VHS tape, which I watched with a regularity that approached monomania. By 1985, you could see through the tape.

8. My dad owned an old and busted Austin Healey. It lived in the garage and made scary noises and I used to have nightmares about it because the grill looked like the teeth of a monster. Cut me some slack, I was 5. In 1986 my stepmom’s cat had kittens in it, and the car was sold not long after.

9. In kindergarten, my sister and Amy Crosland locked me and Robert Whisenant out of my house. We panicked and then totally went on the offensive by trashing Amy’s mo-ped. I poked holes in the seat and Robert put rocks in the engine. We had to pay for that.

10. In the summer of 1990, I would walk to Quail Tree swimming pool listening to nothing but Steve Vai’s Passion and Warfare on cassette. That fall, I started guitar lessons.

11. The only time I ever went to drama competition, I got first place in solo acting, thanks to a great piece my dad gave me, written by Peter Cook. I’ll post a link to it on my page in a few minutes.

12. In 3rd grade Chad Causey and I used to have competitions to see who could put more pepper in their chili. Mountains we’d put in there. I don’t recall who won. But I know that I’m addicted to Vietnamese hot sauce today.

13. In addition to the many ashtrays stolen from Burger King, I participated in the heisting of a newspaper rack, along with Odie and I think Dave Deere? Maybe Lance. I forget. I know it was in Odie’s truck. Probably listening to BloodSugarSexMagik. Because music makes kids commit crime.

14. I was only paddled once. Summer Rec, by Coach Hudson. My crime: going into the stands of the junior high gym to retrieve a frisbee, after we were specifically forbidden from doing so. I was clearly a juvenile delinquent and had to be punished.

15. My grandfather was a minister who wrote and self-published a book on ghosts and their relationship to divine spirit. He did this on a Mac Plus in the mid-80’s, hampered by his slow-moving fingers, which gave him limited movement following a stroke in the late 60’s. I only ever knew him as a man with slurred speech, with a walker or a wheelchair, but his mind was as sharp as a tack.

The Death of Niche Cable

I think it started with MTV’s The Real World. That was when MTV realized that it could make more money with shows that have a clear demographic than it could with just random videos all day long. This inevitably led to our current state of affairs wherein actual music videos on MTV are as scarce as hookers in Times Square. MTV is even saying goodbye to TRL, the last outpost of daytime video programming on MTV.

I’ve noticed an alarming number of cable channels finding greater profits in programming that violates the channel’s name and mandate.

VH1 was quick to follow, eventually packing its schedule with reality shows and instant nostalgia programs. The name VH1, for those who don’t remember, once stood for “video hits.” Like its big sister MTV did with M2, so VH1 begat VH1 Classic, tasking it with doing the chores VH1 was too busy making money to bother with, namely, playing video hits.

Next up, Bravo. Once a channel dedicated to actorly pursuits like Inside the Actor’s Studio (itself now a show featuring stars rather than actors), Bravo now boasts a schedule packed to the gills with reality shows of questionable relevance to its original charter of focusing on film, drama, and the performing arts. It should be noted that Bravo’s Canadian twin, Bravo!, never made this transition.

More recently, AMC, a channel whose name once stood for “American Movie Classics,” launched in 2007 its first original drama series, Mad Men. At least they’ve violated their namesake with a really good show.

The lesson here is that there may not be any money in niche programming, and as soon as there is, the niche is the first thing that dies. I’m once again reminded of that Eric Hoffer quotation, “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Maybe that’s a natural consequence of the old business adage: “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Link Inventory

I’ve had a glut of fun links that I’ve sent around to various people recently. After a certain critical mass, I realized I should just drop them all onto the blog for everyone to enjoy. Also, if you’re on Gmail, I’ll be adding fun links as I find them to my status there via Snurl, a service for making really long links into tiny ones. My intake of new blogs and articles has multiplied exponentially since I added The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired and New York Magazine to my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and here are some of the results:

  1. ClapClap’s history of the long, slow rise of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which began its pop-culture life as Jeff Buckley’s cover of John Cale’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s tune, and now, given its apparent pervasiveness, seems poised to become the next “Amazing Grace.”[1]

    ClapClap’s Michael Barthel talks about how the song gets used on Scrubs and The OC as an easy and cheap emotional shorthand. This made me realize how easily a legitimately emotional piece of music can easily become banal through overuse, the entropy of art. Classic rock stations have the same effect. But Barthel disagrees:

    “This is the beauty of the pop song: it’s an artistic hooker with a heart of gold, always willing to be used. It can become a tool, but a song isn’t a Matisse—if it’s used as a washcloth, just wring it out and it’s good as new.”

