"a bit carried away"

[a few words on accidentally quoting Adolf Hitler]

Hey, hi, sorry to interrupt your holiday weekend, and yet.

Check out this paragraph from an article¹ posted by The New York Times yesterday afternoon:

The Moms For² Liberty can get a bit carried away—one of their local chapters once accidentally³ quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”)—but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.

A few notes on this cutesypoo bilge:

1. I just checked Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s lyrics for “Carried Away,” from their (written with Leonard Bernstein, natch) 1944 stage musical On the Town, and I’ve confirmed that at no point do their characters Ozzie and Claire⁴ accidentally quote Adolf Hitler.

2. One of the local chapters of Moms for⁵ Liberty did not “accidentally” quote Adolf Hitler. One of the local chapters of Moms for Liberty posted a fully attributed Adolf Hitler quote directly under its masthead in its June 2023 newsletter.

   

   John Tufts/Indy Star

3. The Times should learn what the word “disavowing” means, and what it doesn’t mean.

4. We do not, in allegedly objective narrative text, refer to Adolf Hitler as “the Führer.”⁶ If the writer of the article was attempting, ultimately ineptly, to perform what Henry Fowler derisively dubbed an “elegant variation” so as to avoid referring twice to Hitler by name, he might have gone, the second time around, with the tried-and-true pronoun “him.”

5. “but still”? As I’ve been known to comment: #YHGtBFKMwTS

Thanks for listening.⁷

👋🏻

Benjamin

P.S.

Dept. of Too Little, Too Late

P.P.S.

Sorry, guys, you left a little double space⁸ in the text when you yanked the word “accidentally.” You might want to clean that up. 🤷🏻‍♂️

le before

le after

By The Way

Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you especially for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way, which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,⁹ in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “Who would have thought that apostrophes and old movies could be so much fun?” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

1. Link not included. You know how to google, don’t you, Steve? You just apply your two fingertips to your keyboard, and type.

2. That’s [sic]; “for” would be my preference.

3. This is how “accidentally” works:

Judy Garland: How’d it happen? Where’d you meet him?

Lucille Bremer: I was coming out of Huntsinger’s, he was coming in. I bumped into him.

Judy Garland: Accidentally?

Lucille Bremer: Almost!

—Meet Me in St. Louis, screenplay by Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe, based on Sally Benson’s 1942 novel of, as they say, the same name

4. In full: Claire de Loone. What can I tell you, there’s also a character in On the Town named Pitkin W. Bridgework. As well, you may read “their characters” in two ways: Comden and Green wrote the show’s libretto and lyrics; they also, in the first Broadway production, played Ozzie and Claire.

5. Ahem.

6. Unless perhaps we are Nazis.

7. Um, reading. That’s how fatootsed I am.

8. Think of it as a tiny window into an evil alternate universe, except we’re living in it.

9. Not to mention Sallie’s!