Steve Dyer

A heartbreaking quote from Judy Shepard:

"After Matt came out to me, he once asked me if I thought gay couples would ever be allowed to get married. I told him I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime, but it probably would in his. It’s so sad, and ironic, that it turned out the other way. But this case warms my heart, to think that his dream is still coming true. Dennis and I look forward to the day when loving, committed couples are able to marry in every state.”—Judy Shepard on the Prop 8 decision

I wish Matt's mom and my mom—his Judy and my Judy—had been able to meet. I think they would've become great friends.

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STUDENT LOAN RATES SET TO DOUBLE ON JULY 1ST. The interest rate on government-backed student loans is going to jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent Monday. —NPR, June 28, 2013

1. o no o no

2. i’m still behind by $150 worth of payments

3. just for fun whats 6.8 percent of 150 oh i don’t even know how to calculate that
like 12 bucks?
great there goes another pack of Sally Hansen nail decals

4. it really doesn’t seem very fair

5. these are supposed to be more affordable than private loans but my private loan is at 9% and 6.8 is not that far from 9

6. i can’t stop singing that sheena easton song “my baby takes the morrrrrrrnin train!”

7. if my entire government loan is $40,000 (hahah ugh fuck) whats 6.8 percent of that come on lauren you can do this

8. i honestly have no idea how to calculate what that would be

9. god i’m dumb i honestly hate math

10. “he works from 9 to 5 and then he takes another home again”

11. 40 thousand dollars times 6 point eight percent

12. is it 40,000 X 0.068?

13. i literally took AP calculus and fucking figured out the area of a curve on a plane, which DIDN’T EXIST, and i can’t figure out this shit?

14. oh is it only for new loans?

15. no i thought it was for all loans

16. oh ok great well forget it

17. “my baby takes the morning train”

Lauren Rodrigue lives in New York.

Minutes after the Supreme Court struck down DOMA, an immigration judge in NYC halted the deportation of a Colombian man married to a US citizen.

(Hat tip: Esther Yu-Hsi Lee)

Linda Hirshman thinks SCOTUS contradicted itself on the issue of standing:

Maybe Hollingsworth was an honest commitment to the niceties of federal standing. But denying the Prop 8 advocates standing while extending it to the Congressional Republicans in Windsor is a little awkward. The policy argument the Court articulated to grant standing in Windsor—that the Court did not want the president to usurp their role of deciding constitutional cases by refusing to defend a law and destroying standing—applies with equal force to the California government in Hollingsworth. The Court’s role in deciding the constitutionality of state laws is as great, and almost as old, as its role in federal cases. Yet the Court just turned over to the governor of California the ability to destroy its jurisdiction to decide the constitutionality of Prop 8.

The incoherence of the two standing opinions, taken together, makes it more likely Hollingsworth was simply a decision to duck for a little while longer: There are a bunch of other direct challenges in the pipeline that don’t involve a standing problem. But the language of Windsor foretells that when the court does poke its heads over the trench it will be to make the final charge toward victory.

It was the legitimate one: not the Benghazi bullshit or a surveillance program checked by Congress and the courts, whose secrecy was the scandal. This was the accusation that Barack Obama was Richard Nixon, ordering the IRS to target conservative – and only conservative – groups in their legitimate attempt to check on whether “social welfare” groups actually were just campaign machines. To give a sense of how far the Republican partisans went with this – completely unproven – allegation, let’s leave Darrell Issa behind, shall we? He’s such a creep he’d say anything anyhow to advance his own career.

Let’s go to one Peggy Noonan, once a relatively sane, if lugubrious, columnist for the WSJ. She’s been running around yelling Watergate for a while now, and just accused the president of an impeachable attempt to use the power of government to destroy his political foes:

One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?” They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.” …

Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.

Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did.