  2. McSweeney’s deliciously satirical sendup of Ayn Rand, updated for the new financial crisis.

  3. And speaking of economics, I’ve read in several places now that economic downturn is bad news for libertarians. The Becker-Posner blog says it best:

    “The financial crisis has hit economic libertarians in the solar plexus, because the crisis is largely a consequence of innate weaknesses in free markets and of excessive deregulation of banking and finance, rather than of government interference in the market.”

  4. Completely unrelated to anything else thus far, here’s a story about a woman with completely perfect recall. She can remember every detail about every day of her life. Why the Greek tragedians never thought of this, I can’t say.
  5. And, for dessert, cupcakes from John Mayer.

I should mention that a few of these items came via Andrew sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic. I’m addicted. His range is wide, his diction and syntax elegant, and his politics reasonable. I found it very interesting when Michael Barthel of clapclap said, “when you mainly get the world through people who share your filter, it strengthens and hardens.” Incidentally, Andrew Sullivan is a conservative, gay, Christian British guy. So he’s nobody’s echo chamber. Everyone should check him out.

1.) We’ll have to wait about 50 more years to really find out, though.

Noel Murray Nails It

The AV Club’s yearlong feature Popless, in which Conway’s own Noel Murray takes a sabbatical from all new music listening to focus on weeding and reviewing his entire collection, is wrapped up, and I had to pass along this elegant crystallization of what it means to move into parenthood from mere adulthood:

And I’ve got no problem at all with music that’s soft, pretty—even wimpy. I’m a middle-aged family man. I have nothing invested anymore in being thought of as a badass.

This may be the very reason why my musical tastes are all over the map: I have nothing invested in being thought of as anything other than someone whose tastes are all over the map.

While I’d like to admit that I’ve never much cared for what people think about the music that I like, somewhere in college, as I was transitioning out of metal and guitar wizardry[1], I think I subconsciously was guided by the desire to be known as someone whose music collection had no borders, someone to whom nothing was musically off limits. Working at a college radio station, I saw a lot of people putting limits on what they could or should listen to or not. Indie/college rock demands that you not listen to a lot of things: 80’s rock isn’t cool, jazz fusion isn’t cool, mainstream pop isn’t cool, thrash metal isn’t cool[2]. I certainly wanted no part of that hierarchy of badassery. If loving Huey Lewis and the News and Megadeth is wrong, I didn’t want to be right. And I still don’t.

By the way, I cannot recommend more highly that you go back and read each and every weekly Popless entry to learn about a lot of music you’ve probably never had the time or inclination to listen to – here is the first installment of Popless. And here is the index of all the articles.

1.) Or more specifically, “being thought of as someone who was a guitar badass.”
2.) Except Slayer, because there’s a certain hipster credibility to Slayer, because Slayer is the scariest band most indie rockers have ever heard.

Thanksgiving

Thursday I attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Thankfully the weather was as nice as it can really get in November in New York. And I’m also thankful that Heather was able to make it to town on her way back to Arkansas from Boston. We got there around 8 and found a spot to stand, around 67th street. Shortly after our arrival, a gentleman by the name of Alan (and a friend of his whose name I didn’t get) came through and set up a table with bagels, tomato juice and vodka. He said he and his late wife have been doing this for 35 years. So we watched the parade, ate bagels and drank Bloody Marys. Here are the floaty highlights:

Ronald McDonald
Smurf
Spongebob
Snoopy
a big guitar
Sesame Street gang

Then Heather and I went to Whole Foods to grab lunch. We also had a nice turkey dinner in the jazz room at Blue Water Grill in Union Square.

President-Elect Denounces Yappy Dogs

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the sort of hard-nosed policy declaration I can fully stand behind, and I’m glad to see that it’s already on the president-elect’s agenda: Obama is staunchly anti-little yappy dog, and firmly pro-big rambunctious dog.

My apologies to my right honorable colleagues in the pro-yappy dog community, but I’m sorry to say that conscience demands I take a stand. We’ve had far too much of your tyranny these last 8 years. We’re going to get back on track. This crap has got to stop; we’ve got to get back to serious business.

Strange Linguistic Coincidences

These things catch in my brain and require comment:

Evan Longoria is the 2008 American League Rookie of the Year.
Eva Longoria is a star of ABC’s Desperate Housewives.

Keller Williams is both a real estate company based in Austin, Texas, and a singer-songwriter from Virginia.

Tucker Max is a fratboy humor author from Georgia and “Tucker Max” is also the shorthand for Tucker Maximum Security Correctional Facility in Arkansas.

None of these statistically unlikely matching sets are in any way related.