Thursday, September 24, 2009

Jargon and In-Jokes

Excellent idea from John Cole and the folks at Balloon Juice: The Balloon Juice Dictionary.

Some of the terms are specific to Balloon Juice and its comment threads but most are in general use around the U.S. political (especially liberal) blogosphere. I remember when it took me some searching to parse IOKIYAR.

There's a danger when a political movement communicates in jargon and concepts that don't speak to the broader public. That's more a Republican problem nowadays than a Democratic one, since so many of their tropes reach back to hoary days of Reagan or Clinton and they expect relatively apolitical folks to understand them. For the most part, Dems keep their funny argot on blogs rather than in Senators' mouths.

It's hard to top the shorthand term "Two wetsuits and a dildo." Defined here:
Two Wetsuits and a Dildo- A quip often used to make fun of the hypocrisy of the Republican family values crowd and various other religious scolds, which finds its genesis in the police report following the death of Alabama Baptist Minister Gary Aldridge in which his corpse was found wearing, among other things, two wetsuits, rubberized underwear, with a dildo inserted in the anus. Also notable, it is illegal to purchase a dildo in Alabama.

The Lord works things into anuses in mysterious ways, Reverend Aldridge.

Reminds me of a page from long ago on the Internet (1997!): Rectal Foreign Bodies, with mostly medical reports of same. Glad to see it's still around.

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