Media misuse of words

Ballistic.  Ballistics is the study of the inertial motion of objects under the influence of gravity, windage, momentum and so forth, with no midflight attempt to change speed or direction.  To "go ballistic" means to stop trying to control the vehicle, to let inertia do its work.  In the scene in the movie Top Gun where the pilots were talking about this, they meant they were going so fast they kept going for quite a while, despite throttling down.  Going really fast under high power and in control is NOT ballistic.  If an athlete or car loses control after going really fast and crashes through a barrier, that is ballistic.

Cache and cachet.  A cache (pronounced "cash") is a small store of something, stored away for later, or the act of storing something in such a place.  Cachet (pronounced "ca-shay") is the prestige or fashionableness of something.  A few days ago, a soldier was pointing to the pile of crates he and his men had dug up in Afghanistan, describing them as a "cachet" of weapons.

Could care less.  A lot of people say this when what they actually mean is "couldn't care less".  If you could care less, it's because there's still room for you to care less, that is to say, you do still care, at least a little bit.  If you couldn't care less, it's as if to say your care-meter on this subject has bottomed out.

Decimation -- people seem to think this is much worse than "Devastation" but not necessarily.  Decimation was a punishment the Romans meted out, most often to legions that had displayed cowardice in action.  They'd execute one in ten, chosen at random, to scare the others into acting better next time.  So if the bad thing completely destroyed about 10%, leaving the rest relatively untouched, that's decimation.  If the bad thing destroyed 50%, that's much worse than decimation.

Gridlock refers to a specific type of traffic jam, one which is the result of multiple backups in an urban grid intermeshing in such a way as to prevent any of them from moving.  The term is a merging of "Grid" and "Deadlock".  I often hear the giant traffic jam that occurs when the mountain pass is blocked, or a due to a blocking accident as gridlock.   There's no grid in the mountain pass.  Snowlock maybe. The grid, if there is one, is irrelevant to the blocked road.

A Hacker is a computer programmer who works quickly, often by modifying existing code (the etymology is from "Hack and Slash", and to those who do it, the simile is apt).  The implication is that this is also sloppily done, although a number of the very best are neat workers too.  The media has decided that people who break into and vandalize computers or steal data or software should be called hackers.  Some of them are hackers, but most are not and most hackers don't break into computers.  Many worms and viruses are probably written by hackers, but most hackers do not do these things.  A better term for those who break and enter computers is “computer cracker”—in the sense of “safe cracker”--or "vandal".

 

An Implosion is a specific type of kaboom.  A kaboom where the detritus goes outwards is an explosion.  A kaboom where the detritus goes inward is an implosion.  A recent trend in building demolition has been to use a large number of small explosive charges to simultaneously (or sometimes sequentially over a short period) undermine the structure of a building so as to make it collapse inwards on itself...an implosion.  The triggering charge for an atomic bomb is an implosion.  Once critical mass is achieved, the fissionable material of the bomb then undergoes an explosion.   Many in the media have taken to calling any kaboom an implosion, apparently because they think it sounds more cool.

Unthinkable means you literally couldn't think of it before it happened, either because nobody had the idea, (as in "previously unimagined".  Sept 11 may qualify for this) or because thinking about the topic causes the mind to rebel and you can't get your mind go there.  Disgusting and offensive as it is, child molestation is clearly not unthinkable, because lots of bad people have not only thought about it, but done it.  The second time some particular reporter says that a child molester has done the unthinkable, they're not telling you that the crime is unthinkable, but that the reporter can't think.  Personal favorite, from an actual reporter and former pro football player here in Seattle: "Once again, the unthinkable has occurred."

Words have meaning.

(Bertrand Russell tells a story where one of his house staff was accused of stealing something.  She defended herself by saying: "I ain't never stole nothing".  Russell, ever the logician, works through the logic of this statement, which literally translated,  means that there does not exist a time in all of history at which she has not stolen something.  or put more simply, she has *always* (including before she was born) been stealing something.)

