In one of Lawrence Block's ten billion detective books, I think, he had his characters musing about words that are only used with other words. The specific example was "ulterior." 99% of the time when "ulterior" is used, it's followed by "motive."

It's sort of been demoted from a freestanding word to a part of a two-component word.

Feisty was noting that "wreaked" is almost always used with a follow-up word like "violence" or "mayhem." And the other day I was just talking about a word that's pretty much only used in combination with another, though I forget it now.

There are a lot of these not-really-words-anymore words.

Yeah, I got nothing.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 AM | Comments (108)
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A lot of inside jokes were previously explained here, before the thread turned to UFC/MMA, grammar lessons, and WickedPinto's bitch-breaking abilities.

It would be pretty cool to say to a woman, in one's best Ivan Drago voice, "I must break you."

If there are any obscure references outstanding, let me know.

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 AM | Comments (35)
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Admit 'em.

Here are some of mine. I'll Tumble 4 Ya. West End Girls. Most of Def Leppard's hits. Beyonce's Check On Me. Exxtreme's Rest in Peace (Make Love, Not War). Fake-Van-Halen's Why Can't This Be Love.

Even a couple of Rush songs, like that insipid Freewill.

Update: And/or obscure songs and one-hit wonders. People are going that route, and I don't want to be Thread Dictator.

So here's one of my favorite obscurities: Slyy Foxx's Let's Go All The Way.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (319)
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Well at least we agree on that much.

Quoting David Brooks' recent column:

But over the past few years [Lieberman] has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.

The most important words there are "ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds." This isn't just politics.

And Dems are afraid of these maniacs:

Over the past few years, polarizers have dominated Congress because people who actually represent most Americans have been too timid or intellectually vacuous to stand up. Even today many Democrats who privately despise the netroots lie low, hoping the anger won't be directed at them.

This prompts Jim Geraghty to wonder:

How could I entrust a Democratic lawmaker to stand up to al-Qaeda, Iran, North Korea or some other angry extremist, if he or she won't stand up to Daily Kos?

In fairness, the threat posed by terrorists is largely abstract, and statistically unlikely. However, I think we all live in fear that the Freshmaker is going to show up at our homes with his rag-tag parade of drooling imbeciles who then dance around like monkeys on oxycontin, as happened to poor Ned Lamont.

Now that's terrorism. And I'm tired of Bush's declarations that I must go about my life as I would normally, just pretending I'm not under imminent threat of being swept up in some sort of impromptu psyciatric-outpatient-therapy/roadshow revue of Godspell.

Riehl World View rounds up some of the latest media news about Kos and the nutroots, and wondering if the Kossacks' excesses will hurt bloggers generally.

Obviously, they will. Let me postulate a conspiracy theory: the sinistrosphere, angry that the dextrosphere seems to get results and behave somewhat reasonably, has decided to destroy the right's blog-advantage by demolishing the credibility of bloggers generally by behaving like bug-eating lunatics. And the media, also eager to take bloggers down, focuses like a laser on the sinistrosphere's crazies.

Discuss.

BTW, of course I don't believe that. They haven't the requisite emotional control to manage such an operation. But that is the effect.

I dig this piece by Jonathan Chait, last seen declaring how much he loathed George Bush.

Here, he argues that Bush is, yes sirree indeedee, more dangerous than Osama bin Ladin:

A good window into the competing mentalities can be found in two arguments, one by prominent Lieberman supporters, the other by a prominent critic. First, the supporters. Writing in the Hartford Courant, Marshall Wittmann and Steven J. Nider of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council complain that "far too many Democrats view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the nation than Osama bin Laden."

Those loony Democrats! But wait, is this really such a crazy view? Even though all but the loopiest Democrat would concede that Bin Laden is more evil than Bush, that doesn't mean he's a greater threat. Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains, has no weapons of mass destruction and apparently very limited numbers of followers capable of striking at the U.S.

Bush, on the other hand, has wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country. He has massively mismanaged a major war, with catastrophic consequences; he has strained the fabric of American democracy with his claims of nearly unchecked power and morally corrupt Gilded Age policies. It's quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more — if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.

And here's the sad part. Chait is part of the "respectable media," and his unhinged pronouncements are considered to be part of the reasonable voices of the liberal establishment.

Even given Chait's fairly nutty thesis, the nutroots attack him for going on to suggest that they are too obsessed with left-liberal ideological purity. Sure, what he wrote was crazy, but it wasn't crazy enough.

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 AM | Comments (36)
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A he said, she said account, giving equal credence to both sides, as if the truth of the matter is difficult to discern.

Frisch insanely contends one post about french kissing a child was "altered" by Jeff; even so, she doesn't deny the rest. So why doesn't Inside Higher Ed print the nasty posts and let readers decide, instead of suggesting that it's all an overreaction on Jeff's part?

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (33)
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The ethanol plant he worked in had a major spill, and all that sweet, sweet liquor filled up a pond. Who could blame him for wanting to swim in the alcohol and drink the filthy pondwater/alcohol waste?

It's like I just woke up to find it's 1944, and it's Nazi Germany, and further, Nazis just made it a "crime" to swim in a muddy ethanol spill.

It's hard to know THE TRUTH anymore. There are many layers.

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (10)
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And the sissy South Koreans are again whining about it.

North Korea's last line of defense is always South Korea.

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Comments (20)
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The idea seems funny. I don't know because, you know, fragged sound.

Someone tell me if Al Swearingen gets one of those whooping applauses that Fonzie used to do when he entered a scene.

Thanks to RLW.

Posted by: Ace at 09:00 AM | Comments (27)
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She's currently got more "buzz" than Brigitte Nielsen.

Update: I forget who sent this, but it's a good post that rambles from Kos and Armstrong to Frisch to gay marriage to Ned Lamont.

Posted by: Ace at 05:37 PM | Comments (105)
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You've probably heard of her and seen her before. She's been in the outer, cruddier suburbs of tabloid media hell for going on 20 years now.

She wasn't ever really attractive, but, well, she's had better days. I guess it was getting her head run over repeatedly by a clown-car that was really her downfall.

Thanks, I guess, to steve_in_hb.

Posted by: Ace at 05:03 PM | Comments (32)
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