Chief Justice Roberts teaches a language lesson: "The noun 'crab' refers variously to a crustacean and a type of apple, while the related adjective 'crabbed' can refer to handwriting that is 'difficult to read'..."

"... 'corny' can mean 'using familiar and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,' which has little to do with 'corn,' ('the seeds of any of the cereal grasses used for food'); and while 'crank' is “a part of an axis bent at right angles,' 'cranky' can mean 'given to fretful fussiness."

And the point is, a corporation may be a "person" within the meaning of the Freedom of Information statute, but that doesn't mean it's gets in on the "personal" privacy referred to elsewhere in the statute.

[I]n ordinary usage, a noun and its adjective form may have meanings as disparate as any two unrelated words. ...

"Person" is a defined term in the statute; “personal” is not. When a statute does not define a term, we typically “give the phrase its ordinary meaning.”... “Personal” ordinarily refers to individuals. We do not usually speak of personal characteristics, personal effects, personal correspondence, personal influence, or personal tragedy as referring to corporations or other artificial entities. This is not to say that corporations do not have correspondence, influence, or tragedies of their own, only that we do not use the word “personal” to describe them.

Certainly, if the chief executive officer of a corporation approached the chief financial officer and said, "I have something personal to tell you," we would not assume the CEO was about to discuss company business. Responding to a request for information, an individual might say, "that’s personal." A company spokesman, when asked for information about the company, would not.

Crisply explained!

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:

While he's got the FCC's attention, mention that the "fucking" in "fucking brilliant" is not an adjective.

Ha! He's referring to this FCC opinion:

The complainants allege that the licensees named in their respective complaints aired the “Golden Globe Awards” program, during which the performer Bono uttered the phrase “this is really, really, fucking brilliant,” or “this is fucking great.”...

The word “fucking” may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word “fucking” as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation. Indeed, in similar circumstances, we have found that offensive language used as an insult rather than as a description of sexual or excretory activity or organs is not within the scope of the Commission’s prohibition of indecent program content.

"Fucking" can be an adjective, as in "You're a fucking crank," "Watch out for the fucking crab," or "I can't believe you're serving fucking corn again," but in the Bono boast, it's a fucking adverb.

Google is becoming human: It responded to a search by telling a joke!

I have to take a 3rd shot at Larry Tribe's op-ed: That big word "choice."

Here's my first shot and here's my second shot at Larry Tribe's op-ed purporting to say why the Supreme Court will come down in favor of the constitutionality of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. I didn't set out to write one post after another about the op-ed, but I must go on to talk about his use of the word "choice" — which is monumentally important in the discussion of abortion rights. Tribe's op-ed has nothing to say about abortion. I wonder if he would have written it differently if abortion had crossed his mind, but I can't believe that a constitutional law professor would overlook the abortion-related significance of the word "choice."

Tribe's op-ed, as I wrote in the first post, rests very heavily on misrepresenting the Supreme Court's commerce power doctrine as referring to "commercial choices." In fact, the cases refer to "commercial activities," and a switch from "activity" to "choice" is immensely important in the health care litigation, in which opponents stress that the failure to buy insurance is inactivity, not activity, and therefore beyond even the broadest interpretations the Supreme Court has ever given to the Commerce Clause.

Tribe attempted to skew opinion by substituting "choice" for "activity," and I have called him on that. But I need to go further, because someone who uses words to get things done needs to be kept honest not only about shifting from one word to another, but also about changing the meaning of the same from case to case. Let's look at how Tribe talked about "choice" and health insurance and then see how that squares with what "choice" is supposed to mean in the abortion context.

In today's op-ed, Tribe wrote:

Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system. They know that if they need emergency-room care that they can’t pay for, the public will pick up the tab. This conscious choice carries serious economic consequences for the national health care market, which makes it a proper subject for federal regulation.

You can see that Tribe has given a very broad definition to the notion of choice. People bumble along, doing what they want, aware of the chance of an undesirable outcome, vaguely expecting to take advantage of an out that isn't very nice. That's a choice. It is something real and specific that the individual has done. Society can, as a group, based on our idea of the good, say to that person: We are now going to require you to take responsibility at that early decision point of yours. So Tribe says.

Now, apply that to abortion. If we take a similarly broad view of choice, we could say — as anti-abortion advocates do — that women who know they may be fertile have a choice when they go ahead and have sexual intercourse with a man. They can refrain from having sex, but if they go forward, they know that if they need emergency-room care get that they can’t pay for get pregnant, the public will pick up the tab they can get an abortion.

