Le Mot Juste

I was reading this article and a passage leapt out at me:

Whatever else you might say about the New York Times, it takes itself very, very seriously. So nowhere has the whiplash been felt more sharply. Maureen Dowd was excited about the America that emerged on Election Night 2008. “I grew up here,” she wrote, “and it was the first time I’ve ever seen the city wholly, happily integrated, with a mood redolent of New York in the weeks after 9/11.” Now she worries that “there’s an untamed beast rampaging through American politics. But this beast does not seem blessed; rather it has loosed a kind of ugliness and wildness in the land.”

I rarely read the Weekly Standard and I just as rarely read Maureen Dowd, for similar reasons. But this woman has won a Pulitzer Prize?

The word “redolent” is derived, ultimately, from the Latin word redolere which means “to emit a scent” and emitting a scent remains the literal meaning of the word today. Of what was New York redolent in the weeks after 9/11? Hint: it wasn’t team spirit.

52 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    I’ve noticed that my local newspaper has recently gone from two pages of opinions/editorials to one page, at least on weekdays. Dowd and Robinson strike me as writing in the style of diarists, the most expendable part of news print.

  • PD Shaw Link

    What ever happened to the “dialogue,” i.e. Mike Royko and Slats Grobnik? I looked up Royko on Wikipedia to make sure I spelled Slats’ name correct, and I found this statement” “Like many columnists, Royko created fictitious mouthpieces with whom he could “converse”; the most famous being Slats Grobnik, a comically stereotyped working class Polish-Chicagoan. ” I’m only familiar with Ryko’s use of the dialogue and some of the smaller newspapers that appeared to be imitating him. Does anybody do that anymore?

    The decaying ivory towers of newsprint have lost their sense of humor, lost a feeling of shared kinship with people of other backgrounds, and lost interest in the working man. Instead, we get Preacher Robinson, preaching hate against Republicans.

  • I blame the J-schools. Mike Royko was a reporter. He understood Slats Grobnik because he grew up with him, lived above the bar he drank in.

    Maureen Dowd is an English major and a Catholic girls’ school product who, IMO, aspires to be smart. Not smart as in intelligent; smart as in definition 6c—fashionable, appealing to sophisticates, i.e. people who’ve never done anything useful in their entire lives. The smart set.

    BTW, Royko lived eight doors down from where I do, where I’m sitting now.

  • Lewis Grizzard was his southern counterpart, and Molly Ivins, before she got too uppity. They dead.

  • P. J. O’Rourke used to have something on the ball, but he’s become crabby, too. Probably just age.

    Hope and shange isn’t such a bad motto. But sometimes there has to be change before there’s hope.

  • The decaying ivory towers of newsprint have lost their sense of humor, lost a feeling of shared kinship with people of other backgrounds, and lost interest in the working man.

    Newspapers went from being populated by reporters and other tradesmen to being populated by “journalists” and other “professionals”.

    Assortative mixing has been going on there like in so many other parts of American society – this gets us back to the notion of neighborhoods with people of mixed incomes and social status and how those neighborhoods have all but vanished.

  • P. J. O’Rourke used to have something on the ball, but he’s become crabby, too. Probably just age.

    Ass cancer would make anyone crabby. For that matter, so would crabs.

  • BTW, Royko lived eight doors down from where I do, where I’m sitting now.

    Normally I’m not all that impressed by proximity to greatness, but this time I am.

  • I didn’t know he had cancer. Ain’t cool atall.

  • This is why we try to keep the young’uns around.

  • You might note (you might not) that there’s a common theme emerging today: mutual respect. If we despise each other, I think we’re in real trouble. Maybe respect isn’t the right word, le mot juste. Caring? Identity? Sense of commonality?

  • I guess there is a theme emerging. I’m not entirely sure how valid it is, though, as we’ve often been at each others throats.

  • Forgiveness.

  • Grave over hemorrhoid. Or something.