And so she reaches back to her “Romney-Will-Win” pre-election mindset. He did. But it was stolen! Now check out how far the WSJ’s James Taranto has run with this Nixonian meme (yes, the right is now anti-Nixon, when it comes in handy):

Notice, en passant, that the WSJ is now indistinguishable both in party line and total hysteria from Fox News and talk radio (not that it’s ed-page was anything but extreme, but at least it was smart). Now check out the latest details from the IRS about 501 (c) 4 and 501 (c) 3 entities:

The instructions that Internal Revenue Service officials used to look for applicants seeking tax-exempt status with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their titles also included groups whose names included the words “Progressive” and “Occupy,” according to I.R.S. documents released Monday. … One such “be on the lookout” list included medical marijuana groups, organizations that were promoting President Obama’s health care law, and applications that dealt “with disputed territories in the Middle East.” … “Common thread is the word ‘progressive,’ ” a lookout list instructs. “Activities appear to lean toward a new political party. Activities are partisan and appear as anti-Republican.” Groups involved more generally in carrying out the Affordable Care Act were also sent to the I.R.S. for “secondary screening.” And “occupied territory advocacy” seemed subject to the most scrutiny of all.

So we begin to see the actual truth (and where it usually is, Page A14): the IRS was rightly scrutinizing a whole slew of new groups claiming to be all about “social welfare” and checking to see how politicized they were – on both sides. Most of those on the progressive side were seeking 501(c)3s – not 501(c)4s – so the parallel isn’t exact. But it sure suggests nothing of any malign nature here. Par exemple:

Ameinu, which on its website calls itself a “community of progressive Jews,” received its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status on May 28 — five years after applying. IRS agents peppered the group with 18-page surveys and lingered for months without follow-up, Hiam Simon, national director of Ameinu, said in a telephone interview. He said he was looking at a 4-inch thick folder of Ameinu’s communications with the IRS. “I think they were painting with a broad brush, with worries about Middle East ties to terrorism,” he said of the IRS. “I don’t think it was caused by malice. Ignorance is too strong a word, too. They simply weren’t nuanced enough or careful enough.”

They’re not perfect, but this is the critical fact:

Werfel said his review of the agency’s actions hasn’t found evidence of intentional wrongdoing or involvement from outside the IRS. That’s consistent with the findings so far of congressional investigators.

So time’s up, Peggy. Put up or shut up – especially with the outrageous smear that the president was behind this. The IRS was trying to flush out bogus non-political groups on both sides. That’s what we pay them to do. Since the targeting used classic code words on right and left, it may have been unwise as an administrative policy, but it sure wasn’t illegal or scandalous. And you can see why, given the volume of applications, these might have been shortcuts to expedite the process.

I think this scandal just evaporated into thin air.

Please let me know if you find any right-wing outlets that have pushed this untrue story that are actually reporting on this new IRS data (this attempt by NRO is lame or needs further clarification); and whether – God help us – they are apologizing and correcting. Over to you, Mr O’Reilly. And Ms Noonan.

Where’s your Richard Nixon now? Breaking into Republican Party offices?

Gabe says, ”There have been many phone conversations in many movies over the years, but it is widely agreed that this is the very best one”:

Colbert’s eulogy for his late mother:

tastefullyoffensive:

Dogs from this year’s Creative Dog Grooming Competition in Hershey, Pennsylvania. [telegraph/via]

The Honorable Representative Louie Gohmert is prone to confusion. Again and again, he says things that just aren’t true. And he just demonstrated his lack of mental clarity in this conversation with ThinkProgress:

THINKPROGRESS: Where do you stand on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act?

GOHMERT: I’m not aware of exactly which one you’re talking about

THINKPROGRESS: It would protect LGBT workers from being fired due to their sexual orientation.

GOHMERT: Who wants to go talking about sexual orientation when they’re working? Good grief.

Apparently the Honorable Representative Gohmert has forgotten this bit on his official government web page:

Today, he and his wife Kathy are the proud parents of three daughters.

Surely the Honorable Representative is no hypocrite. This must be another instance of his confusion taking hold. I suggest we call his offices and ask him to remove this bit of information that (“Good grief”) he himself would find offensive if he knew it was there.

I’ve already called both his offices. To paraphrase the conversation:

Me: I’d like to ask that the Congressman remove all references to his wife from his official website.

Them: His wife?

Me: Yes. He says that sexual orientation shouldn’t be discussed in the workplace, so he should start by removing all references to his own orientation from official communication.

