After John Kelly published his comprehensive post on merkin in 2015, I assumed there could be little left to say about those pubic hairpieces with the quaint name. (You should read the whole post, but here’s the etymological gist: from Matilda to the diminutive Maud to the secondary diminutive Mal to the third-degree diminutive Malkin to the variant merkin.) Yet recent developments suggest that we are far from finished with merkin, or it with us.
art
What a shitshow!
Here are some of the things I’ve seen characterized as a shitshow (or a shit show) during the last 115 days:
- A Q-and-A session involving the ride-hailing company Uber
- The British Labour Party
- The British rail system
- The Long Island Rail Road
- The New York restaurant Tavern on the Green
- The Fyre Festival
- College basketball
- Chicago Cubs baseball
- ESPN
- The Facebook page of Congressman Eric Paulsen, Republican of Minnesota
- Australian internet
- The U.S. healthcare system
- President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey
- Trump’s on-camera interview with NBC news anchor Lester Holt about the Comey firing
- American democracy
Go back just a little further and we have late-night host John Oliver’s “Clowntown Fuck-the-World Shitshow 2016” (March 2016); fellow late-night host Samantha Bee’s “most deranged electoral shit show in a generation” (February 2016) and “Shit Show the Musical” (à propos the presidential inauguration); and Michael Moore’s “My friends, this … is … a shit show” (also à propos the inauguration, at :55 in the video). In the March 2016 issue of the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg reported that President Obama privately called the situation in Libya a shit show. (In public, he called it a “mess.”)
And that’s very far from a comprehensive list. It’s enough to make one agree with this sentiment from @hugetiny in Austin, Texas:
@tgrochowicz To be fair we’re in bit of a shitshow renaissance, the rules are changing daily
— Patrick V Barrett (@hugetiny) May 12, 2017
Sweary links #3
The sweary links are arriving thick and fast these days. Here’s a fresh batch of foul-mouthed items of interest.
The Globe and Mail, having published the band name Fucked Up, robustly defends the decision.
It wasn’t all nasty, brutish and short. Countering the myth of Anglo-Saxon swearing.
Finding the poetry in Kim Sears’ profanity.
Strong Language 