All the -stans

"-stan" is the Farsi or Urdu suffix that means roughly "place of", or "place where one stands".  There are presently 8 countries that end with this suffix, all in central Asia.  All but two were part of the Soviet Union until its breakup.  Pakistan (and its relative, Bangladesh, which was once called "East Pakistan") were the Muslim areas of Britain's India colonies at the time of partition in 1947.  Afghanistan managed some level of independence through the "Great Game".  Dagestan is still a Russian subject.

Afghanistan  is a country in south central Asia, between Iran and Pakistan
Dagestan is a subject country of Russia in south western Asia, east of Chechnya and Georgia, and north of Azerbaijan, along the western shore of the Caspian Sea
Kazakhstan is a country in central Asia, north of India the Caspian Sea, and south of Russia
Kyrgyzstan  is a country in south central Asia, along part of the border between Kazakhstan and India
Pakistan is  is a country in south central Asia, between Pakistan and India
Tajikistan  is a country in south central Asia, between Kyrgystan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan
Turkmenistan is a country in south central Asia, between Uzbekistan and Iran, on the southeastern Caspian Sea
Uzbekistan is a country in south central Asia, between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan

In addition there were many regions that are now part of a larger country that were "stan". Nuristan is a province in eastern Afghanistan.  It was once called "Kafiristan" and Kipling wrote about it in "The Man Who Would Be King".  Balochistan is a region which lies in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.   It's very arid, and is the home of a great deal of insurgency.

The Registan is the public square at the center of Samarkand, Uzbekistan

The Rigestan Desert is in southeastern Afghanistan

Rigestan is also a town in southwestern Iran

Kakistocracy

I just learned a new word.  My source is this WSJ article, but it's in wikipedia, too.  Kakistocracy is from greek: Kakistos is the superlative of Kakos (κακός), meaning bad or evil, so Kakistocracy is government by the worst.  The wikipedia article interprets that to be rule by the stupidest.  But I don't think that's right.   It's government by the worst--the most corrupt, the most willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill for their own (or whoever is paying or controlling them) self interest.

In other words, pretty much what we get when we let the big banks, big oil, big military companies, the NRA, etc., have too much power in government.  Kakistocracy, Oligarchy, and Plutocracy are not mutually exclusive...in fact, they usually go together.   If you understand Gresham's Law, it's pretty much inevitable that it happens when you fail to regulate the powerful sufficiently:   The getting of power is always a competition.  If cheating is tolerated, those who cheat will quickly gain enough advantage that those who don't cheat will either be driven out of the competition or forced to begin cheating.  So it's inevitable that those that cheat the worst have the most power.

One of our parties has been fundamentally Kakistocrat for a long time, has stacked the supreme court with pro-corruption justices, has blocked enforcement of monopoly, financial, environmental, etc., regulation, has taken us into self destructive (but good for the plutocrats) wars.   It became almost literally kakistocrat when it began following the tea party script to try to get their way by mucking up the works of government...and not really succeeding at anything but mucking up the works.  The other party has been a feckless patsy...target for the Kakistorats lies, and occasionally duplicating their destructive policies.


A few pertinent references
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/tattoos-incompetence-and-the-heritage-foundation
http://www.timesherald.com/article/JR/20150729/NEWS/150729821
https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486272745

Facts, Opinions, and Theories.

A fact is something which is objectively true.  Two plus two is four.  The earth is roughly spherical.  President Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, roughly two years after it became a state, to a mother born in Kansas.  There are also false facts: things which are objectively false.  Two plus two is seven.  The earth was created roughly 6000 years ago.  Liberalism is the same thing as communism and is also the same thing as fascism.   The founders were a pack of gun toting anti-government, anti-tax, bible thumping activists.

An opinion is an attitude or belief about something which may be difficult to validate, or about which your opinion is really of no consequence to anybody but yourself.  I think there is probably life elsewhere in the universe.  Blue is a better color than Red.  Fangio was a better driver than Schumacher.  You can have opinions about facts.  It's sad that our bodies wear out as we get older.  It's annoying to pay taxes.   An opinion is sort of a middle ground, between true and false facts.  Opinions are sometimes validated or invalidated as we learn more about things. 

