We already had “Hitchslap,” but now The Urban Dictionary has adopted a new word coined by Anne Crumpacker:
Hitch inspires another word
December 20, 2011 • 8:28 am
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(damn check box)
Perhaps:
‘A child, disabused of religious indoctrination, who is encouraged to read broadly and to seek the truth unapologetically.’
‘A child void…’ makes me queasy.
Good word, though, but.
“void” implies there’s an emptiness there that needs filling. perhaps by God? 🙂
Better: a hamburger.
Even better: “devoid of religious indoctrination.”
‘…innocent of…’
‘…uncontaminated by…’
‘…unpolluted by…’
‘…undefiled by…’
‘…unsullied by…’
‘…untainted by…’
‘…unadulterated by…’
But, of course,
‘…free from…’
Wouldn’t “disabused” imply she used to be religious?
True, my anaemic attempt at Biercean lexicography; the ‘disabused’ is a reference Dawkins schtick on ‘Christian chil…’.
Oh, if you have to explain a joke, it can’t be any good in the first place. As you were.
Replace “disabused” with “without”, and I’d essentially agree.
To be disabused of a notion strongly implies that one previously subscribed to that notion.
Adorable batch of “hitchlings” here:
http://socraticmama.com/2011/12/20/hitchling-noun-see-attached-photo/secular-parenting
They will make your day.
The Crumpacker Hitchling. Sounds like a Cohen Brothers film.
On the subject of nominative determinism, BBC Radio 4 had an item today. These are all true:
The leader of the British ‘Howard League for Penal Reform’ – Frances Crook (Frances means free)
The priest, The Reverend Vickers.
Scottish legal firm: Welch, Steele & Robb
The soccer defender: Mark de Maan
I know of some Twickenham undertakers: Wake & Paine.
Pupils’ daft names: Tamara Knight
And the toweringly incomparable Pocahontas McGinty
Hmm… Tamara Knight was from a Two Ronnies sketch… someone still went ahead and gave their child that name?!
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I got Tamara Knight from my mflresources chatroom (MFL – Modern Foreign Languages); same with Pocahontas McGinty; you’ve punctured my delusions, Dr. Ant, I’ll never trust a Spanish teacher again.
I normally avoid that crummy Urban Dictionary but I thumbed it up anyway.
Ever ready with a battery of puns.
I was on a roll the other day, so I came up with this one for Dr. Jerry.
Coynedog- noun (see “cat”)
Official
See Coynedog here:
http://socraticmama.com/2011/12/20/coynedog-noun-see-cat/secular-parenting
kindling a child that has never read a book with real pages. *coat*
Well, it sure has an interesting word origin, and it’s a rather nice sounding, one of those words that seems to harmonize with its meaning. It has those hard British consonants softened by the bouncy “-ing.” And as much as I admire Mason and her mother, the word “crumpacker” doesn’t land on ear in quite the same way.
“seek the truth unapologetically”
I loved Hitchens’s writing on atheism, but to say he sought the truth, given his position on Iraq, is false in my opinion.
What’s worse, his behavior in his defense of his Iraq position was far beneath the standards he applied in his defense of atheism. John Cook at Gawker put it well:
Hitchens never saw one’s death as an occasion to paper over the misdeeds of one’s life (recall his outstanding and perfect take-down of Jerry Falwell). Most of the time, I deeply admired Hitchens, but he was far from perfect.
At least remember that Hitch had many Kurdish friends who had watched as their country was bombed and gassed by Saddam over many years. In fact after the first Gulf War, until the coalition enforced a no-fly zone, entire villages were massacred by Saddam’s helicopter gunships. Following the second (and for Saddam, decisive) gulf war the Kurds gained a semi-independent democratic secular republic.
Yes, I remember. It was always the Kurdish regions of Iraq that Hitchens brought up too – and there is little doubt that the Kurds are better off, for now at least. If the US government wanted to go to war to liberate the Kurds (and that was a result of the US invasion that was predictably postive), then the US government had an obligation to its own people and to the people of other countries to tell the truth. Instead, we got lies: we got 9-11/Saddam connections that were lies, we got WMD claims that were lies and we got Jeffersonian democracy scenarios that were neoconservative fantasy. The result of the Iraq war, an extraordinarily corrupt theocratically dominated semidemocracy was a likely result – as was understood by even many of the people who later supported the war. How many kids joined the US military after 9-11 because they thought they were liberating the Kurds and how many thought they were joining for some other reason?
One more thing: If Christopher Hitchens, one of the finest rhetoricians who ever lived, can’t come up with something better than ‘the Dixie Chicks are sluts’, and Cindy Sheehan is ‘a sob sister’, I’m inclined to think he didn’t have real counterarguments to his detractors arguments – and I’d guess that as time went on, he knew it.
You acknowledge the huge benefit to the Kurds of the war then immediately ignore it, not something any Kurd would do.
What Americans or Britons now think of their government’s sometimes-lying propaganda is surely a secondary issue.
Spoken like a antidemocratic imperialist. The lies the Bush and Blair administrations told may be secondary to the Kurds, and that it is understandable from the Kurds point of view. It isn’t secondary to the people who followed the liars into a war under false pretenses. If the neoconservatives want to fight a war, let ’em put together a private army and fight it themselves. If the want to take their fellow citizens along, then their fellow citizens deserve to know why they’re going.
The thought of being called a ‘hitchling’ brings Noel Coward to mind:
One day you’ll clench your tiny fists
And murder your psychiatrists!
I like the word hitchling – and I’ve got a little hitchling at my house.
I think we miss the point if we play smartest guy in the room.
Found this online:
“Devoid” is always used as an adjective, while “void” can be used as an adjective, a verb, or a noun. As adjectives, “void” and “devoid” mean basically the same. “Void” means empty; “devoid” means empty, but only after something has been taken away. “Devoid” is usually followed by “of.”
Example: After her husband’s death, her life seemed to be devoid of meaning.
Void:
Noun: an empty space, a vacancy
Verb: to empty, to clear
Adjective: empty, vacant, unoccupied
I like empty. Empty just means it isn’t there.
Also, the word doesn’t imply “fan of” or “follower of.”
See here: http://socraticmama.com/2011/12/16/hitchling-hitch-ling-noun/secular-parenting
OT. Void (n.) always make me think of Flash Gordon: “Pathetic Earthlings! Hurling your bodies out into the void.”
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Now that’s the spirit!
There’s a town in Northamptonshire called Irthlingborough.
As the leader of the council no doubt openes proceedings, “My fellow Irthlings…”.
The town’s name does indeed come from Old English forms of “earthling”, namely “erthling”, “yrthling”. But the OE word doesn’t mean “inhabitant of Earth”, but “ploughman”.
“Pathetic ploughmen!” doesn’t have quite the same ring!
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Yup,
I have ‘yrđling’ in my ‘A Concise Anglo-Saxon dictionary’, 2008; husbandman, farmer, ploughman. Also in Aelfric, yrđling is given as ‘wagtail?’. A mid-nineteenth century reference (Herrig) has the spelling ‘earthling’.
The thorn, the ‘th-‘ sound looks like a strange ‘d’ in this font.
No jokes, just relentlessly pedantic orthography.
Cheers.
In the nursing field, void means to empty one’s bladder…just sayin’ 🙂
So, do you tell them to, ‘Lay down all thought, surrender to the void’? (The Beatles -Tomorrow Never Knows)
Seems a bit of a hi-falutin’ phrase for ‘to have a pi..’.