Pun Salad

Why didn't the Supremes just say you could display the 10 Cs on Monday, Wed, and alternate Fridays, but not on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Or that they could be viewed inside government buildings, but only on the walls of bathrooms and in janitors' closets? Has anybody ever advanced this radical opinion -- that the five justices in question may be intelligent and thoughtful people individually, but that together they form one blithering idiot?

Thoughtful thoughts from legal beagles, pro and con, may be found at SCOTUSBlog. Also see Prof Althouse, who explains why these decisions will kind of act like a full-employment act for judges up and down the line for years to come: nothing is settled except for the way these particular justices ruled in these particular cases.

Unborn fetus. My gosh, has it gotten that bad? I know the Times can't say "unborn child" (which is what a fetus is). But now they can't even say "fetus" — it has to be "unborn fetus."

First I googled the phrase "unborn fetus": 31,500 hits, so it's not that uncommon a phraseology, but I agree that it's oddly grating. Unfortunately, the search results don't clearly indicate what, if anything, the writers of the phrase are attempting to communicate by prepending the seemingly-redundant adjective.

But then I looked at the NYT article itself. And things got even weirder. Because the brief paragraph to which the headline refers is:

On a new single, this fresh-faced rapper and actor rushes in where Hallmark fears to tread. Maybe you can't buy a greeting card to thank your mother for not aborting you, but now there's a hip-hop track expressing that very sentiment. Visit www.nickcannonmusic.com to hear "Can I Live," which has a chorus by the winsome soul singer Anthony Hamilton, and to watch the video. (Beginning with protesters outside an abortion clinic, it stars Tatyana Ali as the pregnant protagonist.) "I know the situation is personal," Mr. Cannon declares at the beginning, perhaps understating the case. He is no one's idea of a brilliant rhyme-spitter, but sometimes content trumps form, as when he rewinds to his very early years - as a fetus - to declare, "Mommy, I don't like this clinic/Hopefully you'll make the right decision/And don't go through with the knife decision." There should be a special Grammy reserved for the first politician (on either side of the aisle) who finds a way to appropriate this strange but not unmoving song. And Mr. Cannon deserves recognition, too, for finding a truly startling way to express a rather simple thought: he's happy to be alive.

I wouldn't have expected to see something this pro-life appear in the NYT. And check the song; I'm not a rap fan at all, but I was impressed.

(Note the critic says the song is "not unmoving", which brings to mind Orwell's parody: "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.")