What are you protesting?
Whaddaya got?
Meant to note this one earlier: Kevin points us to a fun little piece by Geoffrey Nunberg on the semantic drift of the word “protest”—since you now hear “pro-war protest” referred to every now and again:
But it sounds a little weird to talk about a protest in support of a war that’s about to be initiated by the Administration in power. Maybe that’s just semantic sloppiness, as if “protesting” nowadays were just a question of getting together to yell slogans—why should the other side have all the fun? Or maybe it’s a strategic blurring of historical memory. It’s hard to keep this stuff straight in an age when the oldies stations are apt to play Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” back-to-back with Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was a number one hit a few months later.
Worth a chuckle.
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