Reminds me of one of the funniest name jokes I've ever heard. From Saturday Night Live, about a year or so ago:

"Jack Abrahmoff? But I hardly KNOW Abrahm!"

Heh. sorry, I seem to be stuck on an SNL loop here...

-CW

Wouldn't Mike Meyers do a great job imitating Blagojevich on SNL? They've both got the same sort of puffy-cheeked face...

Sorry, I just had to say that.

-CW

You know, when I wrote this I couldn't believe I hadn't written about it before, but I couldn't find it in my own archives. Maybe I just picked the wrong search term, I dunno.

English, to the best of my knowledge, is the only language to have a Thesaurus, because it's the only language that needs one. Most languages have one word for one concept. In France, "merde" is used whether on TV, in front of children, by politicians, or whenever. But English, like Russian or Japanese (and most decidedly not like French) welcomes in new words all the time, from all kinds of different languages.

But the first of these linguistic melds was from the Normans. Farm words are usually Anglo-Saxon (house, barn, etc.), whereas government/legal words and military terms are all straight from the French. And the upper class lived not in a house (haus) but in a mansion (maison). The upper class expectorated, the lower class spit. The upper class urinated, the lower class peed. The upper class procreated, the lower class bred. This is also one of the reasons English has such crazy spelling and pronounciation rules, because the language really has two major roots. Plough, through, though, cough, rough -- this is why it's such a hard language to learn if you don't learn it from birth.

I don't really study linguistics, but I pick up an amazing amount of trivia here and there. To me, the most interesting language to hear spoken is Dutch, because it was a bastard trading language sort of between English and German. When you hear it, you can almost understand what they're saying.

The way Yoda speaks is the funniest to me, because he's speaking English, but with German sentence structure, which always (for some unfathomable reason) sticks the verb at the end.

This, an interesting conversation is. Fascinating these linguistic roots are. To the end of my comment I have come.

Heh heh.

-CW

But, then...I remembered who he was speaking to and who were right there in front of him, hanging on every word like flies to...you know, flypaper.

And, on the subject of torture...has anyone read The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror...written by Michael Ignatieff, Canada's next Prime Minister!

I would add one talking point for any Democrat who gets the chance to counter my own Senator, Richard Shelby:

"Senator Shelby refers to the foreign auto plants in his own state. There are two things he apparently doesn't realize: one, those auto plants share half their suppliers with GM, Ford, and Chrysler, so if the Big Three go down it will certainly impact the auto industry in his state. Second, Shelby says that government shouldn't loan taxpayer money to prop up this vital industry, but those auto plants came to Alabama through industrial recruiting incentives -- on the order of $200,000 ***PER JOB***.

There are further details on my blog...

See, I just knew it was going to be tough. Sigh. OK, but I still say "Blago" is silly. Heard Jay Leno call him "Bla-sonovabitch" last night, that was pretty funny too.

I actually looked at the Fitz transcript, and it was hilarious how many times he said some version of "bleep isn't what he said." Redact away!

-CW

I prefer "Blowdryovich", but that's just me.

When Fitzgerald said "the bleep is a redaction" I just about fell out of my chair. I've been using "badword" as my version of "bleep", but "redaction" has a certain charm, you know? For instance:

"This thing is redacting golden! I'm not gonna redacting give it away for nothing!"

"Obama's a motherredactor. Redact him!!"

Yeah. That works.