156 thoughts on “This has gone too far!”

        1. Another one of those famous because their are famous chimeras. How do they get started? Chicken or egg conundrum in the media of such anomalies. Empty shells roaming around the infosphere.

    4. He’s quite the reprehensible first world person. Bad manners, bad music, total narcissist. I wonder if CanYe even knows who Steven Pinker is.

        1. I think I would get the same response should I have met him. Though I have no idea who Steve Pinker is or what he does…

      1. I was able to pick up from the linked videos that she’s also a pop star singer, but apparently not as obnoxious as Mr. Cannes-Yea.

        b&

        1. Actually, Taylor Swift is good at her craft. Some may not like it, but she is talented and I generally like her songs.
          I am not proud of saying that.

          8. I don’t really get the concept of a guilty pleasure. Why be guilty about liking something (unless it’s something morally questionable)? Calling it a ‘guilty pleasure’ is just kowtowing to snobbery.

          10. In a Puritanical country like Saudi Arabia there would be legal repercussions. Here it is more of a saying free of that part of the meaning.

          11. I think “guilty pleasure” is used metaphorically, as though the speaker/writer gad eaten a rich dessert full of empty calories.

          12. It’s eating Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia out of the container while watching cable news about the Republican Party imploding.

          14. I think a guilty pleasure is something that you like, but the people you hang out with tend to look down on. I doubt that people who have them (don’t we all?) really feel guilty about it. I happen to enjoy Willie Nelson’s music, for example. Some of my classical friends don’t get it. We joke about it. They know that when it comes to classical, I know my stuff.

          15. The point of a guilty pleasure is not so much in the pleasure as in the guilt. It has to be in some way retrograde, shameful, selfish, immoral, wasteful, or even perverted, but ultimately harmless.

          16. Back before he became a closed-minded grouch and scold, I used to take a guilty pleasure in reading the legal opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia. I almost always disagreed with his decisions’ outcome, but the guy could write a line of lively and demotic English prose.

            Now, his sycophants on the far right think its the height of wit for him to say something like “argle-bargle.” The pleasure is long gone, but along with it, so too the guilt.

    7. I’ve heard of him because he announced he was going to run for president next time around.

      And he named his son North. North West. SMH.

        1. Oh my stars!

          I used to work in the health sector, and we got some weird names. Twins called Benson and Hedges (I don’t know whether you have them, but that’s a cigarette brand) is one I always remember. There was a new born called V8. I don’t know whether the V8 ever officially got that name, because the government has the power to prevent a baby being named something that could cause it future problems, but it’s what the parents wanted to call him.

          1. My brother-in-law is an avid hunter and fisherman. He named his two boys…Hunter and Fisher.

          2. Those are nice names actually!

            I had a friend named “Jalna” – her father got that from a racehorse that he won a lot of money on. Her sister’s name came from the same source, but it was an ordinary girl’s name – Molly.

          3. I had two crayfish in a tank I kept at work named “breakfast” and “lunch”. when breakfast died I cooked and ate him. so all I had left was lunch. that didn’t go over well with the people at work, I was working at a pet supply company at the time. 🙂

          5. I had 2 cats named Hunter and Carver, except Carver was named after my amplifier, not what he did to the furniture.

      2. I liked Obama’s take on that – Do you really think a black guy with a funny name from the south side of Chicago could get to be President?

          2. Super hot (and cool) as Domino Harvey.

            I’ve always thought she had kind of a Helena-Bonham-Carter’s-younger-sister thing goin’ on.

          4. Worth a watch, if you get a chance. Great cast. Little too much of the standard Tony Scott rapid-cut editing.

            Based on the true story of Laurence Harvey’s daughter, who became a bounty hunter in California. It’s the flick where I became aware that Keira Knightley could be cool, not just a fine actor in costume dramas.

          6. Oh no! You’ve uttered the killer words for my activating my prejudice against a movie: “Based on a true story. “

          9. OK, maybe HBC doesn’t merit relegation from KK’s league. (I’d but NP – KK was her double in _The Phantom Menace_; SJ – Heather should check out the “arty” KK/SJ photoshoot in _Vogue_; CB and RW are in the /same/ league!)