Of course, the Supreme Court case law does not present the woman's right to choose in terms of taking responsibility at that early point. It says:

These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

The choice that matters is an elaborate process of high-level reflection that occurs after the woman becomes pregnant — that is, when it's too late to take the precautions that the majority might have liked her to take so that she would not show up with the demand for something it wants to prevent.

I realize there are many distinctions that can be made between health insurance and abortion, but there is so much sophistry around the word "choice" that I think it's important to concentrate on what choice means and how it matters in the law. It seems to me that society, acting through a legislature, may have a preference about when an individual should be required to make a choice, and that the individual, valuing autonomy, may want a broader range of choice than the majority would like to permit. When we think about government power and individual autonomy, how consistent must we be about what "choice" means?

"Any person who vitiates the atmosphere in any place so as to make it noxious..."

There's a dispute in Malawi over whether that language, in a criminal statute, outlaws farting.

Hey, that remind me of an old story about George Bush:

What the President thinks of the use of weird words. Having just expounded on the use of strange words, I especially enjoyed this extract--in Slate's always appreciated we-read-this-so-you-don't-have-to series--from Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack":

Page 186: Bush aide Nick Calio declares his intention to vitiate a congressional filibuster. Bush says, "Nicky, what the f**k are you talking about, vitiate?"

More on the inadvisability of using the word "vitiate" here. As for farting in public, I've only written about it before in connection with Saul Alinsky and Chris Matthews. And here's that wonderful George Carlin routine.

"Now that the law is 'dead,' will Wisconsin return the money or rebuff any other federal grant money?"

"Will other state governments declaring the law dead do the same? If so, how much money do they stand to lose? How will this impact their consistuents [sic]? It's a pretty worthwhile line of inquiry."

Well, yeah, it sure is. Congress larded the 2,000-page bill with so much spending that we're supposed to be so fat by now that we can't do anything more than roll over and submit to any unconstitutional excesses of power that came with the lard. How dare Wisconsin's Attorney General stand up and say no?!

***

I put "sic" up there because I assume "consistuents" is a typo, not a portmanteau, a deliberate incorporation of "sissy."

"Back in the 1960s, who'd have imagined that a septuagenarian white sheriff from Arizona with a hostility to free speech would one day become a hero to the left?"

Let's talk about Clarence Dupnik.

Dupnik made multiple statements drawing connections between conservative "rhetoric" and Saturday's crime.... At a time when most politicians were behaving responsibly, why was Sheriff Dupnik speaking with a reckless disregard for the truth...?...

The Arizona Republic reported Wednesday that Dupnik's department was "refusing to release a wide range of public documents about the man charged in Saturday's shooting rampage that left six dead and more than a dozen wounded." Later that day, the Republic reported, the department relented and released "12 sets of incident reports" about police calls to the Loughner home or Jared Loughner's high school....

It's quite possible that Dupnik simply enjoys shooting off his mouth. 

More likely he enjoys covering his ass. Shame on all the journalists who scurried forward with their big old newsrags to help him cover said ass.'

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene (who knows such things) says:

A juvenile point: the surname "Dupnik" derives from "Dupa," a word used in Slavic- and Baltic-speaking languages. The word "dupa" means "ass."

"Dupnik" can translate as "assman." There is a bawdy dance — usually done at vodka-infused weddings — called the "dupnik," during which the partiers "fist bump" their cheeks.

"Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing."

"Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private. The wicked direction the American debate often takes is not a sign of danger but of freedom. And I'll punch out the lights of anybody who tries to take it away from me."

Slate's Jack Shafer comes out in favor of free speech.

Can you imagine writing about politics without the violent metaphors (and dead metaphors... yikes!)? You'd have to give up words like campaign! From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

campaign

1640s, "operation of an army in the field," from Fr. campagne "campaign," lit. "open country," from O.Fr. champagne "open country" (suited to military maneuvers), from L.L. campania "level country" (cf. It. campagna, Sp. campaña, Port. campanha), from L. campus "a field" ... Old armies spent winters in quarters and took to the "open field" to seek battle in summer. Extension of meaning from military to political is Amer.Eng. 1809. ...

And you know damned well that the people who are calling for the abandonment of violent metaphor are setting themselves up for hypocrisy when they go back to it. It will be so tedious to point it out when the time comes.

