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.)

 

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Nothing in my own words for this post. All quotations from others.

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It was a custom introduced by this prince and his ministry (very different, as I have been assured, from the practice of former times,) that after the court had decreed any cruel execution, either to gratify the monarch’s resentment, or the malice of a favourite, the emperor always made a speech to his whole council, expressing his great lenity and tenderness, as qualities known and confessed by all the world.  This speech was immediately published throughout the kingdom; nor did any thing terrify the people so much as those encomiums on his majesty’s mercy; because it was observed, that the more these praises were enlarged and insisted on, the more inhuman was the punishment, and the sufferer more innocent.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

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The crowd just south of the White House roared last week as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke introduced “a man who loves our parks” and “who brought ‘Merry Christmas!’ back to our nation’s capital.”

Zinke beamed as he pointed to Trump, who was off stage. “And you did, sir! It is my high honor to introduce the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump and our beautiful first lady [Melania Trump].”

The honor was Zinke’s because he oversees the National Park Service (he opened his remarks by saying that “our public lands are our greatest treasures”), and the park service oversees the annual lighting of the National Christmas Tree.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/christmas-what/547298/

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On a visit to Utah on Monday, President Trump announced his proclamations dramatically shrinking the size of the state's two massive national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Taken together, Trump's orders mark the largest reversal of national monument protections in U.S. history.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/04/567803476/trump-dramatically-shrinks-2-utah-national-monuments

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Host Chris Cuomo immediately fired back that it seems like the president has “no standard of morality” and that this endorsement for Moore is all “political pragmatism.”

“The president has tremendous moral standards . . . , “ [Kellyanne] Conway retorted.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/kellyanne-conway-defends-trump-apos-151924081.html

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Lurking in the background of the roiling debate about harassment and assault in American society are the allegations made against President Trump by at least 19 women, many of whom came forward after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/what-about-the-19-women-who-accused-trump/547724/

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War is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

George Orwell, 1984 

Bang, Bang

Imagine you're the toughest, most macho National Rifle Association member. You think that guns should be allowed in schools, churches, bars, and sporting venues to scare away the bad guys. Now there you are, walking down the street, a sidearm holstered at each hip, an Uzi slung over your right shoulder and an AK-47 over your left. I come up behind you (or from the front or side), pull out my pistol and blow your head away.

Your armory was no defense; indeed, even if you could have somehow juggled them, adding a grenade launcher and a flamethrower would have aided you not a whit. Your safety did not rest on your arms—but on my lack of weaponry.

Of course, there is no such thing as absolute safety, for there is always a weapon around. If not the paring knife in the kitchen, there is always, as Clue players know, the candlestick in the dining room. Or that rock at the side of the road.

But relative safety (if not absolute safety) is the issue. I can only increase my relative safety (and you increase yours) by disarming other people as much as possible (even if we can't hide all the rocks from them). Which really means mutual disarmament. I'm safer if you destroy that Uzi and AK-47 and the rest of your stockpile, and you are safer if I destroy mine.

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“Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy,” Lemuel Gulliver asserts near the beginning of Part Four of Swift's satire. What Gulliver has seen is a creature called a “Yahoo.” After giving the creature a blow with the flat of his sword, Gulliver is confronted by “a herd of at least forty ..., howling and making odious faces.” For safety Gulliver runs

to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by waving my hanger [sword]. Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth, which fell about me on every side.

The land in which Gulliver is stranded is not populated only by these humanity-in-the-raw creatures, the Yahoos, but also by a race of rational horses, the Houyhnhnms. When Gulliver tells the horse that befriends him (his “master”) about destructive European warfare, his master thinks Gulliver has said "the thing which is not“ [the Houyhnhnms have no word for lying]. After all, says the horse,

nature has left you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. Then as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and tender, that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him.

That humans have managed to create a world such as Gulliver describes with

cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying

can only be due, says the master horse, to a corruption of reason that “might be worse than brutality itself.”

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If we could negotiate a disarmament that reduced mankind's means to fight others only to the weaponry that nature itself has given, such as the act of climbing a tree and shitting on one's enemies, we would be much better off. All we would have to do after a battle would be to jump into the nearest lake and wash ourselves off. We would be soaking wet—but alive.