Possible word of the year

[Joel S. Berson]

I notice that in the two newspapers I read, NYTimes and Boston Globe,
several articles (through Saturday) have taken the space to quote or
paraphrase the "do it to himself" passage (together with other short
excerpts), but no article has undertaken to explain it.  Apparently
these newspapers can't even talk about the F-word.  Or they're clever
enough to know that everyone able to read and understand English --
except car-parkers in Tampa, but they hadn't yet read these two
papers -- will fully understand without needing instruction.

Joel

At 9/1/2012 06:33 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>There is an argument on Honyaku (perhaps finally done) about this
>speech. One of the points of contention is whether this can mean
>anything except "fuck himself."
>
>Benjamin Barrett
>Seattle, WA
>
>On Sep 1, 2012, at 8:30 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>
> > Friday evening on "The CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley" I heard
> > Bob Schieffer say that car parkers at the Tampa convention were
> > asking, just what did Eastwood mean when he told the chair "He
> > {Romney] can't do that to himself."  The whole bunch -- RNC,
> > RNC-chosen car parkers, and RNC-nominated candidate -- seem
> > singularly out of touch with real people.
> >
> > P.S.  Michael Moore on The Daily Beast seems to have gotten it wrong
> > -- "They will know about the night a crazy old man hijacked a
> > national party's most important gathering so he could literally tell
> > the president to go do something to himself (i.e.
> > fuck  himself)."  Rather, Eastwood asked the chair what he (the
> > chair) wanted to say to Romney, so Eastwood was putting the F-word
> > into the chair's mouth.
> >
> > Joel
> >
> > At 9/1/2012 10:00 AM, David Barnhart wrote:
> >> eastwooding, verbal. n. {w} Also written Eastwooding.  See the quotations
> >> for the meaning.  Nonstandard (used in slang contexts dealing especially
> >> with U.S. politics; frequency?)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> The Smithsonian Institution, with hilarious seriousness, traced the
> >> tradition of politicians' interrogating empty chairs back to "at least
> >> 1924."
> >>
> >> A brand-new word was born: eastwooding, the act of talking to an empty
> >> chair. Twitter, Instagram (in which photos are conversational tender), and
> >> Pinterest were furnished with people's photos of furniture, of themselves
> >> lecturing, upbraiding, arguing with their sofas, stools, and settees. The
> >> hashtag #eastwooding ricocheted to at least 29,000 Twitter accounts,
> >> according to TweetReach. John Timpane, "Eastwood unseats Romney;
> Chair chat
> >> is meme of the moment," The Philadelphia Inquirer (Nexis), Sept.
> 1, 2012, p
> >> A01
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> The Twitter handle "Invisible Obama," which said it was sitting
> "Stage left
> >> of Clint Eastwood," quipped that "The GOP built me." An hour after
> >> Eastwood's speech, it already had 20,000 followers. The move spawned a new
> >> trend with people posting photos of themselves pointing at empty
> chairs with
> >> the hashtag "eastwooding." Halimah Abdullah, "Eastwood, the
> empty chair and
> >> the speech everyone's talking about," CNN.com (Nexis), Aug. 30,
> 2012, p not
> >> given
> >>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org