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To suggest a term or phrase, please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence. “Words Worth Sidelining” will be a recurring feature, at least for a while. “Unpack” has traveled with ridiculous speed from inventive to irritating and unimaginative. That’s my issue with it - it’s vacuously voguish, the semantic equivalent of an article of clothing with a logo that asserts membership in a certain caste or club. “Be careful using the word ‘unpack’ in this manner, as many find it pretentious or gimmicky.” “The term gained acceptance in academic and psychological circles and is considered a buzzword,” the website says. It notes that in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the haunted prince of Denmark at one point complains about having to “unpack my heart with words.” But Merriam-Webster identifies the 20th century as the dawn of “unpacking” as a surrogate for “examining in detail” that’s “beloved by graduate students and armchair philosophers the world over.”Īccording to the website Grammarist, the 1980s were when “unpacking” as “a sort of deconstruction” really took off. Merriam-Webster says that the figurative “unpack” is by no means a recent invention. But to Trump’s latest post? Please, please, no. I mean the figurative version of “unpack” - you’re still welcome to do it to your suitcase. I’m interested in words or phrases used so oddly, indiscriminately or excessively that they’re itching for exile. Cheney has made that case as forcefully as anyone, holding on to the greatest prize of all: her dignity. But we know this much now: The losers on Tuesday night were the Republican Party, which needs her more than she needs it, and the United States, which needs rescue from its ruinous indulgence of Trump. Was her Lincoln reference an indication that she’ll run for president in 2024? Political observers wonder. It invoked and put her in the company of Abraham Lincoln, who, she noted, “was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all.” She’s alert to the past and perhaps inherited that from Lynne Cheney, who writes serious books on the country’s political history. She was clear about her determination to hold on to her megaphone and continue fighting Trump in her Tuesday night concession speech, which was less concession than vow - and an extravagant vow at that. But a hero she is, because she models independent-mindedness for a country in which too many people fall into tribal line. She’s a cantankerous sort - like father, like daughter - and heroes are as messy as villains. She simply and importantly made cause with Democrats, which didn’t erase her past, had greater authenticity and was enough. 6 committee if you’re not confident that you’re on the side of the angels.Īdditionally, she didn’t do what more than a few other Never Trumpers did and essentially morph into a Democrat, tweaking and twisting long-held positions so that she could still belong somewhere.
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You can’t radiate the calm and conviction that she has as the vice chair of the Jan. You can’t endure and survive the kind of nastiness that she has if you don’t believe in what you’re doing.
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They rightly augured that she’d become more of a political celebrity in exile than she would by playing along, and they guessed that she was making that calculation.īut there could be no dispute, at least not among honest and sensible patriots, about the correctness of her positions on Trump, on her party’s fealty to him and on the peril that he poses to the future of American democracy.Īnd there’s no question at this point about her genuineness. They suspected that her motives included grandstanding. They sensed that she had inherited Dick Cheney’s arrogance. She’s not some paragon of altruism, and a few conservatives I respect rolled their eyes when she first separated herself from the House pack to denounce Trump in the most sweeping terms possible. I don’t mean to idealize her too much - easy to do, given the cowardice of so many others in her party.