Since there are a lot of things that are difficult to validate, a lot of people have opinions which may actually be facts or false facts.  For example, you may think that Obama is a Kenyan terrorist.  You are entitled to think anything you like of course, but if that's your belief, you are simply wrong, and acting on that belief in some way may be harmful.  If you think that government tightening its belt during an economic downturn is an unquestioned necessity, you are simply wrong.  It may be a little too complex for a lot of people to understand.  So was the roundness of the earth before circumnavigations or satellite photos.   But lots of people did understand that and knew the truth in the face of popular belief to the contrary.

A theory is an idea about the way some particular thing works in the universe.  Theories can be true, false or opinion.  The theory of the flat earth proved to be false.  The theory of evolution proved to be true.  The theory of universal gravitation is basically true, but it turns out to be more complicated than that.  The theory that there is life elsewhere in the solar system remains possible but is as yet unproven one way or the other, so having an opinion either way is reasonable.  The word "theory" is sometimes used to cast aspersions on a fact that the speaker is unhappy about.   Not liking a theory has no bearing on whether it's true or false, nor does misunderstanding what the word means. It may have an impact on the politics around a theory, which may affect funding for research or even lead to ostracism.  Thinking that something true is false or vice versa, is likely to lead you to make strategic errors.

Team Names

When I was growing up, the nearest division I college sports teams were the Stanford Indians.  This was a commonplace sort of team name and seemed an entirely positive reference: the athletes were purporting to have the properties of native Americans: Strength, endurance, team spirit, aggressiveness, loyalty, etc.  The college across the bay (which I later attended) were the Bears.  More independent perhaps, but strong, aggressive, etc.  The high school I went to were the "Pioneers": independent, far sighted.  Beavers, Ducks, Huskies, Vikings, Mustangs, Matadors, Chargers, Cowboys.  These were all meant to be positive references. Not really taken seriously as actually representational, just symbols to have on a flag. 

In 1972, Stanford decided to drop the indian mascot.  They struggled for a little while trying to find a replacement, temporarily using the team's primary color, Cardinal Red, and calling themselves the Stanford Cardinal.  40 years later, they've given up finding a new mascot and have stuck with the color.  This made no sense to me at the time: the Indian mascot was an entirely positive and honorable allusion. Why should real indians complain?

One trouble is, the stereotypes about a few of these have them to be marauding bandits. There's some truth to it, but like many marauding bandits, they were driven to desperate measures by economic changes not of their own making*.   Worse, there's an implied comparison to animals.  But really, that's silly--actual cowboys, vikings, matadors, etc., are not complaining--nor should they.  No insult is implied or intended.

The difference is that native Americans are still subject to real racial prejudice.  The people who are being touchy about mascots named for them are trying to get attention for a real cause.  It's not really the team name at all.  They are trying to get better treatment for indians--on reservations, in impoverished sections of cities, and so forth.  A lot of indians are trapped in a cycle of poverty that is very difficult to break out of.  Horrible things have been done to them.  Being touchy about team names is nothing more than a way of getting attention.  A PR campaign. 

There are, of course, lots of people who have confused the PR campaign for a real issue.  That's what Stanford did when they changed their team name.  This happens all the time.  If all the teams changed their names, they would have "won", but it would deprive the native Americans of a real PR asset.

-----------------
* The Norse had a huge population boom that left a lot of people without land, so some of them went viking (it's a verb) to occupy someone elses land.  At first scary, they assimilated very well.  Angles, Saxons, Normans, Russians all have viking heritage.  Indians were on the receiving end of this.  The vikings made a colony there too, but were not as successful as they'd been in europe.  500 years later, a new set of immigrants came, but brought devastating disease with them, which made colonization much easier.

