santorum

[Dave Wilton]

The use of "santorum" as a meta-term in web sites may have nothing to do
with this specific campaign. It may just be a dig at his conservative,
family-values politics. The name "Exon" was similarly used on porn sites
when that senator led the fight for the Communications Decency Act. The
absence of other senators' names may simply be due to the fact that they are
not unique. "Hatch," for example could refer to many people, not just the
senator. Not so with "Santorum."

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net
  http://www.wilton.net


> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
> Of Grant Barrett
> Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2004 12:12 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: santorum
>
>
> I should clarify: there are plenty of uses of "santorum" on such sites,
> but as far as I can see, only as keyword filler used to draw more
> search engine hits. Which may only mean that people know about the
> santorum campaign, since there are no other senator's surnames so
> listed.
>
> G
>
> On Feb 7, 2004, at 15:06, Grant Barrett wrote:
>
> > On Feb 7, 2004, at 14:50, Michael Newman wrote:
> >
> >> However, the problem is that it is hard to imagine any
> >> "in-the-wild" uses of the term outside a few intimate incidents in
> >> the bedroom and people recounting such incidents to others. The
> >> specificity and yuck factors that make it attractive to the campaign
> >> make people (in my experience) avoid talking about it.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I searched all available online erotica and
> > pornographic fiction and fan fiction I could find for free, including
> > newsgroups (such as alt.sex.stories.*), to no avail. There's not a lot
> > of restraint in that kind of writing, and there's millions of words of
> > it. This particular "santorum" does not seem to be there.
> >
> > Grant
> >
>
>