Quote du jour

The Latin word for noon is meridiem, or middle of the day. The hours of the morning, which come before noon, are ante meridiem (a.m.), and those that come after noon are post meridiem (p.m.).

- Kevin Williamson

Quote du jour

I thought of trying to rewrite the newsletter with no Fs at all. (After breaking the "F" key on his Macbook). There’s a word for that: lipogram, from the Greek word (λειπογράμματος) meaning “leaving out a letter.” Lipograms are a kind of literary stunt. A famous one was the novel Gadsby, which contains about 50,000 words but no letter E. Some works omit a letter by accident (there is no X or Z in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), but the writer of a lipogram does it on purpose.

- Kevin Williamson

Quote du jour

Household word’s meaning of famous is of course an application of its meaning of common: Everybody knows what a doorknob is, and everybody knows who Alec Baldwin is. (If you don’t, the answer is: a doorknob.)

-Kevin Williamson

Quote du jour

In 1984, George Orwell introduced the term “doublespeak.” In the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, Democrats have perfected it.
The Democrats are in a bad way, and two things stand immediately in the path of their political agenda: the Supreme Court and the English language. To destroy one, they must destroy the other.

-Kevin Williamson

Quote du jour

It continues to amaze me that Amy Coney Barrett’s textualism — the proposition that judges are constrained by what the law actually says — is being presented as some kind of right-wing extremism. One would think that Judge Barrett’s left-wing adversaries would very much prefer her to follow what the law actually says than to impose her own sensibilities on the nation through judicial fiat.

-Kevin Williamson