Linguistics experts like to say that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never hurt us. This is true with the one exception of words that are forged out of razor-sharp steel letters, dipped in curare, and hurled like throwing stars. Now that we've cleared up that technicality, here's Merriam Webster’s #1 word of 2021, which, for the second year in a row, throws the spotlight on a little crisis the world has been dealing with this year:
Lookups of vaccine, already very high all year, jumped by 535% in August, long after discussions about vaccines began taking place in the press and widespread distribution in parts of the world were well underway. A number of stories in August show that discussions about policy, approval, and vaccination rates—rather than the vaccine itself—sent people to the dictionary. […]
Continued...
Vaccine comes from the Latin word for “cow,” vacca, because the term was initially used to refer to inoculation using doses of cowpox that, it was discovered, protect humans against smallpox. This word is a relatively recent one in English, dating back to the 1880s.
So ostentatious to use two c’s instead of one x during our nationwide letter shortage.
The word vaccine was about much more than medicine in 2021. For many, the word symbolized a possible return to the lives we led before the pandemic. But it was also at the center of debates about personal choice, political affiliation, professional regulations, school safety, healthcare inequality, and so much more.
Few words can express so much about one moment in time.
Other letter-based vittles on the shortlist: insurrection, cicada, infrastructure, and cisgender. We salute all the winners and, as always, hope they enjoy their lifetime supply of alphabet soup.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers forWednesday, December 1, 2021
Note: Sorry, neighbors. That wasn't a tornado that tore through your bushes yesterday. it was just me finally getting the hang of this whole dreidel business.
Percent increase in Black Friday store traffic versus last year: 47%
Percent sense it makes that Republican leaders are bitching about the effects of high prices on Americans, but refuse to vote for legislation that would lower prescription drug prices, child care prices, and health care costs for Americans: 0%
Texans polled by Quinnipiac University who do and don’t, respectively, believe Gov. Greg Abbott should be reelected: 42%, 51%
Percent chance that he will be reelected because the state is so rigged in his favor (sorry, Beto): 100%
Current score in the war on Christmas: 3-2 (Pagans lead)
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Mid-weekRapture Index: 183 (including 4 famines and 1 Baby Jesus loaf in swaddling sourdough). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
CHEERS to December. The year's glorious, sparkling, musical, snow-bedecked, bell-ringing, Norman Rockwellesque grand finale. Bring on the swans a' swimming, spin your dreidels (Hanukkah continues through the 6th) and polish your Festivus pole (the 23rd).
Ahem. Mask?
Bring on the full "cold moon" (the 18th). Bring on the winter solstice. Bring on C&J’s 18th anniversary. Bring on the infrastructure! Bring on the Covid booster! Bring on the new live-action Boba Fett series! Bring on the sequels to Spiderman, the Kingsman, Sing, and The Matrix that we don’t need! Also: check the expiration date on the eggnog that's been sitting in the back of your fridge since 1999 before you take a swig. And settle your differences with 2021 because in 30 days it is out the door and ain't comin' back. I believe I speak on behalf of everybody here when I say: "Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya."
JEERS to December. The year's stress-filled, bone chilling, dark-by-3, be-cheerful-or-else, and oh-here comes a-giant-blizzard grand finale. The Harry Simeone choir will make curmudgeons' ears bleed with enough pa-rum-pum-pum-pums to choke a horse, and you just know there are several beloved mega-celebrities who will inconvenience us by dying this month.
Fox News will continue hating on Christmas for another season by using this Satanic “greeting.”
There’s the Pearl Harbor anniversary to remind us how few of our WW II heroes remain above ground. Our cat will take up her favorite December tradition of batting glass ornaments off the tree for us to step on in the middle of the night. With the MAGA cult still a good bet to abolish the Democratic party and establish a Fourth Reich in America (with stern tut-tutting from Democrats in United States Senate), the wise among us will forgo candy canes and instead hang holiday-themed Prozac dispensers. Plus: I just guzzled a bunch of eggnog before checking the expiration date, so nice knowin’ ya. I believe I speak on behalf of everybody here when I say: "Bah humbug."
The Supreme Court on Wednesday will take up the most important showdown over abortion rights in at least three decades, a direct challenge out of Mississippi to Roe v. Wade's landmark holding that the Constitution provides a right of access to abortion.
The star chamber gathers to sacrifice a goat and drink beer before hearing today’s oral arguments.
It's the case opponents of abortion have long sought and advocates of abortion rights have dreaded, coming before a strongly conservative lineup of justices. Three were appointed by then-President Donald Trump, who said he would choose nominees willing to overturn Roe.