            /@

          12. There wasn’t any blood flowing dude! Just an acknowledgement of her physical attractiveness and a recognition there’s a brain too. No menage a trois ( excuse the missing accents – I don’t know how to find them on this device) fantasies please! 🙂

          14. Shouldn’t have said that really, but I’m an atheist determinist, so these rogue comments escape my brain now and then. And unlike Kiera, I’m not sure there’s a lot of guilt going on over it happening either! 🙂

            Although, of course, I knew that’s not what you were suggesting, and you know I knew etc….

      4. Maybe they can name the grandkid “North-by-North West” — like the Hitchcock film, and making Kanye sound like a thoroughbred sire in The Daily Racing Form.

  4. I believe Pinker argues in The Sense of Style that the accusative case is the “default” case in English. Absent a sentence to contextualize the pronoun, “me” is instinctually preferred by English speakers. Just had this conversation with my daughters over the correctness or incorrectness of “Me And Earl And the Dying Girl” which is indeed “correct” if not formal English. Elder daughter insisted that the more formal-sounding “Earl, the Dying Girl, and I” (complete with Oxford comma) was preferred though admitted it lost the flavor of the original.

  5. I’m probably missing something here (an inside joke, perhaps), but why should it be “Kanye and I”? Steven and Kanye are the objects, not the subjects, no?

  7. Pinker must have been a bit tipsy, which would explain both, his thinking that it’d be cool to get a selfie with a famous rapper, and his “Kanye and me” solecism.

    2. I find no solecism.

      One wouldn’t say here is a picture of I. If the phrase, here is a picture of me, is correct, why is, here is a picture of Kanye and me, in correct?

  8. I saw this pic last night. It won hands down for being the most unexpected and delightful thing to have flittered into my consciousness yesterday. I had to look up Kanye, given my pop cultural deficits. I learn something from Steve Pinker about every day. This pic had me smiling at midnight and again now. I like Jerry’s response to it, too.

  10. Pinker is unlikely to make a grammatical error, even on twitter.

    The way I learned the rule concerning “I” vs. “me” was to eliminate the other person and see what works on its own — and use that one. It’s easier to figure out the proper form. So if Pinker had posted a selfie, would it make more sense for him to label it with “Me” or “I?”

    The former. The other one sounds bizarre.

      1. “Ditto.”

        And, yes, I know, “It is I” (or, “I am it”) is officially correct and “It’s me” is frowned upon, but that ship sailed a long time ago. I’d use Da Pinkah’s formulation.

        b&

        1. “It is I” is still used in cases when followed with a predicate as in “It is I who washed the dishes”.

          Curiously, French has ALWAYS said “It is me”, so the song from the musical Camelot “C’est moi” is entirely correct French though not classical English, so the last line of each verse goes
          “C’est moi, C’est moi, ’tis I”.

          So far I have never met a Biblical proof texter who claims that since Jesus says in John 6:20 “It is I”, this is PROOF that that is the correct usage, but with all the proliferations of Poe’s law going around these days, I wonder if it is just a matter of time.

          1. As in Louis XIV’s famous “l’etat c’est moi” or Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary c’est moi“?

            I believe the “rule” in English is to use the nominative case pronoun following a verb derived from the infinitive “to be,” except where speaking or writing informally. (Thus, if I get a call on the office phone asking for me by name, I’ll say “this is he”; if it’s one of my kids who doesn’t recognize my voice, I’ll say “it’s me, clean the crud out of your ears.”)

          1. Yeah, like that one about nouns and verbs agreeing in number. That one are a headache-giver, too.

    3. True, it sounds bizarre, and most people would say “me”. But “I” is formally correct. “Kanye and I” is an elliptical clause for “This is Kanye and I” and “is” is a linking verb. The same logic applies “This is I”.