Them: Okaaaay. I’ll pass that on.

His staff were quite pleasant to me, and I suggest offering them the same courtesy in return. Here are his numbers:

Washington D.C. office: (202) 225-3035

Tyler, Texas office: (903) 561-6349

We owe the Honorable Representative every assistance, given the intellectual demands of his duties and apparent ability to carry them out.

So, yeah, about this story...

Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night noted that Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX) was a leading member of a House subcommittee focused on public health and biomedical issues. Burgess said Monday he supported the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act because male fetuses pleasure themselves as early as 15-weeks after conception. The bill, which would impose a ban on abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, was approved by House Republicans on Tuesday. “It is one thing to be a random Texas congressman, Michael Burgess, saying that we should set laws for everybody in the whole country based on when he thinks fetuses masturbate,” Maddow remarked. “But this guy also is in charge of something. The House Republicans took the fetal masturbation theorist and put him in charge of their Subcommittee on Health.”

I haven't seen the proof. No one has. But for the sake of argument—sigh—let's concede the point: boy fetuses are in there pleasuring themselves. They're rubbing 'em out, one after another. And it's just the boy fetuses because, you know, there aren't any outlets in there where girl fetuses can plug in their itty bitty Hitachi Magic Wands. So! At the same time congressional Republicans are moving to ban abortion because THE BOYS ARE MASTURBATING IN THERE, Republicans in various states are passing laws that require women to submit to medically unnecessary trans-vaginal ultrasounds—against the will of the woman, if necessary, which meets the legal definition of rape. (But whatever! there are boys masturbating in there! Priorities, people!)

So, yeah, if boy fetuses are masturbating in there and we're passing laws requiring doctors to take their pictures... and make videoes... of horny boy fetuses and chaste girl fetuses alike... aren't Republicans in Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Texas basically mandating the production of child porn with their trans-vaginal-ultrasound/rape-that-lady laws? At least half the time?

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In January, my friends Erin and Christopher had a baby and so a fleet of us descended upon their house with assorted casseroles and other heat-and-eat type meals. It’s a beautiful convention that when a loved one’s life is upended, whether by a newborn baby or illness or grief, people show up with food. For wimps like me though, even day-to-day life can feel like trying to find a foothold on a wall of slime. Erin thought so too, and so she rallied a few households of her friends to start an informal dinner share. I am unbearably evangelical about this now, so I have interviewed myself about it for Billfold readers’ benefit.

How does it work?
We bought nine collective matching Pyrex casserole dishes divided evenly among our three households of two people each. Each Sunday, each household makes three dinners’ worth of a meal. It should be something that can be baked from frozen or refrigerated to make a full meal without much additional preparation. Then we all exchange dishes, leaving us with two new dinners in addition to the dinner we made for ourselves. In our case, all the households are vegetarian. My husband and I alternate Sundays cooking so I really only have to do it twice a month. After we eat the meals, we wash the casserole dishes and cook the next week’s thing in them. There is usually enough food in each meal to portion out for the next day’s lunch for both of us, so EXTRA MEAL.

Is this the greatest?
Yeah, it is really good. We spend $15-$20 in groceries used just for the dinner share. That excludes staples like oil, rice, garlic, or spices that we have at home already. So $15-20 is the amount we end up spending per week on 3 dinners, and 2-3 leftover lunches for 2 people.

Are you rich from the savings?
No, but I am rich in ENTHUSIASM about cheaply eating good food that I didn’t have to cook.

Shouldn’t you set this up with five households so that you have a different meal for every weeknight?
Yeah, I guess if you had really enthusiastic and organized friends, that could be a thing. We usually eat out one night a week, and I might have a night where I work late and don’t feel like doing anything when I get home besides eating cereal in bed while my laptop scorches my bare legs. Also, you run into problems of scaleability if you have a modest apartment kitchen and non-industrial cookware. And why would you have a 10 gallon stock pot? You’re just a guy.

