Warning, not necessarily work-friendly/child-(under-18)-friendly. Don't get me wrong--no pictures and nothing (probably) too dirty, and, to be sure, it's probably more than downright tame. But still, it makes me blush a little:

Jesse Sheidlower last Thursday, on Slate wrote a piece on last Monday's New York Times' Crossword Puzzle, number 43 down. The hint was "scoundrel," the answer was "scumbag." Apparently, many readers were outraged (scumbag originally meant "condom"--scum, meaning "semen." This, of course, makes me wonder at the origins of the word "come," or "cum," and if it's at all related to scum or simply to "having arrived," and, more interestingly, perhaps, if other languages have the same form: e.g., "Je suis arrivee." Anyhow:). I'd take issue with the hint itself: a scoundrel is different from a scumbag, in my mind--scumbag is more of a "sleazeball" (different etymology, apparently, here). A scoundrel is more of a villain, in my mind. But I'm veering off course:

I agree, for the most part, with Sheidlower's--language is evolutionary and scumbag just doesn't mean what it used to. In fact, scumbag is relatively tame compared to what people throw around: ass hole, etc., and my favorite, of course, douche bag. I think Sheidlower is right to note that we'd be in a world of trouble if we were to take words for the meanings they originally had, or, at the very least, seem like they ought to have.

But there's just one part which I raise issue with: Sheidlower fails to see what's so bad about a scumbag, in general. But there's a misstep here: scumbag, replaced by "condom" is fairly innocuous--sterile, even. But scumbag, I'd argue, is something analogous to calling someone a "sack of shit," but worse, in some respects: speaking as a guy, I feel there's something fundamentally more offensive about being a voluminous bolus of ejaculate than a large containment of excrement.

Stop laughing, I'm (kinda) serious.

And, to be perfectly honest, all this puts a different spin on early twentieth century slang: if scumbag was (and apparently still is) so offensive, how about words like "hot-diggety," "jerk," "gosh," "darn?" maybe there's some lost seduction in being "the cat's pyjamas," "snakes shoes," or "loosey-goosey" that makes wholesome nineteen-thirties through nineteen-fifties slang somehow "come alive?"

After all, our grandparents were once our age...

Alas, it is no longer particularly surprising to note that a top professor is leaving the University of Chicago Law School for another place. But it appears that Alan Sykes is headed to Stanford . . .

Sai Prakash and Steven Smith (both of San Diego) have a draft of their forthcoming piece in the Yale Law Journal, How to Remove a Federal Judge up on SSRN. In a nutshell, the Constitution's grant of "good behavior" tenure permits federal judges to be removed by a simple finding of misbehavior. It does not demand that they be impeached.

The final draft of the piece should be coming out in the fall in the Journal.