Date Formats

There are quite a few formats in common use for presenting the date.  The most common in the US is

MM-DD-YY, which represents today's date as
September 23, 2014, and can be abbreviated as Sep 23, 14 or even 9/23/14

In Europe, the most common is
DD-MM-YY, which represents today's date as
23 September 2014 and be similarly abbreviated
Some people also use the "big endian" version of this
YY-MM-DD, which comes out
2014 September 23, which has a certain appeal. (This is ISO 8601)

as long as everybody is using the same format, it doesn't really matter that much which we use.  But too often, you can't tell.  After a lot of thinking about it, I've concluded that little endian euro style is the way to go.  the biggest advantage is that it requires no punctuation or even spaces to remain readable:

23Sep14 is almost as decipherable as 23 September 2014 and requires only 7 bytes to represent all possible 21st century dates.  (it takes 3 letters to disambiguate March from May and June from July.)   by adding two more to indicate the century, 23Sep2014 is completely unambiguous, self documenting, (no Y2K problem!) and can represent any date from the reign of Augustus to 31Dec9999 in 9 human readable bytes.   If for some reason I choose to write it 2014Sep23, you can still read it correctly.

If I write it Sep2314, you can still probably figure it out, but it could also be 14 Sep 2023.  If I go really crazy and write "91101", you aren't really sure it's a date at all--it could be a zip code (it happens to be Pasadena, CA).  Or it could be 1 Jan 1991, 9 Nov 2001, or 11 Sep 2001.

So, unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, I use Euro little endian when I write the date: 23 Sep 2014.

The King's English

In 1614, Queen Anne died without heir.  The powers that were in Britain, namely Parliament, had decided that after three terrible kings who were Catholic, that they didn't want a Catholic King again.  So they banned Catholics from the throne.  The nearest non-Catholic heir was George, Elector of Hanover, Anne's 4th cousin.  George wasn't really interested in being King of England and he spent very little time there, and probably never learned to speak much English.  But his court, and many of his new English subjects, tried to please him.  Among the many small gestures was mimicking his thick German accent.  This became known as speaking "The King's English" and portions of it remain in the English accent to this day. ("Elector" is a title similar to Duke, but in the Holy Roman Empire, was part of the process of "electing" the new Emperor)

For example, the German "R" sound is rolled, where prior to George, the English "R" had been hard, what is called "rhotic", like today's mainstream American accent.  George was apparently able to stop rolling his Rs but never quite make a true hard one, so Rs were dropped.   There is no "S" sound in German, but there is a double S, so many speakers of the Kings English have over-sibilant Ss.   The sound that Germans spell "Sch" is spelled in English "Sh".  So George confused the two, and words which had been pronounced "Sk" but spelled "Sch", such as "Schedule", came to be pronounced "Shedyule".  There's no "Th" sound in German but they spell what an English speaker would spell with a "T" with a Th.  Thus the river that runs through London became the "Tems", while retaining it's spelling "Thames".  (Interestingly, this seems to be a case of the sound being switched twice:  Rivers in the new world that were named for it, such as the one in Connecticut, are pronounced with a Th sound, but it appears that before the renaissance and the spelling firmed up, it had been pronounced "Tems".  But during the time the English were colonizing America, it was pronounced "Thames")

It became fashionable for a time in the New World to mimic the King's English, so things like R dropping became popular in a number of the more fashionable coastal cities.  But when the Americans rebelled against George's great grandson, George III, this became less fashionable.  But pieces of it remained in some American dialects.   The inland American dialect continued to move in it's own direction.   And much of England didn't really adopt it.

Conveniently for historians of American English, a great deal of research has been done on the "correct" way to pronounce Shakespeare. (Shakespeare and the earliest American colonies were contemporaneous) An English "RP" or "Public School" accent is quite wrong, and many of the rhymes and puns just don't work.  An American accent is still wrong, but less so.  I've always thought it really funny to hear an American doing Shakespeare, aping an RP accent. The modern accent that sounds nearest, to my ear, is Cornwall, where they still pronounce a lot of R, but even that is not right.

Types of BS Artist

Bullshit is a useful skill, but there are a lot of people who abuse it, to the general detriment of all.

