A Little Help For Bill Quick

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by Smitty

A jig is a Celtic dance tune, typically in a 6/8 time signature.
When the piece is finished, the jig is up.
If everything is raaaaacist, nothing is raaaaacist.
Here is one I like to play, when not consumed with work, blogging, newborn son, etc:

Update: no, Bill, even within a conditional “if Geithner were black. . .”, you still haven’t got a case. “The jig is up” has zero racial content. Even if Rachel Maddow were to bloviate for a thousand days straight trying to connect the dots between racism and that phrase, she would only have the historical fact that her daily beclownment strove foolishly for a thousand days. As with “gay marriage”, no amount of juxtaposition of two contradictory ideas can effect their harmonization.

25 comments

  1. why link to that yo-yo? he still allows that freedom of speech stops at the other person’s ear.

    If we allow the easily offended to define the offense and the offendee then we no longer HAVE freedom of speech.

    Words mean things but many words have many meanings.

    even “fighting words” is bad law. who defines them? usually it’s the class of the easily offended. who strangely aren’t offended by the same words being said by a person of their class.

    the ignorant and thin skinned have turned logic on it’s ear and our freedoms are under attack more and more but the attacks mean less and less.

    the offended don’t understand the irony. as smitty points out so succinctly “if everything’s raaaaacist, then nothing is raaaaacist” and so it has become.

    less and less, those who would cringe and cry at being labeled “raaaaacist” now shrug it off. even better many attack their attackers in return.

    only in the media do these sort of pile-on’s still occur and have negative outcomes and only because they advance a particular political agenda or undermine a different political agenda and have the willingness to press the point to infinity.

    the harmful effects of these attacks are becoming obvious to even the most oblivious among us. it is becoming increasingly understood that this sort of complaint has really only one purpose – – to silence other voices.

    liberalism is a disease of the mind; BUT IT IS CURABLE.

  3.  Arguendo, and assuming it is used as an abbreviated form of jigaboo, the only way that word would be racist, as used in the phrase “Geithner’s jig is up” would be if it were referring to a black person in Geithner’s possesion or employ.

    Maybe some unnamed flunky at Treasury?

    Otherwise Quick ain’t quite so.

  4. Bill lives in San Fran; I think it’s something in the water. Of course, I didn’t know him before he moved there; he may have been a cranky SOB long before. 😉

  8. “The jig” was used to describe a game, trick, or scam going back to Shakespeare.  “The jig is up” originally meant precisely what it does now:  some scheme is over, found out, done, busted.  OED gives it as “the game is up, it’s all over.”

    The idiom has absolutely nothing to do with either the Gaelic folk dance or the racial pejorative “jigaboo.”

    An attempt to read racism into the phrase which has been in common usage at least 150 years is just stupid.  So I’d expect it from those whose values are formed by the left.

  9.  Scandi in origin, but in common English usage since at least the mid-16th Century – before Shakespeare, even.  The former Comptroller of the District of Columbia was forced to resign for saying the Mayor’s budget was “niggardly,” meaning of course “stingy” or “miserly,” the word predating any racial epithet and from a different source.  The complaint was what it SOUNDED like, which is a stupid reason to complain, but those raised among leftists or wolves can’t be held to human standards.

    The late Christopher Hitchens wrote an excellent article on the insane treatment of language some years ago [CAUTION:  the tender of ear may be offended – do NOT follow this link if you are a leftist idiot or share their stupidity] – http://tinyurl.com/7p3r3ju

  11. I’m getting bored, I think I’m going to go out for a nice evening of spear chucking. After that I might visit the neighborhood haunted house and see if I can spot a spook. Check you all later.

  12. Yes, Smitty I am aware of the common idiom and it’s proper usage.

    My point was that the usage in reference to Geithner did not adhere to that usage, therefore was open to alternate interpretation, but even on that basis Quick’s argument still fails.

  14. “Here is one I like to play, when not consumed with work, blogging, newborn son, etc:”

    That’s a bad axe, dude.  Hard to tune, harder to play in tune. 

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