Super Tuesday bug time
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Typo of the week:
Chris Christie endorsement of Trump is a major breakthrough.this is a huge step for Trump and will impact super tuesday bug time.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) February 26, 2016
Adrian Morgan said,
February 27, 2016 @ 8:25 am
I think it refers to a TV channel that normally devotes Tuesday evenings to documentaries about insects. Unfortunately, some live show about Trump is expected to go overtime and cut into the timeslot. The public outcry against this decision will eventually lead to an insect being elected President.
(But seriously: there's actually a thing in American politics called Super Tuesday? Ugh.)
[(myl) Yes, Super Tuesday. But come on, glass houses and all — no one from the UK is in a position to sneer at the oddities of American political terminology…]
Jerry Friedman said,
February 27, 2016 @ 9:30 am
I think Gingrich meant "bugly".
By the way, as I occasionally tell my students, Newt's Third Law is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reactionary.
Victor Mair said,
February 27, 2016 @ 9:35 am
Just while Jerry Friedman was typing his note about "bugly", I was preparing this:
=====
Hah! Newt must have been reading Language Log comments (see here [first comment] and here [fourth comment]).
The possible linkage between "big league" and "big time" had already been covered by Mark in the o.p. leading up to his discussion of the Bush-Cheney flap over Adam Clymer.
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Adrian Morgan said,
February 27, 2016 @ 9:45 am
@myl I'm Australian. And without suggesting for a moment that we couldn't be the recipients of a sneer or three, I can't think of any political terms that have connotations of wild enthusiasm. :-)
bratschegirl said,
February 27, 2016 @ 10:58 am
Now picturing the remaining Republican candidates all trying to squeeze into the same VW bug… Last one in is voted off the island and has to endorse Trump?
Guy said,
February 27, 2016 @ 5:08 pm
@Adrian Morgan
Right now it's sometimes also called the "SEC primary", after the athletic conference, which I find even more annoying.
maidhc said,
February 27, 2016 @ 6:14 pm
That's the period the FBI has scheduled to retrieve the day's information from your phone.
Y said,
February 27, 2016 @ 10:08 pm
I finally got it. He meant to say Christie endorsed Thrips.
Makes perfect sense now.
D.O. said,
February 27, 2016 @ 11:03 pm
And why exactly Super Tuesday is worse than, say, Black Friday or Black Monday, for that matter? Or are you objecting to "super" part? But in America, super is a pretty normal word. It even has as one of its meanings somebody who watches over a multi-apartment building (well, this one of course, would be a noun, but nonetheless). US even wanted at some moment to build SSC, which stands for superconducting super collider, but it was super expensive and president Clinton together with Congress killed it to make a dent in a super large budget deficit.
Ray said,
February 28, 2016 @ 6:26 am
newts eat bugs, right? at times?
January First-of-May said,
February 28, 2016 @ 11:58 am
Minus the "insect elected president" part, I like Adrian Morgan's suggestion for its sheer plausibility.
Incidentally, I have no problem with the name "Super Tuesday", though I agree that for a complete outsider it would probably sound a bit silly.
(I'm a bit desensitized to American election weirdness from AH.com political timelines, which had taught me that there's lots of election weirdness in pretty much any country. And that there's mainly been even more historically.
I'm even more desensitized to American stuff in particular due to the 2012 campaign, where Obama was the clear Democratic front-runner and didn't really do much of a campaign in the first place, while the assorted Republican candidates seemed to try their best to appear ever more ludicrously conservative – and thus, especially to non-Americans, ever sillier.)
J.W. Brewer said,
February 28, 2016 @ 8:52 pm
FWIW, my personal American view is that the most strikingly awesome bit of AustEng political jargon is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_spill.
D.O. said,
February 28, 2016 @ 10:27 pm
As things go, I think we gonna have 2 Super Tuesdays this season, March 1 and March 15. Should we call them "half-super Tuesdays"?
BZ said,
February 29, 2016 @ 1:07 pm
I'm still hoping that Tuesday elections will at some point be moved to a weekend or at least made into public holidays. If this does happen, I wouldn't be too surprised if a non-Tuesday "Super Tuesday" would exist. I mean "Super Sunday" is taken, right?
Nik Berry said,
February 29, 2016 @ 1:10 pm
@Adrian Morgan Jeez mate, the bloody septic called you a pom.
Adrian Morgan said,
February 29, 2016 @ 7:28 pm
@Nik My theory is that Mark quickly visited my blog and assumed the photographs taken in Ardrossan were from the one in Scotland. They're actually from Ardrossan, South Australia, and I didn't feel the need to mention that they weren't taken in Scotland in December! :-) The building that looks like a castle is really a grain silo.
(For some reason I've had an inordinate number of clickthroughs to my very humble blog from this thread. I hope it's because people enjoyed my contribution and not because they wondered what sort of a jerk would write that! :-) )