Fearless Billy prediction: Even John Roberts drinks from the conservatives’ holy grail and votes to overturn Roe v. Wade in a 6-2 decision. I say 6-2 because Justice Stephen Breyer will die in office from a horrible smelting accident before the decision is announced, and President Biden won’t be able to get a justice confirmed because Manchin, Sinema, Warner, and Tester will object to his nominees. As a result, abortion will become a capital offense in half the states by June. But on the bright side, I think that Disney Boba Fett series is gonna be pretty darn great.
CHEERS to parking your kiester for equality. On December 1, 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks, who was also secretary of the local branch of the NAACP and trained in nonviolent civil disobedience long before John Lewis labeled it "good trouble," refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama public bus. The bus driver, James Blake, said he was just doing his job when he ratted her out. But history reveals his job apparently also included being a jerk:
Once, after she had paid her fare at the front, he had ordered her to board the bus at the rear and then, before she could do so, driven off. On other occasions he had ostentatiously driven past the stop at which she was waiting.
As for Parks, she wasn't the first black American to challenge the discriminatory rules of public transportation. But in this case, her arrest and the ensuing boycott of the bus system—led by budding activist Martin Luther King, Jr.—became a signature event of the civil rights protest movement. I don’t like to play the game of "What If,” but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts she'd be rooting for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Yeah—going out on limbs is my business.
Summer spending atMainehotels and restaurants surged to a record high in 2021 as the state’s service industry continued recovering from losses incurred in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.
Tourists returning to Portland harbor after an excursion to the islands.
Mainelodging and restaurant sales reached nearly $2.5 billion between June and September, according to Maine Revenue Services. This summer’s spending was almost $1 billion more than during the same period in 2020 and a 14 percent increase from the roughly $2.2 billion record set in 2019. […]
About 10 million people traveled to Maine over the summer, just surpassing the record set in 2019, according to research conducted for the Maine Office of Tourism.
Oh, wait a minute—it all makes sense now. Consumers turned bitter and resentful because they had to leave Maine, and go back to living a life of drudgery and dread in their pathetic shit-hole state instead of our glorious center of the civilized universe. Sorry. That should've been obvious to me. My bad. Someone delete this item.
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Ten years ago in C&J:December 1, 2011
JEERS to seeing the devil in the details. The big banks, and the government officials who used to work for them, couldn’t be more evil if they were Satan's own spawn. (And who says they aren't? Have we seen their birth certificates?) If anyone asks what the 99% movement is about, send ‘em this:
In the lead-up to the financial crisis that crippled the American economy and plunged the country into a recession, the Federal Reserve made trillions in undisclosed loans to struggling banks and financial institutions, according to official documents obtained by Bloomberg News. Six of the country’s largest banks then turned those loans into more than $13 billion in previously undisclosed profits. The total cost of the Fed loans amounted to $7.77 trillion, and unlike the funds made available by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the loans came with virtually no strings attached for the banks.
And the icing on the cake: Bush's Treasury guy, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, tipped off hedge fund managers to how he was planning to rig the roulette wheel before the '08 collapse so they could place their bets accordingly. I guess that explains why our pundit scolds like Newt Gingrich never tell the banksters to "take a bath." As long as taxpayers are around to bail 'em out, that's something they'll never have to worry about.
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And just one more…
CHEERS (because it's important) and JEERS (because it's still necessary) to World AIDS Day. This year marks 40 years since the first published scientific account of the virus that would decimate the gay community and spread to the straight community with equal viciousness. Today more than 38 million people around the world live with HIV or full-blown AIDS. A minimum of 36 million have died from it. UNAIDS says the 33rd anniversary of World AIDS Day brings with it additional complications, (no-)thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, says executive director Winnie Byanyima:
Where leaders are acting boldly and together, bringing together cutting-edge science, delivering services that meet all people’s needs, protecting human rights and sustaining adequate financing, AIDS-related deaths and new HIV infections are becoming rare. But this is only the case in some places and for some people.
Lest we forget, this asshole took years to even acknowledge that HIV/AIDS existed. Rot in hell, Gipper.
Without the inequality-fighting approach we need to end AIDS, the world would also struggle to end the COVID-19 pandemic and would remain unprepared for the pandemics of the future. That would be profoundly dangerous for us all.
Progress in AIDS, which was already off track, is now under even greater strain as the COVID-19 crisis continues to rage, disrupting HIV prevention and treatment services, schooling, violence prevention programmes and more.
On our current trajectory, we aren’t bending the curve fast enough and risk an AIDS pandemic lasting decades. We have to move faster on a set of concrete actions agreed by United Nations Member States to address the inequalities that are driving HIV.
End inequalities. End AIDS. End pandemics.
By the way, the last time the 54-ton AIDS quilt could be displayed in its entirety was 1996, and if laid out today it would cover more than 1,293,300 square feet. Not coincidentally, this is also Give A Virus The Finger Day. Knock yerself out.
Have a happy humpday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Biden Urges Calm in the Face of Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool leak: ‘A Cause for Concern, Not a Cause for Panic’
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