Language Follies 30 (If Only)

The World Cup is over. Here is a last observation (or maybe not).

On the advertising hoardings around the fields there would pop up:

“The Final Half Time Show” — to which I reacted, “If only.”

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Perhaps the way to get started is with an eye-opener:

But it doesn’t help if the suds get into your eyes.

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Some other questionable products and/or their names:

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(OK, I give up. What the hell is that?)

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On the tortilla front:

The Dutch have more to answer for:

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Let’s stop being negative. Here’s the latest look in men’s pants:(1)

The Next Big Thing in Men’s Pants? It’s Stolen From the Ladies

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Or maybe let’s take a gander at women’s fashion:

Just perfect for a run down to Costco.

Why are we at this point in fashion that the most bizarro designs turn up every season at couture houses' shows? Perhaps this helps to explain it:

Decades ago, the world of fashion was smaller and feistier, dominated by eccentric, visionary designers trying to express themselves. . . .

In those pre-social-media days, designers’ fiery personalities would spill into their collections, for better or for worse. In 2000, John Galliano showed his infamous “homeless chic” couture collection. Alexander McQueen’s “Highland Rape” show of torn dresses shocked the industry in 1995. Rei Kawakubo’s spring 1997 line, known as “lumps and bumps,” remains one of the most significant collections of the century because it rejected traditional sex appeal, distorting and reimagining a woman’s form.(2)

There it is: “designers trying to express themselves.”

(I wrote about the foolish notion of having people “express themselves.”)(3)

Somehow the idea that the purpose of designing clothes was to make the wearer look good and feel comfortable has been usurped by the notion that the designer's wet dreams should be displayed for the world to see. (By the way, I'd be interested in philosophical designers' attempts to define “the self.”)  

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Odds and Ends

“Uh Huh” Headline of the Month:

Indicted Tycoon Says $10 Billion Offer Did Not Spur U.S. to Drop Charges

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Spaced-out discussion of the Month:

Two hours in [to their podcast], [JD] Vance and [Joe] Rogan began to talk about whether there’s “a meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and a space alien with super technology.”(4)  

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From Gulliver's Travels, Book Two (Brobdingnag, the land of the giants):

They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.

Of no relevance to the present day, of course.

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A couple of questions:

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What would you do with $37.5 billion? Spend it on healthcare? schools? infrastructure? scientific/medical research? 

Nah! Bombs to drop on Iran. 

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A native New Yorker reacts:

The New York Times published an article this week entitled, “How to Wait in Line (and Keep Your Cool).” I immediately scrolled down to the comments link and fired off the following: 

Hey! The NY Times is a New York paper. It's “wait on line.”

The Times did not print my response. 

They stink!

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But let's end on an upnote or two.

They now make chocolate fortune cookies.

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Here's a picture of a model t-shirt wearer at Amazon:

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(1)  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/style/pants-paper-bag-menswear.html

(2)  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/fashion-slop-boring.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20260721&instance_id=179078&nl=the-morning®i_id=92908560&segment_id=223438&user_id=4610757384ecaf1ad328813857abb8ad 

(3)  https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2012/04/whisper-of-muse.html

(4)  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/jd-vance-rogan-epstein/687944/

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OK, one more thing from the World Cup:

When Norway beat Brazil on July 5, the team celebrated its famous victory with a delivery order: 20 pizzas from Bagels by Jarrett in West Orange. 

(And they probably forgot the cream cheese.)

 

All Over Again

I have waited twelve days to see if there was anything new in the New Year. The answer is NO. 

I ended 2023 blogging with a post that kept referring to previous items. “Of course, we’ve been here before,” I wrote comparing the responses by defenders of French actor Gérard Depardieu to sexual assault accusations against him and those of defenders of director Roman Polanski to charges laid against him. 

I was hoping to leave the past behind on January first; but no such luck. Everything old is new again.

In today’s mail, for instance, I received the following envelope from Trout Unlimited. 

I have been selected to represent New Jersey in a survey about fishing, and to answer leading questions like 

A few months ago, I was selected to represent New Jersey in a survey about Yosemite National Park. Same old, same old. When are people going to stop volunteering me, asking me to waste my time (and, incidentally, to send a check with the completed questionnaire)? Well, I won’t subscribe to Trout Unlimited’s magazine, even if I have to forego an opportunity to learn about “reading water, casting, [and] identifying insects.”

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But it’s not just 2023 being repeated into 2024. It’s the 1950s. Instead of watching pro wrestling, I spend my time revisiting old New Yorker magazines. I am on my third go-round, having started in 1940, and am now in the middle of 1952. The magazine used to have fillers at the bottom of columns (they are few and far between these days). With some regularity the magazine listed one group of fillers under the heading “Funny Coincidence Dept.” Here’s an example:

Of course, “Funny Coincidence” is a satiric jab; the true expression is “Plagiarism.” 

The incidence of plagiarism—in books, articles, speeches, etc.—in those days was quite alarming.* I selected the above example because in this one a university president appropriated a whole article by another administrator. Although Harvard’s Claudine Gay did not use a scoop shovel like Cornell’s Deane W. Malott to accumulate her “appropriations,” her actions gave me another case of déjà vu, as I had written about plagiarism back in 2017: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-dog-ate-my-file-cabinet.html

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And then there are the foreigners. In 1949, some politicians were losing their hair over the idea that hordes of aliens were coming to the USA. At least they weren’t coming by spaceship. 

So the current histrionics of Trump, Trumpians, Trumpists, and the rest of that motley crew is same old, same old. Trump’s calling out immigrants and refugees as “vermin,” his nasty remark about fellow human beings, has an echo of a remark by François Mauriac, who was, according to the New Yorker in 1952, “one of the pillars of the Roman Catholic Church in France” and  a notorious misogynist. But at least at one point he backtracked on something he said:

Unfortunately déjà vu fails us here, our most notorious misanthrope has not seen fit to show charity to human frailty. 

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* Because of the change in the magazine and the few fillers, it is impossible to judge whether the tide of plagiarism has receded at all.