      That said, most people (even grammarians) think the distinction is nit-picking. I would use “me”, or is that me would use I.

      1. What about what Stephen wrote just above you? And it seems to me your example is still an elision: “This is Kanye…” is short for “this is a picture of Kanye and…” In which case Sastra’s heuristic applies.

    4. I’m no sure Pinker thinks there is such a thing as a “grammatical error.” I think he falls into the descriptive rather than proscriptive side of the debate.

      1. I have to disagree with you. Pinker is not in the “anything goes” camp. He’s exquisitely sensitive to grammar — try reading his book, A Sense of Style. His take on grammar is far more sophisticated and nuanced than the old school sentence-diagramming style I learned.

        1. Not only is Pinker not in the “anything goes” camp, there basically isn’t an “anything goes” camp among linguists. Descriptivists recognize that there are rules, and that accidental violations of those rules do sometimes occur.

          Where they differ from prescriptivists is in regarding the rules not as authoritarian dogma to be strictly enforced, but as natural phenomena to be discovered empirically, by studying the way real people actually talk.

          1. Yes, indeed. The intentional violation of a grammatical norm can be quite refreshing, especially in colloquial prose. The intentional part, of course, is the difference between solecism and rhetorical device.

  11. In a nutshell Kanye is a crappy rapper, a mediocre fashion “designer” and is married to reality tv queen Kim Kardashian. He thinks he is great but he’s just an idiot pop star with a lot of money.

    Kanye? You can’t fall lower than that. Taylor Swift is superclass in comparison to Kanye. For more on Kanye’s idiocy go to the Daily Mail.

  12. It is possible that the improper grammar is a signal to his peeps that he knows this is also improper.

  13. I wonder if the picture and the wording were a social experiment to see what type of responses they elicited.

  14. “Kanye and me” is a phrase, which by itself breaks no grammatical rules.

    Slot it into a sentence and it’s right or wrong depending on the sentence. Some people here have seen an implicit sentence like Kanye and I are standing here before you; others have seen a different kind of implicit sentence, like This is a picture of Kanye and me.

    Maybe the phrase can just stand on its own, no sentence required. If not it should be taken as implying whichever sentence makes it grammatical.

  15. Where I come from, ‘I’ is nobby or snobby if you like, it would not be used in conjunction with a super.. cough.. with a self promoting nobbing ‘superstar’ of rap, not cool.
    It would go something like this: me and my mate Kayne.
    All the same I would be ‘well liked’ on fb if it were me with said rap star. The novelty factor would be immense. Most of Kaynes’ fans would have no idea who Pinker is. I have no evidence of this but I am impressed that he(Kayne)obviously does.

  16. You can look at “me” as the emphatic version of the pronoun (like “moi” in French). You’d never say “Kanye et je”, it would be “Kanye et moi”.

  19. I’m having a lot of fun imagining Kanye discussing his favourite Steven Pinker book and Steven Pinker discussing his favourite Kanye album.

  20. Hmm.

    From a UK charting artist that I know (and who’s opinion on such things I trust) Jay-Z is a top guy but Kanye is an absolute idiot…

    Don’t ask!

  25. 1) I’m sure many have already pointed it out, but no, it’s “Kanye and me”. You wouldn’t point at a picture and say “that’s I”.

    2) Kanye and Pinker. Why? Just…why?

  26. Grammar Police here:

    Pinker is correct. If the photo was of him alone the caption would read “a photo of me” and not “a photo of I”

    Hence, the way to know when to use “I” or “me” is by removing all other subjects.

    Pinker might say, “Kanye and I took a selfie,” because if he was alone in the photo he’d say, “I took a selfie.”

    You’re welcome.

  30. [This is a picture of] Kanye and me.
    Kanye and me [are shown in this picture].

    He must’ve meant the former.

  31. In the last few years Australian writer Anne Manne has written a tome about narcissism, prominently featuring the honorable, admirable Mr. West. One can easily find her holding forth on Youtube about Mr. West.