The Artist.  I knew a guy who reveled so much in his talent to BS that he seemed to make it a policy to never do anything else.  His office was across the aisle from mine and we got to be fairly good friends.  He was a very smart guy and showed enough comprehension that I believe he could have done useful work, but he chose not to.  I asked him about this and he of course gave me BS for an answer.  He had me snowed for more than a week when I first met him.  It took his boss several months to really grasp what was going on, and when his boss tried to use more force to get him to shape up, his boss stepped in.   The boss's boss was prone to referring to him as one of the biggest talents we have in this company.  I left the company about two years later and the boss's boss still thought the world of him.   He contacted me about ten years later and was working for a politician--an appropriate job for him--but I think he was too much of a rebel to go very far with this.  His memorial (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few years ago) was all full of wonderful praise for his generosity and wisdom.  Not the guy I knew.

The Embellisher.   I've known quite a few of these.  The best of them are pretty knowledgeable and can make a lot of useful contributions, but when their expertise runs to its limits, they keep going.  They can make educated guesses and the audience is no wiser.  Sometimes they're even right.  As long as it's only a tiny fraction of the point that they're making, it's actually valuable.  Rarely does the customer know as much as the embellisher, and the small embellishment is really more like a white lie than willful deception.  The most impressive embellisher I know is regarded by many as a great visionary.  He is not.  He's a small visionary and a hypester, and a stealer of other's ideas.   He could be a useful guy--he's very smart and knows a lot about a lot of things, but he's more interested in getting his ideas heard and implemented, good or bad, than he is in their actual usefulness. His present venture is a patent mill, which is an excellent fit, but among the most harmful things he could be doing.

Almost all Salesmen are embellishers, but they generally have too little knowledge to be useful.  They are generally unconcerned with the right answer, only with making the sale and not getting caught.

The Flack is a very special case.  The job is to make people think they're saying things that appeal to the widest possible audience; to seem like all things to all people, while never getting pinned down on anything even slightly controversial and never saying anything that might get them caught lying or give away strategy.  It takes a lot of skill to do well, and it's evidently very stressful, because the best of them seem only able to do the job for a few years.  E.g. presidential press secretary.

Many Hacks started out as flacks but discovered that their audience doesn't really care whether they're telling the truth or not.  Rush Limbaugh is almost the defining example of this.  In the late '80s, he said lots of controversial stuff that was appealing to right wingers, but was very careful to edge right up to the edge of the truth and not actually lie.  My favorite was when he pointed out that there's more old growth forest in the US today than when the Declaration of Independence was signed.   It's true.  There's more old growth in Alaska, all by itself, than in the original 13 colonies in 1776.  But his listeners were meant to think that the old growth had come back.  Some time during the GHW Bush administration, he realized that his listeners didn't care whether he was telling the truth or not, and were paying for controversy, not sense or reality, so he gave it up and became a hack.  Most hacks where never anything but hacks though.

The White Lie is an important piece of BS.  They're usually harmless and smooth social situations, but in bulk they can do a lot of harm.   Many obnoxious people have no idea they're being obnoxious.  A little truthtelling might give them a chance to figure it out.

addeda dec 2013
I think Paul Ryan started out thinking he was an embellisher who didn't initially realize that his whole world-view was based on a fantasy novel, that described people and behaviors which could only exist in a world of magic.  He became a full-on artist when he discovered that nobody on the political right even cared whether he was connected to reality or not, and succeeded in selling himself as a wise, competent man, when in fact he is an incompetent boob who can deliver nonsense speeches well.   Functionally, he is pure Hack.  The true artist I describe above did have some notion of ideas.

