In light of Ted Cruz's recent faux filibuster, I decided to I look up the origins of the unusual word. It comes from the Spanish "filibustero" with origins stemming from words like privateer and pirate. Just as I suspected, the term "filibuster" was coined by a MAN named Albert G. Brown in 1853. But that's not important. What IS important is that he was male. I knew it had to be named by a man.
If you had asked a woman to name a procedure in which one is allowed to talk for as LONG as one wants about WHATEVER one wants, without interruption, effectively keeping anything at all from actually being accomplished, she would have called it "Better Than Sex".
Note from Anonymiss: By the way, if this sounds familiar, I drudged it up from a post I wrote in March about Rand Paul and just changed the names a bit. If it doesn't sound familiar, ignore than last sentence and bask in my timely originality :)
It is commonly accepted that irderivative terms of art LIKE "filibuster" or "degradligating" (a "lawfare" argot term meaning, essentially "lawfare", or "to {purposely [understood]} degrade through {excessive [understood]} litigation"), although not those two specific terms, were first introduced - well, you can't say "into English" per se - as part of a ginormously elaborate prank* perpatriciated on the Saxons by the Normans. Sadly, "English" itself is really nothing more than the lasting dreadful consequence. We really do speak a "joke language"**.
ReplyDelete*Ha! Made you look!
**Which, strangely, is not very useful for communicating robust insults.
Actually, women would hate filibustering unless there was at least one other person in the Senate chamber who was nodding and making listening noises.
ReplyDeleteSomebody Google this: has a female Senator ever filibustered?