"Argument is war" was used as the first example of a metaphor we live by in the book "Metaphors We Live By":

Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. ...

To give some idea of what it could mean for a concept to be metaphorical and for such a concept to structure an everyday activity, let us start with the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions:

ARGUMENT IS WAR

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target.

I demolished his argument.

I've never won an argument with him.

you disagree? Okay, shoot!

If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.

He shot down all of my arguments.

It is important to see that we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument — attack, defense, counter-attack, etc. — reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; its structures the actions we perform in arguing. Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing "arguing." In perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance. This is an example of what it means for a metaphorical concept, namely, ARGUMENT IS WAR, to structure (at least in part) what we do and how we understand what we are doing when we argue. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of things — verbal discourse and armed conflict — and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of WAR. The concept is metaphorically structured, the activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is metaphorically structured.

Moreover, this is the ordinary way of having an argument and talking about one. The normal way for us to talk about attacking a position is to use the words "attack a position." Our conventional ways of talking about arguments presuppose a metaphor we are hardly ever conscious of. The metaphors not merely in the words we use — it is in our very concept of an argument. The language of argument is not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way — and we act according to the way we conceive of things.

The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person's conceptual system. Therefore, whenever in this book we speak of metaphors, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR, it should be understood that metaphor means metaphorical concept.

Now, perhaps you think we shouldn't argue anymore and you'd like to deprive us of our war metaphors as a way to make us amiable, uncomplaining citizens in the future. You think that controlling speech would improve the world. But it wouldn't. In fact, it would be... doubleplusungood.

"The president didn't have enough backbone. He became too milquetoast... He actually surcame too easily to big business and big banks..."

Surcame?

IN THE COMMENTS: Someone calls this solecism "ebonics," and I say:

No, this is nothing like ebonics. It's the opposite of ebonics, if anything. Cornel West may be black, but his speech is not at all ebonics. It's pretentious straining at erudition, which is why it's so damned funny when he screws up.

I would not put up a post making fun of someone who lapses into an ebonics-type usage. I don't see the value in mocking that. I do see big value in puncturing a puffed-up academic — even though political correctness nags at me to refrain from making fun of the way a black person speaks.

I do have some sympathy for West here, though, because I think PC folk have failed — over a long period of time — to give him the feedback that would have kept him from developing this absurdly inflated style of speech, with its danger of missteps like this, and the self-serious demeanor that makes his mistakes especially funny.

"Are you over 50 and enjoying life? Then you may well be a mappie."

"The acronym stands for Mature, Affluent, Pioneering People and has been coined to describe a growing social group of active, fun-loving fifty- and sixty-somethings."

Oh, lord, must there be a cute name for everything? I say that on Day 9 of my countdown to age 60.

The truth is, it's surprisingly good to be old — if you don't mind that closer-to-death part. But no one knows how many days are left. Are you alive and paying attention and not suffering too much today? Then this is a good day you have as a human being. Are you richer today with more lived days behind you or with the odds of more days ahead? You can't be in the future days any more than you can be in the past days. The past days can be remembered. The future days are unknown, even in number.

"Wisconsin fans will be taking this very seriously while enjoying $8 brats, $7 fried cheese curls and $10 pitchers of beer at Mad River Bar & Grille, 1442 Third Ave."

The NY Post is telling New York City folk where to go out to watch the various bowl games, and this is the advice for Badger fans. That's all very nice. But it's not cheese curls! It's cheese curds! Unless they've got some sort of homemade Cheetos over there at the "grille," it's cheese curds.

And, by the way "grille" is the thing on the front of a car. "Grill" is the thing you cook on. But that's not the Post's fault. Maybe the curl/curd mix-up isn't the Post's fault either. I see the Mad River Bar & Grille's idea of a Wisconsin experience is Coors beer. Come on! Pick a Wisconsin beer!

"The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English."

Click. Hey, for me, click is one of the most beautiful words. But the words on this list tend to be multisyllabic with aesthetically pleasing sounds: evanescent, efflorescence, effervescent, emollient.

(Via ALOTT5MA.)

"Manchin stands by skirting votes."

Stands by skirting.

Are you distracted by language the way I am? Stands by skirting... It's like...  sits by pantsing... runs by shortsing....

And... while I'm at it... Manchin is a good name for a powerful masculine character. The feminine equivalent might be... Ladyfingers.

Secretary Ladyfingers sits by pantsing.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.

"As sunbeams stream through liberal space/And nothing jostle or displace..."

