The Bengals are in the Superb Owl

UncleScoopy

7 thoughts on “The Bengals are in the Superb Owl”

  1. Drama queen Brady…”Tom Brady announces he is retiring from the NFL, ending days of uncertainty about his future.”

  2. Bengals fan since I came outta the womb. So used to disappointment, I thought they were mostly lucky when this run started. But when you make Superman Mahomes look like a helpless infant sucking his thumb, twice in a month, including in his own backyard, you really did something. That’s not luck, that’s talent. They didn’t even need Chase, Higgins, Mixon. They don’t need to rely on those guys to win games. Their D adjustments & kicker took care of everything in the 2nd half.

    Granted, “Who Dey?!” is a dumb cheer, but they were a dumb team for 50-some years. And smoking cigars in victory is dumb too for pro athletes. They’re not used to success & will hopefully come up with better stuff.

  3. And how bout them ‘9ers?

    I see the NFC champs game as a reminder of not just “on any given Sunday”, but also that “past performance does not guarantee future returns”. TV analysts hedge. Anything can happen. But “Rams favored by 4” was far from representing what the bets were saying about the game. Like, the 9ers came in a distant 4th in “to win the super bowl” bets. The game we saw showed us exactly why that was a widely-held opinion.

  4. OK, Scoops, I hereby retract my claws.

    I wasn’t happy with your earlier focus on communist as somehow unique, ignoring the ease with which I was able to add further examples. Of course, limiting our scope to “adjectival nouns in the orbit of ‘communism'” solves that little problem. Big whoop.

    Your appeal to authority doesn’t help. I have my own background. And English is my birth language. It doesn’t make me uniquely qualified. It does vaguely support my credibility. But not necessarily above you, even remotely.

    Scoops: “even when there is an existing adjective”

    Of course. You didn’t say that until now. New usages are invented when practitioners need it to express themselves how they want to be heard. I readily concede that resistance to this particular form of innovation might be drastically lower now than it used to be, in our heyday. We could also guess that speakers today are seriously more sensitive than maybe they ought to be toward entrenched connotations of existing turns of phrase. But that being so, usage will adapt to the current conditions.

    Scoops: “as time goes on”

    Here we do have a small bone of contention. What gave those long strings of adjectival nouns special salience to me was the observation that “Newspapers often use many nouns together in headlines to save space.” In our age, people like you and me are swimming in a sea of headlines that are no longer limited to print media. So this is even more broadly applicable than is stated. This “novel” usage is a commonplace. We’re inundated by it. No longer is this phenomenon an at-need aberration. It’s utterly routine.

    As for “dwarfism community”, current polite practice is to cater to the preference of the community itself. The common term for the medical condition being dwarfism, this particular community of sufferers prefers to emphasize the nature of their predicament by reminding the rest of us that what we’re seeing is something that happened to them. What it isn’t is a choice they made. Nor is it a reflection of “who they are”. That is, a stereotype. They’re individuals. They wish to be understood individually.

    I might be wrong to call you “Scoops”. But I wouldn’t do so, if I thought you’d take offense. Just say the word. Well, this use of dwarfism is that. It’s not our first rodeo, either. We are daily trying to cleanse out negative connotations as our various job titles turn into idioms and acquire unwanted insinuations. It’s an arms race, a neverending one, and it’s pitiable. But here we are.

  5. The playoffs for a Browns fan:
    Watching the Bungles make their third trip to the Browns’ none.
    Watching Josh Allen play and knowing they could have drafted him.
    Conclusion: Baseball can’t get here soon enough.

    1. My apologies to Bill & anyone else who’d like to jump in & talk about the NFL or baseball season. I didn’t mean to rain on your parade. Please continue the original discussion. Thanks.

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