Vaporware

I just read the wikipedia article on Vaporware, and tracked down a few of its references.  Interestingly, the inventor of the term is purported to be an engineer for Microsoft Xenix in 1982.  There are only about 8 people which that title describes and I'm one of them.   The ultimate reference is this 1995 article in the New York Times, which describes a 1982 meeting Ann Winblad had with Mark Ursino and John Ulett.  I knew Ursino and Ulett quite well and I think I know what the meeting was about, although I wasn't there.  First of all, they're what we called in those days "Marketeers", which was a job that included sales, marketing and what later came to be called "program management".  They have some technical understanding, but they were not engineers.  For a purely OEM product like Xenix, their job mostly consisted of talking to folks--media like Winblad¹, Dyson, etc., potential customers, existing customers, etc., and ultimately the engineers themselves.  If I understand the context, what U&U were trying to say with the vaporware comment was that while we intended to do what we'd promised, but there was not an engineer actually working on it at that particular moment.   After all, there were only 8 of us and hundreds of promises made.  We did eventually stop working on Xenix, but it was not until 1987.  We earnestly did try to do everything we'd committed to.  We did a lot--Xenix for 8086, z8000, 68000, 286, 386, and in most cases, several wildly divergent platforms for each, and several versions of Xenix.  The specific thing I'm guessing Winblad was concerned about, the ability to make an atomic database operation in the face of file system caching and several processes having the file open simultaneously, was done in early '83, about a year after the relevant meeting.  It wasn't terribly hard, but it took more than a week.

In the 1960s and '70s, IBM made a determined effort to capture the entire computer market.  They came quite close to pulling it off.  One of the many dirty tricks they would play was to announce and attempt to sell a bunch of products that somebody thought might be useful, and see which ones had the most buyers.  Once they found out, they'd set about implementing those few, not bothering to implement the majority of the proposed products.  A smaller company wouldn't have the working capital to pull this off.  A customer considering choosing a competitor can easily be reigned in, for the cost of some hype.   Eventually, this, and many other of IBMs monopolist stunts, would be banned, but not before most of their competitors had failed.  This strategy is now known as "selling vaporware". 

It seems to me there are three legitimate things which might be called vaporware:

1. We're working on it, but it'll take some time before it's ready.
2. We intend to work on it, but it'll be a while before we can even free up enough time to start.
3. We don't really intend to work on it unless we get enough customer demand.

As long as the customer knows which is in play, they may be frustrating, but resources are finite and decisions must be made.   There's a fourth thing, which is not so legitimate:

     4.  We don't intend to do this, but we're pretending we are, to inhibit you from going with our competitor.

In other words, lying to the customer.   Unfortunately, too many people on the marketing side think this is ok.  If you change jobs every year or two and never have to face the consequences of being caught in a lie, this may be ok for you.  But it undermines the future of the organization that appears to have done it.


¹ Winblad was at the time still with a company doing accounting software, Open Systems, Inc, but her real importance was the articles she was writing.

Redefining Words

Chief Justice Roberts says that it seems like Gay Marriage supporters are trying to redefine the word "marriage".  Of course they are.  Words affect the way we think about things. Benjamin Whorf argued persuasively that we cannot really think about anything for which we do not have words.  We define new words, and redefine old ones, to represent new concepts and ways of thinking all the time.  It's how language evolves.  The word "gay" is an example.  A century ago, it meant something similar to "happy".   But about 50 years ago, it became a codeword for homosexual and before very long that use was "outed".  No longer does it mean what it meant when it was used to describe "The Gay Nineties".

I think if there was a collection of words which meant, concisely and unpejoratively, gay marriage, hetero marriage and nonspecific marriage, the issue of the moment would be much less controversial.  The number of people who are opposed to fully recognized civil unions is much smaller than those that object to redefining of the word.  I have some sympathy for that objection.  "Hetero marriage" is awkward and will refer to 95% of marriages from here on out.  But I think that battle is lost and "marriage" is now redefined as inclusive.  Do we really need words that refer to the specific types?  Not really.  Most uses of the word will remain as they were and in the very rare cases where we need to be more specific for some reason, the awkward version will suffice.  I think most people who grew up with the old definitions will be a little startled for the rest of our lives when a man refers to his husband or a woman to her wife.  But this surprise will eventually wane, and in a few decades it will be gone entirely.

Republicanese

The neocon publicity machine has generated an enormous amount of what George Orwell called “Newspeak”.  Neocons have fallen out of repute since most of this was written, during the GW Bush administration, but today's Republicans are still doing it.  Here are a few examples:

Non-Starter:  We can't find any fault with this idea at all, but we're immovably against it anyway. E.G., R51 is a non starter.  It would result in huge improvements to our congested highways at a trivial cost to taxpayers, proportionate to their use of the highways, but we're against it anyway.  Therefore it is a non-starter.

