Category: unintelligibility

Bound and Gaggled

The always invaluable Henry Seltzer brings us yet another example of Scott McClellan's heroic inability to provide explanations for things he claims are easy to explain:

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Well, we're making it easier for seniors to be able to understand what is available to them. And I think the point the President was making is that he understands that these are new options and choices that are available to America's seniors, and what we want to do is talk to them about what is available to help them make an informed decision. And I think seniors are trying to go about making an informed decision. And what they're going to realize is better benefits and significant savings.

Q. And what's the best plan for my mother in particular? Can you save me some time here? (Laughter.)

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not the expert on that. Go ahead. I didn't know that's where you were going.

Our only question is this: why hasn't the administration addressed health care for seniors by ordering the widespread distribution of that purple fingerpaint they used in the Afghan and Iraqi elections? We thought that shit could cure anything. — DCEIVER

READ MORE: pool report , scott mcclellan , unintelligibility , white house briefing

Decoding the Note: Has the Eagle Landed?

Oh, Note! Why do you tease and derange us so? We swore we would be lured no longer down your florid yet terminally occluded path of dim insinuation and addled wit. For that is where, we have learned by painful experience, the English language--to say nothing of the mental properties of sensemaking that have sustained its frail development over these many long centuries--goes not merely to die, but to be suckerpunched, pitifully buckled over and breathless, wailing the unanswerable plaint, "Why, Note, Why? What have I ever done to deserve this? Curse your portentous prolixities and your gnomic formulations of the teeth-grindingly obvious!"

Absurdly detailed Notely ruminations after the jump.

But so be it. Today the Notely gauntlet is thrown at the very opening: "The Owl Flies West (?) (A Mysterious Note Headline for Just One Reader)" We know not who this reader, let alone the occidental-tacking bird of prey, may be. But Note, really: What the fuck? The parenthetical question mark already has us woozy. Does the owl merely appear to fly west, while in fact doing something else entirely? Perhaps it is studying its diction--or better yet, punctuation usage! Or maybe there is no owl at all. We have to at least allow that possibility as one outcome of the nonsensical pileup of parentheses: We have clearly entered some dark counterfeit life where none of the usual rules apply. Is the Note playing Matrix to Keanu's Neo? Let us, ahem, Note that "One Reader" can be reconstituted as "Neo Red Ear." Yes, we know that yields only two Matrix terms out of three word formations, but that's a far higher percentage of sense-making value than you get by taking the thing at face value.

But we digress. (Or do we)(?) And we are, alas, entirely spent before the main Note event/news summary, which seems to concern some investigation of some sort of a leak involving the Bush administration. All we can think to do is to plead for the assistance of the owl-spotting (or owl-shunning?) Very Special Note Reader Referenced in Set of Parentheses Number Two. Are you out there, Bird Watcher? Let us know, please, since we now lack the epistemological confidence to believe that we are, in fact, in here. And failing your first-hand testimony, O Binoculared One, let other readers step forward with interpretations of what any of this could possibly mean,at tips@wonkette.com. We retire, meanwhile, to the solarium, for some laudanum and a cold compress. --HOLLY MARTINS

The Note: The Owl Flies West (?) [ABC News] (?)

READ MORE: professional aphasia , seriously, what the fuck? , the note , unintelligibility

Decoding the Note: OK, So We're a Little Obsessed

Really, we don't mean to harp on the stylistic flourishes of the Note. But the thing just randomly sprays so much pretension and so many empty faux-knowing asides into our poor overtaxed brainpan that we find ourselves idly trying to formulate Notely phrases to describe its torment: "risible rodomontade"? "power-vocab preening"? "obfuscatory obsequiousnes to power"? "fellatial mash notes to the headmaster"?

Just consider today's entry under--we kid you not--"news summary":

In a television interview on another network this morning LIVE from his Habitat event, the President committed no serious news, but he did laugh at a lot of the questions (for reasons any student of George W. Bush would well understand), and he did allow himself to be shown hammering purposefully, with a jejune combination of cowboy swagger and yuppie self-consciousness.

Forget the typically, and pointlessly, gnomic parenthetical aside about the privileged knowledge available to "any student of George W. Bush," which so far as we can tell roughly translates as "We still love you, Dan Bartlett." No, consider instead that Teutonic trainwreck of phraseology at the sentence's end: "a jejune combination of cowboy swagger and yuppie self-consciousness." "Jejune" is a fancy Frenchy word for childishness or immaturity; alternate meanings include "lacking in nutritive value" and "lacking interest and significance." (It also so happens that it's Dictionary.com's word of the day for Tusday, Nov. 2, 2004. We're just saying.)

So are the Halperinites saying that a combination of traits is itself childish, or nonnutritive, or dull? How would that work, exactly? Did the assembler of the combination grow frustrated, and break out into a wailing tantrum? Did a hunger strike ensue? Neither of the combination's constituent traits--swagger and self-consciousness--suggests arrested development. (They are, however, almost entirely contradictory, which leads us to suspect that Notesters do not grasp the meaning of either "jejune" or "combination.") So how could their fusion produce childishness? Is this the same principle by which multiplying two negatives produces a positive integer? Is this the kind of logic that will permit us to continue to plunder the federal budget while continuing to institute tax cuts?

We confess that the Note has again defeated us. We're repairing to bed for some lethean languor. --HOLLY MARTINS

UPDATE: Operatives report that in a Frum-like burst of Commissar-vanishes editing, "jejune" has been mysteriously replaced by "peppery" in today's Note News Summary. Not the condiment we'd choose--W.'s bipolar hammering has always struck us as more satay-like, somehow--but far be it for us to cavil when the Self-Aggrandizing Tip Sheet takes baby-steps (or if you must, steps of distinct jejune-osity) toward actual sense-making. . .
The Note: Very Dignified [ABC News]

READ MORE: professional aphasia , rudderless pretension , the note , unintelligibility

The Note: Getting Its Incoherent Groove Back

After yesterday's controversial brush with gnomic attempted humor, The Note regains its footing, just as though nothing had ever happened. Here's how it begins:

Congressman Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) is sort of like Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana), only with courage. (That's a joke intended largely for the two Congressman and their press secretaries.)

See, they are already explaining that they regard something as funny that isn't, and that the whole exercise really has nothing to do with you, the reader, anyway. That's what makes their pious lectures about how the Gang of 500 have everything wrong so hilarious; they're writing for a Gang of Two.

We're also happy to report that their woozy flirtation with direct declarative sentences is at an end. When they were channeling Jimmy Carter you could sort of figure out the points being made. Now, in dissecting a Jeff Flake op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the Halperinites have put all the marbles back in their mouths and resumed the quadruple-negative pirouetting, dadaesque metaphors and clusterfuck nonsensical hyphen compounds that really establish you with a single-digit readership:

Flake writes, with an antiseptic non-fervor that nonetheless reveals the dirty little non-secret that explains why the Republicans Party is not panicking in the face of hurricanes-gas prices-Iraq: ". . . [E]ndemic Democratic ineptitude makes Republicans more attractive when graded on a curve."

It ain't a new point, we concede, but it nicely delineates the environment into which the President is about to launch a new Supreme Court nominee through the eye of the Democrat-media-Collins-Dobson needle.

Simply put: Nothing the Democratic Party is doing is putting fear into the hearts of the Republican Party.

"Simply put." Heh. Now that's hilarious. -- HOLLY MARTINS

READ MORE: an entire city's tin ear for humor , the note , unintelligibility

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