Not sure how precise that link is, but here's my tweet from June 2021...

Ambiguous hed in @wsj.com? If you judge your hotel roommate to be revolting, you'd better hope that your suite's bathroom has a door. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tr...

Oh, too bad... How quirky X has become.

While I'm at it: If MICROCRACK was low frequency, how about ANABIOTIC?

Glory days. Here's the cover, with an image taken from the office television. I was a college intern, but I had three pieces in the issue & got written up in the house organ, N/W. In the photo, I was more or less in uniform, wearing a seersucker suit with a thin bow tie.

Not sure why the whole Web isn't saying this. Trump's Brazil tariff is illegal. Presidents can impose tariffs only for limited economic reasons. Interfering with a prosecution abroad is not a permitted rationale. The issue is both legislative & constitutional. Only Congress can levy taxes.

SSA BS. Is this politicization a first? Just got an email from the Social Security Administration patting the President on the back for the budget-busting bill Irony (one of many) is that the bill changes the taxation of benefits in a way that threatens to deplete the fund a year early.

If ADENINE, why not ALANINE? Thinking it might be because alanine is "non-essential."

was in, is out CARIOCA. Surprising. It's been in forever. Below, an ngram of carioca vs the also-perennial YENNING, whose inclusion had never made sense to me.

"BREAKING: RFK JR CONFIRMED AS HHS SECRETARY" Quick hed that says it all about our times. Farce as news, news as deadly threat.

From the rival site:

Always: DITALINI

NYTimes hed watch. Asked how vigorous he might be at 86, Biden said, “I don’t know. Who the hell knows?” I find the response to be a step shy of acknowledgment that he might not have been able to serve out his term. I mean, who among us knows how vigorous he or she will be in four years?

For my sins, watchng snippets of the Patriots-Cardinals game. Hapless is the word for the Pats. Hapless in both senses of the word, unlucky and clumsy.

Then again, @OED does not recognize cart-way as an unhyphenated word. The OED dates cart-way to the 1390s, and various spellings appear in the literary examples. @merriam-webster.com does contain cartway.

Here's the n-gram. AMNION appears in print much more often that CARTWAY and has done so for two centuries. But then, amnion s medical and cartway is common language, or was once.

That less frequently used word is DOGTROT.

Tweak FRL to "felons, relatives, & loonies"?

So misleading—as if there never had been a bio-psychosocial model. I have not read the book, but *no* plausible representation of depression in the brain will be incompatible the life-circumstance perspective. No biological theory ever proposed has been.

From my college classmate Mike Kazin, the opposite bet:

The missing compound word having to do with paper or rope: HANDLAID. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/h...

Of course, nothing is as unused as MEMED, which goes unremarked. Use 'memed' in a sentence. @lauralippman.bsky.social @around.com @fetterman.senate.gov @notinwordlist.bsky.social

Having (privately) received complaints about the recent pangram MICROCRACK, I ran an Ngram (vs low-frequency 🐝 words) in the years since the OED says the word came into use. It's on the level of ARCO & CANOPIC, well below the now-discarded TAIN. @merriam-webster.com classes microcrack as medical.

3/ Apparently, the warning made adolescents less likely to seek care & pediatricians less likely to prescribe. The one variable that did not change: Doctors became no more likely to monitor teens for suicidality. Here, the turquoise line shows the prescribing drop-off.

2/ Here's the relevant graph. It's stunning. You almost never see a public health intervention that causes this kind of inflection point, a dramatic worsening of public health. The red line shows a steady decrease in teen suicides followed, after the warning, with a steady increase.

Regarding Trump's absurd cabinet appointments, I've taken a look at this sentence from Hannah Arendt which has been making its way around the Web.

As Bsky balloons, Is X feeling pressure?

@debamlen.bsky.social I got queen bee twice yesterday, first with 242 points & then with 249. The added word (absent from @merriamwebster.bsky.social) was HAMACHI. Am I right that the goal posts moved midday? Has this happened before? #thegridkid #hivemind #nytspellingbee

Is "rank-and-file" the new euphemism for the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus? @nytimes.com