Possible word of the year

[Benjamin Barrett]

It was noted that because it was unsaid, there are necessarily going to be people who don't get the interpretation of "fuck yourself, and I admit when I watched it, Eastwood's rambling manner didn't really make the point clear.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Sep 2, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> 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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