"So waved the pine tree through my thought/And fanned the dreams it never brought."

Who wrote that? I asked aloud. Meade guessed the name of one of our regular commenters.

I laughed. "Emerson! You know why I'm reading that? I'm reading this letter to the editor of the New York Times from 1853, and the reason I'm reading it is that I did an archive search — you can go back to 1851 in the archives — for 'facetious' and 'bowers,' because I was looking for that quote in the law case Bowers v. Hardwick that uses the word 'facetious,' which is something I wanted for that post about argument by laughter."

Thereupon, I read the verbose and goofily palpitating paean to nature that begins "I have a penchant for grass and trees. A facetious friend intimates, it is on account of some natural affinity — mentioning a certain color by way of illustration." And so forth. The word "bowers" is in there:

Oh! happy is the man that has many of these spots to dream over, when the real of existence becomes too real! I have a few, and they are bowered with holy feeling — as beautiful and beloved as nests of singing larks in bowers of roses.

Oh, well, okay... I think I know what you're saying in that crazy-ass pre-Civil War way. The temperature has shot up to 10° here in the northland. I don't know if the real of existence becomes too real here at my desk with my computer-screen view of the internet and my peripheral view of a wall of windows looking out onto the "liberal space" of Madison, Wisconsin. I don't think it will be such a dreamy escape from the real to go out there, but we will. It's time for that. When I'm trying to write about law and sodomy and laughing and I tumble back into 1853, the pine trees are waving to us.

"No Labels, a group that aspires to build a grass-roots movement for political independents and independent-minded voters in both parties..."

Every couple of months we get something like this, don't we? It's the "Coffee Party" all over again — isn't it? — an attempt by elite Democrats to create the impression of a grass-roots movement. It never works. [Remember "One Nation"?] And "No Labels" is such a silly... uh... label. It has a certain nostalgic 60s vibe: I ain’t lookin’ to... analyze you, categorize you, finalize you or advertise you.... But I came from the 60s, and I'm sick of that vibe when it's used to advertise to me. Wasn't there some ad campaign with a sincere-looking model staring straight into the camera and saying "no labels"? Or was it "no games"? Or no some other damned thing?

On Sunday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg flatly ruled out an independent run for president in 2012. On Monday, he appeared at the national unveiling in New York of No Labels...

It’s also possible, though, that he understands something about the modern political culture that many of those speculating about the purpose of No Labels do not — that an independent not only no longer needs to spend time encouraging the formation of a party organization to run for president, but he’s also probably better off without one.

Especially if he's a billionaire!

... No Labels was created by two Washington consultants, the Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and the Republican image-shaper Mark McKinnon, and its slick opening event featured throngs of journalists, free boxed lunches and a song written for the occasion by the pop sensation Akon. The group’s slogan, printed on T-shirts and banners, summarizes its purpose this way: “Not left. Not right. Forward.”

Hey, that's the Wisconsin motto — "Forward." And free lunch, eh? There is a such thing as a free lunch. That could be a motto. Anyway, I just don't get the enthusiasm around Mayor Bloomberg.

Some commentators have speculated that No Labels could even form the basis of a serious third party, with the mayor at the helm, something America hasn’t seen since Ross Perot’s Reform Party collapsed from a long internal power struggle in 2000.

Hmmm. Let me think. What is the similarity between Mayor Bloomberg and Ross Perot?

Here's what Rush Limbaugh said about No Labels yesterday:

Now, what is this?  Well, let's take a look at who these people are.  Mark McKinnon, Kiki McLean, Nancy Jacobson.  I'll tell you what this is about.  It is about money.  These are political consultants.  They need candidates.  They need candidates running for office for whom they can take whatever the consultant gets, 5%, 10%, what have you.  All three founders of No Labels are Democrats.  They would love for Bloomberg to run for president.  Why?  Because he is a billionaire.  Get him to run as an independent, maybe even third party.  You know, sucker him into an independent run where they get the money, win or lose.  Whether he wins or loses doesn't matter.  They get the money.  And he would lose.  But there are always, as a friend of mine says, there are always political operatives who will tell a billionaire what he wants to hear....

We know the founders are left-wing political consultants and we know that Democrat and liberal are labels that do not help political people these days.  Of course they would want to get rid of them.  By the same token, conservative is a good label.  Naturally they would want to get rid of that.  And naturally they would find some so-called pseudo smart Republicans who would agree with them on this.  How many of these people belong to a particular religion, and why?  Because of their belief system.  Nothing wrong with labels as long as they are appropriate; as long as they are true; as long as they are properly descriptive.  It's called language.

