Old Wine in New Bottles
… and have some fun with mixed metaphors:
Old Pigs, New Lipstick
New labels and new faces will not mask the fact that rotgut will always rot your gut; and a pig is a pig no matter how much rouge you put on a rogue. Swill’s the word that binds our mixed metaphors together.
In an attempt to rebrand their flagging flag-bearers, the Republican National Committee has announced a new initiative to showcase diversity within their ranks. Not just old white guys anymore, meet the Rising Stars of the New GOP: Marilinda Garcia, T. W. Shannon, Scott Erickson, and Karin Agness.
Marilinda Who? Scott What? How will these rising stars outshine the stellar performances of Governor Gaffe, Senator McFluff, Congressman Corn Dog, former Speaker Nitwit, and tea nominee More Schlock? Let’s play Trivial Pursuit. Match these blunders to the blunderbusses who spoke them:
[Immigrant children have] “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
"You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."
“Texas is a unique place. When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that”
"Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen."
I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce in hubcaps. Because there's no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.”Will the Rising Stars walk a new walk and talk a new talk? Hardly! Not according to Karin Agness, who argues that the GOP would benefit by tackling the problem of liberal bias in universities. Oh nos! Not that old shibboleth again! See my point: “Old wine in new bottles” doesn’t mean the GOP has changed when the faces are new but the message remains the same.
Speaking of mixed metaphors, lipstick on a pig will not resurrect a dead horse.
I'm not going to ace your quiz although I know at least one answer.
ReplyDeleteSomething new and something old? David Crockett: His Life and Adventures by John S. C. Abbott
This enjoyable tome was entered into the Library of Congress in 1874. According to the author, one of the primary motivating forces which led to the Spanish-American War, in which we stole from Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico and made U.S. Territories of Cuba and the Philippines was a concern about the northern states winning the debate about slavery. According to my sources, many of the gentry in California were very sympathetic to the Southern cause and went so far as to keep a record of which persons were sympathetic to the Union for later retribution.
That debate about slavery seems the most central theme in our history and the idea that it was settled once and for all at Appomattox might actually be called a liberal bias, or at least a cover up. True, they have to redefine and overhaul slavery, but the feudal economy they espouse needs a serf class.
ReplyDeleteThe Liberal bias at universities - right. The appeal to ignorance is essentially American too, that contempt for "book learnin'" that preference for the superstition and self delusion of the common man used to support the life-style of the uncommon man. It's voice is mockery. It's language is fallacy.
ReplyDeleteHeard a clip of ol' Boner last night where he goes on about how Carbon Dioxide is perfectly natural and doesn't cause cancer as his way of rebuffing concerns about climate change. The leopard can't change it's underwear, if you like that metaphor, and if you want the real dope on loop quantum gravity without all that academic bias, maybe we should ask Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limpdick.
I just had to append this -- appropos of bias, mangled metaphor metaphor and journalism.
ReplyDeleteDoes it really matter how they mangle the language and lay waste to logic if what even liberal journalists (you know, the ones we tend to believe are smarter and more honest) seem to an old white man like me write ( with my apologies to Keats) on water. Words have no meaning you can hold on to. Yesterday's yes means tomorrow's no.
Reading just now, an interview of Jill Abramson at the Washington Post by Michael Kinsley, I'm horrified to see:
" It’s been on my mind to very fulsomely express myself when I am pleased with something" as though 'fulsome' meant full.
She means that her writing has improved. What she says is that intends to force her opinions down our throats to the point of nausea. That's quite inadvertently true of course.
Political discourse, along with too much of what we say and write might as well be written on water for all the confused inconsistency of our terminology. One man's 'conservative' is another man's radical and still another man's obstinate. The language has no center to hold on to and we ask what rude beast shuffles toward Washington to belch and fart and call it journalism.
Captain,
DeleteI don’t think there is a fulsome contribution I can make on the subject of language; philosophers and scholars far more learned than this cephalopod have written about it for centuries.
Language, as I understand, has never given us a firm foundation – a so-called Archimedes point – upon which to build a solid and dependable body of knowledge. There is always an Evil Genius lurking in the shadows - fooling our senses. There have always been movements in literature from classicism to romanticism to naturalism to realism and every kind of –ism ad nausea. And just when we thought we knew everything there is to know about language, thereupon cometh the deconstructionists who tell us that language has life and meaning independent of a writer’s intent, a veritable treasure-trove of subconscious images and messages that can also be historical, lexical, and hysterical. Good grief.
