http://crookedtimber.org Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:04:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/08/spitting-images/ http://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/08/spitting-images/#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:50:00 +0000 Henry http://crookedtimber.org/?p=4176 I’ve been reading Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Politics: Observations and Arguments” (Powells , Amazon ) over the last couple of days, and I’m greatly taken by it – witty and intelligent political journalism. I was particularly taken with his coined term, the “expectorate,” which refers to those “journalists, consultants and spin doctors,” (and today, one would presume, bloggers) who manipulate or present expectations about who is winning or losing in American politics. It deserves to be more widely known. Are there other coinages out there deserve wider circulation? Off the top of my head, I can think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s term ‘mallsprawl’ – much catchier and more evocative than the anodyne and uninformative “Edge City”, but scarcely known to the wider public. Philip K. Dick’s ‘kipple,’ junk that seems to reproduce itself, has done somewhat better (it has a Wikipedia entry), but not as well . Any others?

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