ADDED: Here's Byron York:

No Labels was formed by a group of Democratic and Republican political consultants. On the Democratic side, there is Nancy Jacobson, a former finance director of the Democratic National Committee and veteran of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. On the Republican side, there is Mark McKinnon, who worked for former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain before announcing, as the 2008 general election race got under way, that he would no longer work for McCain because, as he said at the time, "I just don't want to work against an Obama presidency."

Now, after two years of an Obama presidency and a Republican opposition, McKinnon believes something is terribly wrong. "Nancy called me about nine months ago and said she wanted to start an organization to address hyperpartisanship," McKinnon says. "She had me at hello."

The event featured appearances by a number of Democratic politicians: Villaraigosa, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, and retiring Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh. For some reason, most of the Republicans who showed up were recently defeated officeholders: South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. God knows why a group devoted to principle above politics would invite the opportunistic Crist to speak, but No Labels did.

AND: Does Bloomberg maintain that he's not running for President?

Homophone phone message.

I got a phone message from someone who identified himself as someone I had talked about on an episode of Bloggingheads. What I heard: "You disgust me." What I figured out, on relistening: "You discussed me."

Are you on Team Chaucer or Team Shakespeare?

"Who 'Invented' More New Words?"

"Invent" is in quotes because all we know is the first recorded use of each word, so the fact that Chaucer has more than Shakespeare isn't as interesting as who has the best words. I'm tempted to go on Team Shakespeare because I like immediacy, laughable, obscene, generous, radiance, tranquil, and useful. But I'm going with Team Chaucer, because, in addition to quantity, he's got accident, Martian, princess, superstitious, vacation, vulgar, snort, universe, theater, scissors, perpendicular, village, wildness, outrageous, femininity, dishonest, and galaxy. No, it's not really fair. Chaucer got there first, and snagged many useful words (though not useful, the word).

***

Bonus Althouse info: The first house I ever lived in was on Chaucer Drive.

"Putting the cheese in machismo."

Have you ever said something you thought was witty — I just said "putting the cheese in machismo" (a propos of this) — and your audience is about to give you credit, because they've never heard it before, but you have to Google to see if you really are the first, and of course, you're not the first?

(Once I post this, I'll be first on the list, in all likelihood, but at the time I'm writing this, there were 6 hits. So that makes my wisecrack pretty original. I predicted there'd be 20,000 hits, so the Googling was mildly rewarding.)

"I haven't been out to check on him for five hours but I went outside for a fag and he's gone."

A woman in the UK calls the police to report the theft of her snowman. And she's a smoker.

Should the Constitution be amended to empower the states, by a 2/3 vote, to repeal provisions of federal law?

Dana Milbank notes "the unfortunate echo of nullification," but nullification was the idea that individual states could disregard federal law they opposed. The Repeal Amendment would institute an orderly structural safeguard as part of the Constitution, a check on federal power that requires a supermajority vote of the states.

Instapundit thinks Milbank is being — pretending to be? — too obeisant to the original Constitution:

The amendment process, after all, is part of the Constitution. The Framers had no illusions that they were creating perfection, and believed in the sovereignty of the people and in the power of the people to revise the Constitution as needed, through the process they created. The idea that the text of the Constitution should be revised only through judicial reinterpretation is a modern conceit, and one that does no honor to the Framers at all.

Since the Repeal Amendment, proposed by Randy Barnett, can easily be portrayed as an effort to return to something closer to the balance of power provided for in the original Constitution, it is pretty silly to portray yourself as brimming with respect for the Founders when what you really support is the shift of power to the national government that occurred over the long stretch of time, a shift that the courts have allowed to take place.

You know what else is silly? This, from Milbank:

Lest you think this is a hair-brained scheme by one Republican lawmaker, consider that the Repeal Amendment... has won the endorsement of the man who will be the next House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Let me dig up William Safire:

Folk etymology is the term for the creation of new words by mistake or misunderstanding or mispronunciation....In today's language, "Hare-brained" is often giddily and irresponsibly misspelled "Hairbrained," perhaps on the notion that the hair is near the brain.

Folk etymology... hmmm. There's also folk constitutional interpretation, isn't there? Or is folk the wrong word when it's journalists purveying the bogus constitutional wisdom?