Northrop Frye, the eminent literary critic, gave us this construct: Mythic mode, Romantic mode, High Mimetic, Low Mimetic, and Ironic Mode to summarize the various transformations of literature through history.
In my earliest childhood memories, I equated language with desire in the way children engage in magical thinking. If only I spoke the right words in the right combination, I thought, I could convince my elders of anything and get what I want.
Inasmuch as politics is motivated more by desire than truth, a healthy skepticism is always warranted. Yet, there is science, empirical evidence, historical facts and events, and an inventory of words with generally accepted meanings that form the Archimedes point of human interaction. Even within this unstable and unsteady framework, you can always smell bullshit when persons with dishonest and noxious intent bend over.
ReplyDeleteYe Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
There's a figure of speech called a "mondagreen," the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new and usually funny meaning. Originally the last line was "and laid him on the green."
The best phrased lines of mice and men. . .
I remember a letter in the local paper wherein the writer claimed that Congress not being allowed to make laws concerning the establishment of religion only referred to zoning and building codes, because to him "establishment" was only another noun meaning a building. And of course the congresswoman who thought animal husbandry involved marrying animals.
So is this inevitable change in some strange Panglossian universe where entropy decreases?
Entropy increases, it's the law, but that doesn't mean I don't have to maintain my house or take care of my health or that the dictionary printed two hours ago is a worthless and ludicrous abomination. Words have history. That history colors even their new meanings - at least to the literate. In what other field do we apologize ineptness and indeed, institutionalize it?
Do we praise the man for whom everything bad "sucks?" Maybe not, but is the man who overuses it a better writer than the man who knows no other pejorative and is he in turn better than the man who has no idea the word ever had something to do with creating a vacuum? "This vacuum cleaner sucks" should be funny. "The collision had an impact" should be funny. To a new generation it is not. Is this a loss or a gain? I should be able to rest my case there - but you know me. . .
Jill Abramson was not introducing some new nuance, some cute nod to the slang or some dialect condescendingly to be emulated. This isn't new and creative usage, a graceful turn of phrase, an original thing. She simply hasn't read enough to recognize an uncommon word - and it's uncommon only to the illiterate Illiterate -- like the majority of journalists who learn their English from watching TV and listening to other half-educated poseurs. The fulsome part of the argument from entropy is that what we apologize for isn't really the change, but the acquired amnesia syndrome (pronounced ass) that accompanies it and makes us sound foolish.
That's the sad part. The need to grow up doesn't mean you have to forget your mother's name. I find the way academia praises this kind of thing quite annoying and yes -- so very fulsome.
I'm talking about journalism not literature and indeed journalistic integrity requires that that profession, like the law profession, have the ability to avoid ambiguity as much as political language depends on the ability to create it.
I just expect a better vocabulary from the editor of a major newspaper and at least as much as we get at the Weekly Reader and that's what it's about. Mistaking fulsome for full isn't the result of anything but ignorance. It's a mondagreen. Knowledge that it really means something more than full probably means the user would simply say full. It means the user is pretentious and looking to sound educated, which is a common source of mirth. It's not metaphor, it's not wit, it's not creative, it's not evolutionary or adaptive. It's not more descriptive. It's not a better, more accurate form of full. It's fulsome.
Of those men who "gang aft agley," I thought Johnny Cash had a corner on that market.
DeleteWhat corner was his market on?
DeleteFulsome State Prison, where an errant phrase is turned into a life sentence.
DeletePermit me to groan
DeleteI'm just trying to help Jill Abramson burn her credentials.
DeleteOr should I say, the best laid plans of Meissen men? Or the best laid plans of my sin, men.
ReplyDeleteHey, sounds the same - is the same. Nez Pah?
Or maybe it's the best laid plans of ma semaine?
ReplyDeleteI wish there was a "like" button I could click. I very much enjoyed this post and the comments. Who can keep up with you guys?
ReplyDeleteBut there's like - a button.
ReplyDeleteDunno about no button. I'm a lookin' for a lever that activates a trap door in the floor through which Tea Party chum drop into a tank holding ravenous sharks.
Deletetrap door in the floor
ReplyDeleteleads down to where the sharks feed
sayonara, chum.