Clear Evidence: Not one shred of evidence, or sometimes fraudulent evidence. E.G. We have clear evidence that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, therefore we will attack him and commit ourselves to many years of "peacekeeping" in a hostile environment, in the process alienating ourselves from the rest of the world.   The scant evidence we have shown publicly is in fact a complete forgery. E.G.  We have clear evidence that tax cuts help the economy and increase employment.   every single previous tax cut has triggered a significant rise in unemployment and the majority have provoked an economic downturn, therefore we are going to try it again, this time in a way guaranteed to bankrupt the government at the same time.

Defending freedom: Suspending or overthrowing constitutional protections of freedom and civil liberties. 

Fighting terrorism: Starting or provoking conflicts that make people who were already angry at us willing to go to almost any extreme, including suicide bombings, to revenge themselves upon us.   Also: Wasting huge amounts of money in bureaucratic boondoggles that make it much more difficult to deal with the social and political problems behind terrorism.

Overwhelming majority:  between 20 and 49.9% approval. E.G. President Bush enjoys support from an overwhelming majority of the American people.

Completely baseless charges:  Guilty as hell.  E.g., the corruption charges against Tom DeLay and the influence pedaling and bribery charges against his crony Abramov are completely baseless.  They did them and more.

Clear Skies: Allowing polluters to do whatever they want with impunity.

Healthy Forests: Allowing lumber companies to do whatever they want with impunity.

Abstinence only: Disseminating lies about, and promoting legal impediments to,  any means of contraception more effective than wishful thinking. (the studies aren't all in yet, but it's starting to look like "abstinence only" may have caused the largest increase in abortions in our country's history)

Junk Science: Anything which is carefully researched, peer-reviewed, and widely accepted by people with expertise in the topic.

Fact: Something which has no basis in reality except for how it sounds to someone with no particular expertise in any relevant subject.

Bipartisan: Supported by most republican legislators and maybe (but not necessarily) one or two extremely conservative democrats.

Saving ____: cutting funding to ____ in such a way as to severely undermine its future sustainability but ensure that the ultimate collapse doesn't occur on the present administration's watch.  e.g. Saving Social Security, Saving Medicare.

Class Warfare:  The victims of long term, sustained attacks finally waking up and complaining about it.

Fairness: Anything that gives wealthy corporations and individuals an unfair advantage, power or money.

Average Person: A person with income between the 90 and 99th percentile.  in 2003 this was the range $125,000 to $300,000.   The actual median family income then was just over $44,000.

Job Creator: Someone who makes most of their income in the stock or bond market or by collecting rent or interest, and thus creates few or no jobs.

added 27 Jan 2012

Totally Dishonest:  Exactly right. E.g.: Mitt's ads about Newt are totally dishonest.  That is, they're completely accurate.  (Very little Mitt says is truthful, but about Newt, he's right on.  Of course Newt is right about Mitt, too.)

added 28 Feb 2013
Showing Leadership: do exactly what Republicans want, in clear violation of what the voters said they wanted or any actual facts on the ground

added 28 Mar 2013
Baseless Assertion: carefully researched, well documented and reasoned.  When a republican tells you something is a baseless assertion, it's a fairly safe bet that it's true.

added 27 Apr 2013
Put Politics Aside: I've lost on the facts or the politics but I want to keep pushing my (probably nonsensical) position anyway.  (both parties use this one but the Rs use it far more)

Not Picking Winners and Losers: Rigging the game so that the powerful can do whatever they want with impunity and the less powerful have no opportunity to do more than grumble.

added 18 Apr 2014
Nobody Could Have Predicted: It isn't what our rich backers wanted, so we prevented it from happening. Scientists and other people with real expertise not only predicted, but were screaming a warning as loudly as they could.

Cooking the Books:  similar to "Junk Science" and "Baseless assertion".  Carefully researched, documented and peer reviewed.  Tends to be used for statistics.

added 18 Dec 2014
Right to Work: The right of business owners to do whatever they please to workers, especially lower pay, blocking union membership, stealing pensions and more.