Manufactroversy: A portmanteau of, “manufactured controversy,” typically referring to an effort to create the impression of uncertainty when the facts are unequivocal. Examples are things like the lethality/addictive characteristics of tobacco, the anti-global warming fraudsters, and the anti-vaccine crowd.
It’s a wonderful word, almost as sublime as the word, “Snollygoster.”
The New York Times has finally agreed to stop using euphemisms, and actually call the CIA’s torture program, well, torture :
Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.
When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods.
………
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program. The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked – that is, whether they generated useful information that the government could not otherwise have obtained from prisoners. In that context, the disputed legal meaning of the word “torture” is secondary to the common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk.
Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.
About f%$#ing time.
The Times has had absolutely no problem with calling other nations’ various brutalities, “torture,” but it’s taken 10 years, and a flat out admission from the President, for the New York Times to finally dip its toes in this water as it applies to the US state security apparatus.
It’s why I tend to look overseas, typically the Beeb and the Guardian, for accurate stories on these matters.
My son called me, “Pretentious,” today.
He was jerking my chain, as is his wont,* and he got the word completely wrong, and I got to say, well, you know.
I got to go all Inigo Montoya on him.
It’s almost as much fun as going Dr. McCoy, and it is a nice change-up.
*Both my kids are smart asses. They get it from my mom.
I was using Google to confirm the spelling of the word “Bated”, as in, “Bated breath,” the other day, and I came across its origins.
It turns out that it’s a diminutive form of the word “abated”, and the first recorded use was by William Shakespeare, specifically, Merchant of Venice, “Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this; ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurn’d me such a day; another time You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?”
I already knew that the first recorded use of puke, actually the word puking, came from The Scottish Play.
I just think that it’s kinda cool.
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By way of context, there are people who claim that there is no such thing as bisexuality.
My father has the uncanny ability to spot people with drinking problems, which is odd, as he has never been a heavy drinker.
Genetics has given me the same ability, though I think that my Kung Fu is weaker than his.
Then again, you do not need mutant powers to see that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appears to have a drinking problem.
Ma’am, it’s pronounced Tusk-Key-Gi:
OK, I was just watching The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart said sh%$.
This wouldn’t be unusual, except for the fact that they didn’t bleep him.
They didn’t bleep him a lot, and they didn’t bleep Pink in her song.
When did the word sh%$ stop being bleeped on Comedy Central?
I hav found a website that has translated “My Hovercraft is Full of Eels” into the following languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, (Modern Standard), Armenian, (Eastern), Armenian, (Western), Aromanian, Azeri, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chinese, (Cantonese), Chinese, (Mandarin), Chinese, (Taiwanese), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian (Northern), Frisian (Western), Galician, Georgian, German, Greek (Ancient), Greek (Modern), Greenlandic, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Inuktitut, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Manx, Māori, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Proto-Indo-European, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Sardinian, (Logudorese), Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Shona, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sumerian, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tsotsil, Turkish, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Venetian, Vietnamese, Võro, Welsh, Yiddish, Yorùbá, Zulu, Klingon, Avallaen, Esperanto, Interlingua, Ithkuil, Lojban, Toki Pona, Volapük.
There are languages on this list that I’ve never heard of.
For those of you who don’t understand, it’s a Monty Python thing:
Someone needs a spell checker:
Even worse, this is a slide from the presentation to campaign donation bundlers.
Who wants to get a Rmoney for Amercia T-Shirt? On the back, it will say something like, “Endorsed by Zombie Regan.”
Just not my deep thought:
Actually, the weirdest Santorum in Iowa.
Seriously, a restauranteur in Boone has christened their chicken salad a Santorum Salad.
I’m not sure whether or not this guy is aware of the neologism (first link) or not, but that chicken salad does look a lot like I imagine Santorum would look.
Yes, despite my complaints, I’m going to have to post about Iowa today, but this little taste of the surreal makes it feel a little bit better.
While I agree with the sentiment:
But it doesn’t have the ring of, for example, “Stop the looting, and start prosecuting.”
It is pronounced “Hoot” (same vowel sound as book) “Spah”.
It’s not pronounced chute-spa!
I don’t expect her to get the guttural “h”, she is, after all a gentile, a Minnesotan, and a Lutheran,* so she has at best limited experience in that consonant, but seriously, don’t speak Yiddish unless you understand Yiddish.
I’d call her a schmuck, but a schmuck has a head.
*Specifically, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is arguably the most antisemitic and anti-Catholic Lutheran sect in the united states.
The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.
This approach avoids the appearance of mincing words and is well grounded in Americans’ understanding of torture in the historical and moral sense.
The fact that our media still consider people who think that it’s OK to crush a child’s testicles to pressure their parent (John Yoo) to be acceptable as regular editorial contributors (to be fair, in the Philly Inky, not the Gray Lady) indicates that the idea of telling the truth has left the lexicon of so-called journalism.
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The reason for the aggressive overuse of acronyms in the military is because it makes the entire process of meaning oversight more difficult and intimidating.
Blah, blah, blah!
I saw this at the Wholefoods Market™, and I saw this.
It’s called the “Buddha’s Hand Citron”, but I immediately dubbed it the “Cthulhu Fruit.”
I did not catch the name, but when I got home, I searched for “Cthulhu” and “Citron” on Google™ images, and this Flicker Stream was, not kidding here, the first image up, which shows that something are universal, at least for aficionados of the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
There are a lot of people who call this “Cthulhu Fruit”.
You kow what the final serial comma is, don’t you?
It’s the last comma used on a list, so you see, “Item1, Item2, Item3, Item4, Item5, and Item6.”
Some people believe that this is an anachronism that can be discarded, and that, “Item1, Item2, Item3, Item4, Item5 and Item6,” is acceptable.
Well, Patrick Nielsen Hayden believes that this shortcut is in error, and I agree:
With the final serial comma, it is clear that Merle Haggard’s ex-wives, as well as Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall were interviewed.
Without the final serial comma it is clear that Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall are Merle Haggard’s two ex wives.
To quote Emo Phillips, “Ambiguity, the Devil’s Vollyball.”
He was an old school journalist, though I best remember him for his curmudgeonly defense of the English language from those who would debase the tongue.