    One is given to understand that, when returning from abroad and going through customs, under “Occupation” he would write, “creative genius.” But he is quoted as saying that he stopped doing that because it was “too long to write,” and that “sometimes I misspelled ‘genius.'”

    1. It’d be a damn poor excuse for a “genius” who could come up with but one way to spell that word.

      1. Let’s grant that that’s true. What has he said – what would he have to say – to convince one that he does not merely have a sense of humor but is in fact narcissistic? It’s easy enough to claim that anything narcissistic one says is merely a manifestation of ones sense of humor. (If Trump were to utter such a sentiment, who is anyone to dispute him?)

        What if he had referred to himself as a “Bright”?

        What if one of us here wrote “creative genius”? Is “wit” or “humorist” the first thought that would come to the mind of the customs officer?

        Is his referring to Pinker as a “weird old white dude” merely a matter of displaying his scintillating humor? (Same with his commandeering the mic from Taylor Swift.) What if a similar, necessarily modified, sentiment were directed at himself – how would he react?

        1. “weird old white dude”

          That was entirely me putting words into Kanye’s mouth! Er. Twi**er feed.

          /@

          PS. It’s telling that iOS Auto-Correct knows “Kanye”.

        2. No, the bit that persuades me he’s got a sense of humour is when he says “sometimes I misspelled ‘genius’ ”

          If he really were as egocentric as claimed, I doubt he’d admit to that mistake.

          It’s also quite likely that his ‘creative genius’ entry was a sarcastic comment on the pointless bureaucracy embodied in some customs declaration forms. What, exactly, do the immigrationdroids do with all the personal information they make you so laboriously fill in? Usually, nothing whatever. Other than what’s on your passport, do they ever check any of it?

          cr

          2. Don’t know, don’t care, don’t know enough about him to make any judgement, and besides, he’s a rapper isn’t he? – so I don’t want to know. Can’t stand rap.

            But IMO, putting a (probably sarcastic) comment on a stupid immigration form isn’t evidence either way.

            cr

          3. “What, exactly, do the immigrationdroids do with all the personal information they make you so laboriously fill in?”

            Being occupationless, I got pretty sensitive to that blank when filling out all kinds of forms. I eventually started being creative, trying things like “Sybarite” or “Drudge.”

            No feedback to date.

          5. The thing is, what you put down has no practical effect whatever. I suppose if you put down “hired assassin” you might get a reaction, but other than that it makes no difference what you put down. Somebody created the form, felt they had to make a lot of spaces for information to be filled in, but nobody ever worked out what to do with the information.

            cr

  32. I recently listened to Astrud Gilberto’s lyrics to Girl From Ipanema (great song, with the tenor sax riffs by Stan Getz). I heard what is the only example I know of mistaking the nominative for the objective:

    “But each day when she walks to the sea,
    She looks straight ahead – not at he…”

    It’s jarring to a grammarian, but it rhymes.

    1. After reading what I just wrote, I realized (with some embarrassment) that these mistakes are common, like the ubiquitous “just between you and I”. But the motives are different.

        1. “Myself” is the foxhole of ignorance, where cowards take refuge, because they were taught that me is vulgar and I is egotistical.

          — Red Smith

        1. In the Astrud Gilberto/Stan Getz version, which is arguably the most well known and frequently played version, it’s “he”.

          2. Maybe they just goofed up the lyrics on the one take in which everything else was perfect, so decided to just leave it in.

            Thinking, hell, no one will ever notice…

    3. Great track off the great Getz/Gilberto sides. “Girl from Ipanema” was a Tom Jobim composition. Don’t recall who wrote the English lyrics, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been Gilberto (Astrud or João) or Jobim, since they are/were native Portuguese speakers.

    4. Anything for a rhyme in lyrics.

      Reminds of the last line here:

      I see your hair is burnin’
      Hills are filled with fire
      If they say I never loved you
      You know they are a liar

  33. “xx and I” usually precedes an action, such as “xx and I went to the pub”. In the present instance, “and me” is the correct form. In my opinion, I might be wrong.

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