I still think 'macaca' should have won....
The American Dialect Society has named its word of the year : plutoed. "The society defined "to pluto" as "to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet."
Other sources have named Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" the word of the year. Since Merriam-Webster failed to actually include it in their 2006 dictionary, you can print out a copy of the revised page on colbertnation.com and glue it into your dictionary yourself. Fun!
Other sources have named Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" the word of the year. Since Merriam-Webster failed to actually include it in their 2006 dictionary, you can print out a copy of the revised page on colbertnation.com and glue it into your dictionary yourself. Fun!
posted by dchan at 5:06 AM
3 Comments:
As long as we keep all the little macaca's of the world in our hearts and minds...
Have you encountered an especially interesting grafitto in the City of Lights?
The society defines "to pluto" as "to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet." I would quibble with that definition. The IAU did not demote or devalue Pluto. Pluto still has the value and rank it has always had, that of a celestial body too puny to remove everything from the neighborhood of its orbit. The new definition simply recognized that Pluto was not in the same league with the other planets. Pluto simply had delusions of grandeur, and since delusions have no place among the hard facts of science, Pluto simply had to be sobered up. "Plutoing", therefore, does not devalue or demote any more than telling some lunatic that he is not Napoleon. "To pluto" is, thus, better defined as "to remove illusions with the harsh sobriety of actual reality."
We must pluto George W. Bush. To be sure, there have been several attempts to pluto him--the Baker Commision, the mid-term elections of 2006, and the finally articulate rebellion within his own party led by Chuck Hagel--but our Dear Leader still remains serenely unplutoed. He still seems to think that he is the divinely appointed saviour of the world. He thinks he can bring order to the world by sowing destructive chaos just as he thinks protection of our liberty is its destruction. Only God can bring substantive being out of its privation, and George W. Bush is, of course, not God, but he thinks so, despite all the evidence to the contrary. As long as he has the power to send troops, carriers, and missiles to wherever his voices tell him, he will persist in these messianic delusions.
Just as it required a congress of astronomers to pluto Pluto, it will require a congress of the people's supposed representative to Pluto George W. Bush. The congress cannot stop at a re-assertion of its power over the purse. It must remind the president, the people, and the Supreme Court that the power to declare war rests with it and it alone, the War Powers Act be damned.
But, above all, the congress must impeach Bush and remove him from power. Any parent can tell you that it does no good to lecture a teen about the evils of drunkeness if you will never make good on the promise of withholding the carkeys. Bush thinks he's God because he has Godlike powers of incalculable wrath at his fingertips. This inebriation with so much firepower feeds and amplifies his delusions. The only possible way to restore this poor man's sanity is to remove his power. That means removing him from power, and the only way to do this without causing chaos or civil war is to impeach and convict him.
But restoring Bush's sanity is not the paramount concern. Saving the world from a wacko lunatic is. Well, two lunatics, of course. We have to pluto Cheney, too, although I don't think he suffers from any delusions. Cheney is Satan, and I think he realizes that he is indeed Satan. So, we must pluto Bush and exorcise Cheney.
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