Media matters is outraged...again.

Ann Coulter on Hannity & Colmes:

COULTER: Right, and I suspect everyone listening to your show knows about that. I mean, I know -- well, I guess Pat is out in America now; you're primarily in New York City. I give a lot of speeches out in America, I frequently visit America, and Americans are pretty freaked out about somebody going to rehab for using a word, and that's of course what I was referring to. And I don't think there's anything offensive about any variation of faggy, faggotry, faggot, fag. It's a schoolyard taunt. It means -- it means wussy. It means, you know, Hillary giving a speech in a fake Southern drawl -- that's faggy. A trial lawyer who weeps before juries is faggy. Lifetime-type TV, faggy. Everyone understood I was not literally calling -- well, I was not calling -- well, for one thing, I wasn't calling John Edwards anything. That was the whole point. I couldn't talk about him, his life's work, his appeasement policies, his wimpiness on foreign policy, because that word is out of bounds. So, in point of fact, I called John Edwards nothing. I said I couldn't even discuss him because using any variation of that totally excellent word would send me into rehab.

You know, its just so hard to keep up with the liberal redefinitions of words we all thought we understood. Even the word "liberal" has been obsoleted--too many negative connotations, so the former liberals are now the 'progressives'. Negroes became blacks who then became African-Americans and now its becoming apparent that genuine "black" refers to the descendants of slaves and slaveholders who vote Democrat. Colin Powell? Not black. Condoleezza Rice? Not black. Does anyone know if Harry Belafonte became personna non-grata after referring to the aforementioned as "house n_ggers"?

Growing up, a fag was a cigarette, and a faggot was either a burning ember or a particularly effeminate man who may or may not have been gay. We called each other faggots and fags all the time. When we wanted to refer to what we now call 'gay' (which used be mean a bright and sunny disposition), we used the term 'homo'. I have a brother-in-law who grew up in Idaho and he has a whole repertoire of vastly more imaginative and vulgar names which will go unmentioned.

In the interest of fairness, all groups should get to name themselves.

Once.

Pick a name for yourself and stick with it. No bailing out after you've pissed everyone off and the zippy sounding name becomes "a curse and a byword".

As a middle-aged white male, I think I would like to be known as "an experienced vanilla stud" Its overwhelming positive and makes me feel good about myself.

Failure to refer to me in this way may result in blogger outrage.

You've been warned.

H/T Ed Driscoll

A surprisingly accurate test. Over the years, many people have commented that I don't seem to have a recognizable regional accent.

That's not by accident, but by an interesting confluence of factors that include the fact that my parents were European immigrants and English wasn't my first language.

Early on, I would get made fun of for not pronouncing certain words properly. I was sent to a speech therapist to teach me how to say "the". After a succession of this kind of humiliation, I learned to pay close attention to how things were pronounced and television was my teacher--hence the neutral accent.

The interesting byproduct of this sensitivity was that as I learned French, I managed to learn it the same way--sans accent. I can't speak it like a native anymore because I've lost the oral musculature necessary to properly pronounce French words and when I do speak it, I hear myself mangling the pronunciation--I can't say it out loud like I hear it said in my mind.

I've made a bit of a hobby of trying to pin an accent to a geographical area. I've met some people who are so good at this that they are able to determine origin very specifically.