  • GRACE over hemorrhoid, GRACE!

  • And now I’m back to French, where the post began: Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent. To understand all is to forgive all.

    Lives limited to interaction with people much like yourself, Ice’s “assortative mixing”, does not lend itself to understanding. We don’t just need more foreign travel and learning foreign languages. We need more travel within the United States, living in different neighborhoods.

    As I’ve mentioned before entrance to my high school was by competitive examination. One of the interesting things about it was that I had classmates of every color and every social background and even varied religion (for a Catholic school) including Jews, Baptists, and Buddhists, from trust fund babies to people living in their cars. We had just one thing in common: we were all smart.

  • To understand is to forgive.

    That only gets one so far.

  • True, my dear. Linebarger and Sunoco have something to account for.

  • Does anyone have another phone number?

    I have donned battle regalia. Again.

  • Camille Paglia did an interview with Glen Reynolds, and Ann Althouse has transcribed part of it. The part that struck me as relevant to this conversation was:

    So I feel the Democratic Party needs to be shattered and remade to recover its true progressive roots. I don’t see progressives. All I see is white upper-middle-class liberals who speak in this unctuous way about the needs of the poor.

    They have no connection whatever with the working class. Okay? It’s the professional class gone amok. And that’s why they don’t notice what a bureaucratic nightmare Obamacare is.

  • I always liked her.

  • But she and Althouse are both public school professors. Like Glenn Reynolds, they rail against the state WHILE IT’S PAYING THEM.

  • Yeah, I read that, too. Wishful thinking.

  • Like Glenn Reynolds, they rail against the state WHILE IT’S PAYING THEM.

    Well, yeah, railing against The Man is a lot cozier when you are The Man.

    I think that this is what Schumpeter meant when he wrote that intellectuals would be the death of capitalism.

  • I have that book here. I’m not reading literature these days. Barely anything else, for that matter.

  • I repeat, “What the hell’s wrong with these people?”

  • Does anybody get off the dime?

  • Full credit to my husband’s ex-wife. She knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t understand her children any better than I do.

  • You know, I’ve never been to Philadelphia.

    Might be interesting.

  • I thought the cheese steaks were overrated.

  • Rats. Can you fix that?

  • Thanks, Dave. You might keep me out of a mental hospital yet.

  • They better figure out what’s coming. Soon.

    My deadline is October 31. Otherwise, I’m coming to rattle they cage.

  • Drew Link

    “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

    Heh. Alternatively… “…….as I sit by the fire, of your warm desires, feeling’ low down, I’m blue for you”…………….in the silk sheet of time, I will find piece of mind, love is a bed full of blues……..”

  • Bull. I’m going in black. Black Ariats. Black Armani jacket. Cruel Girl jeans.

  • Maybe a little silver star on my lapel.

  • Do not mess with a woman who has nothing left to lose.

  • TastyBits Link

    This reminds me of Mark Twain as newspaper reporter & editor in Roughing It.

  • TastyBits Link

    @Janis Gore

    … Black Ariats. …

    What about the silver boot tips and heel guards.

  • Too gaudy. By the way, I just got a fax number. That’s off.

    I’d still like to go to Philadelphia.

  • High Noon, Sugar.

  • It’s pretty much a pain to go anywhere out of here unless you’re driving.

    To fly, I have to 1 1/2 hours to Baton Rouge, 2 1/2 hours to New Orleans, or two hours to Jackson.

  • But I will come, if it’s called for.

  • Carry on.

  • Do not make me angry.

  • Others have called me, in my day, “ideosyncratic”.

  • It’s the South y’all. We can be eccentric.

  • Roy Blount Jr. has something on the ball.

    Find his piece on clay-eating.

  • Ok, Steve V. got me. While some of his economic reforms seem extreme, Gary Johnson’s other positions are right in line with mine.

    If I couldn’t have a southern man, I’d take a western one any day. But not Mitt Romney.

  • Oops, sorry.

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