Ted Cruz' Silicone Problem

At a campaign rally in Humble, Texas yesterday, Ted Cruz said of the Texans who support his challenger Beto O’ Rourke, "they want us to be just like California...right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair....not on our watch.” Ted’s wife might have some grumbling words for him about her own Olay stash, and Texas’ many soybean farmers might not appreciate tofu’s disparagement, but the word I’d like to focus on is “silicon.” 

I have watched the video and that’s what he said, though it is obvious he was aiming for “silicone.” Silicone is a synthetic polymer that has myriad uses in electronics, medicine, construction and other applications, but its popular familiarity in an easily titillated America lies in its use as breast implants. It is often confused with “silicon,” which is what Cruz has done here. Silicon is much harder and more brittle than silicone, and is a critical component in the manufacture of computer chips, hence the term “silicon valley,” a nickname for the southern San Francisco bay area where much of America’s high technology development occurs. There being no colloquial Texas pronunciation resembling "silicon," it is safe to say Cruz committed this common error. 

It being a common error, you might regard my pointing it out here as finicky, but Cruz is a Harvard-trained debate star and a professional communicator, so I think it fair. One literal way to interpret his utterance is this: “There is NO WAY Texas will invest in high tech…not on our watch.” If you are inclined to forgive it as mere mispronunciation, its redux is thus: “Why spend money on fake boobs when you can elect a real one?”

Ron DeSantis has a monkey on his back.

Not to comment on Ron DeSantis’ metaphorical monkey business would be ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. The Twittersphere and other platforms went bananas today when they heard DeSantis warn Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Andrew Gillum. I think his critics are up a tree with this one, as this usage has clearly thrown a monkey wrench into DeSantis’ campaign plans. It was a mistake, not a dog whistle. Dog whistles are usually precisely that—hard to hear, whereas “monkey this up” is about ten degrees south of the N-word. There is no phrase “to monkey up” in any kind of American slang. He was aiming for “muck up” and he misspoke. That said, malapropisms don’t often come from nowhere. It is easy to imagine the M-word making the rounds in meetings among close associates of a Florida candidate who is a monkey-see, monkey-do for the Trump administration. The opinion call from this desk is that DeSantis' use of the phrase, “monkey this up,” was not an intentional dog whistle to white voters. However, his having ceded a few sentences earlier in the speech that Andrew Gillum was “articulate” may bear a closer look on those grounds. Dog whistle. A little hard to hear.

"Tape," like "film," is an anachronism.

My admiration for the resiliency of the word "tape" knows no measure. Very little audio record-keeping is "taped" these days. It is recorded certainly, it is captured, but not taped.

If you peruse today’s comment boards and even newspaper headlines, you’ll read about the “taped” conversations between Cohen and Trump. Unless it was magnetically captured to a tape medium, which I doubt it was, it wasn’t taped. People familiar with Cohen’s work might not be shocked if it indeed were found on a microcassette, but this article refers to “tape” more generally.

The Watergate tapes were on actual tape. For recording one’s own phone calls in the 21^st century, however, it is almost always done with a tap off the phone into either a recording program or a handheld digital recorder. But nothing else sounds as cool as “tape,” so “tape” it is.

My hat is off to "tape," a word that managed to outlive itself.

"Proughts" is hereby coined as a conflation of "thoughts" and "prayers."

Due to the high volume of mass shootings and the attendant need for large quantities of thoughts and prayers, the word "proughts" (pronounced "prots") has been coined as a means of expressing "thoughts and prayers" more efficiently in a single word. It is estimated this will result in a 20% to 30% increase in thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families.
#proughts