Is it a drag to schlep the food around each week?
Not really. The whole thing is far less annoying then gawking around the produce section in my sweaty workout clothes trying to remember how cooking works on a Tuesday night. These are my friends so it just means I stick around for a drink on the porchm or sometimes if Erin’s baby is awake, I get to smell his neck. He tries to play it cool, but dude breaks really easily, so I get to feel hilarious in his presence for the full 20 minutes that we are bros before he starts crying. If you form a similar dinner share with people who haven’t seen you ugly-cry, it might work to have a standard weekly meeting time and location. We just text each other when we’re good for a pick-up or delivery. And sometimes we have to ask for an extension, just like in life.

I feel like you are eating a lot of lasagna.
It probably seems like the one-dish heat-or-reheat format makes for some heavy, boring meals but we have been able to keep it interesting. Kashi makes a black bean and mango pilaf frozen entree thing that I ripped off one week to great success. Soups and stews work, too, and you can send them along with biscuits, corn muffins, etc. This week, my husband made some koshari that was delicious. The meals are a little dense, and we usually do some quick veggies or a salad on the side. That can be done while the entree is in the oven.

Do you worry about people judging your food?
Not really. I am a serviceable home cook and welcome the challenge of cooking something interesting for my friends every week. My husband and I are both veterans of the intense potlucking that happens in DIY culture so we have been offering up homemades for years. We also were in a rut of making some lame tofu curry thing with rice every goddamn day, so now I get to learn how other people put food together. Also, if you totally shit the bed one week and roll up with red sauce on elbow mac, they’re just your friends! They will probably think it’s funny. And then eat it, because why not. Maybe if they were acquaintances or coworkers, their judgement would be ice water in my colon, but I doubt it. I do yoga or whatever.

Evelyn Garcia tweets from Columbus, Ohio about running and sour candy.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, boxed set: The New Millennium Edition: $134.29
I promise this is related. I have mice in my apartment. A lot of mice. The people at the building management company told me it was a building-wide infestation until a few weeks ago, when it became a my-apartment-only infestation. They’d been diligently bombing mouse nests in the courtyard and eradicating mice from the other apartments for some time, so when I called to report that I’d seen a mouse sprinting to get behind my refrigerator before I could retaliate, the nice lady who answers the phone (and probably does a million other things) told me the mice were mostly gone from everywhere else.

Anyway, the Feynman Lectures shouldn’t count toward the total because I didn’t buy them—they were a gift.

Comically large glue traps: ???
I can’t even bring myself to Google these to find out how much they cost. The exterminator brought them over after the mice crapped all over the smaller traps and laughed about it later with their mouse friends. The glue traps are big enough to fit a whole bunch of mice on them at once. This will be important later. For weeks there was a huge black glue trap on top of my fridge and three or four of them on the ground near the kitchen, collecting dust.

CVS rubber gloves with aloe (one pair): $3.99
There’s always a pair of rubber gloves in my kitchen because I don’t have a dishwasher and washing dishes dries out my hands in a really serious way.

Plastic bags from the plastic-bag stash under the sink: Free
There are so many mice. I see them practically every time I’m in the kitchen. I see one leap out from behind the microwave and into the hole around one of the burners on the stove in a single fluid motion, as if he’s been practicing all day. I hear them in the wee hours of every morning, gnawing on my furniture and skittering around in the dark.

It’s completely out of hand and I’m not even scared of mice. I keep telling people it’s a good thing this isn’t a spider infestation. But I can’t look at another mouse. My startle reflex, which, even on a very calm day after two or three glasses of wine is at least an order of magnitude more sensitive than a regular person’s, is malfunctioning. Every time I think I see anything move out of the corner of my eye I jump. Where is that little bastard? WHERE IS HE.

Old iPhone 4S: $399; Headphones: $22
What is that noise. No seriously what is it. It sounds like the eagle in the opening credits of the Colbert Report is being tortured by government defense contractors in my kitchen. No such luck. There are two mice in the glue trap next to the stove and they are shrieking. Of course they are. They’re alive and stuck in a glue trap. You’re starting to put it together now.

I’ve been stalling but obviously the only thing I can do here is crank the volume on my phone, put on the rubber gloves, throw a plastic bag over the trap and then drop all three volumes of the Feynman Lectures directly on top of the quivering, suffering heap. Stand on the books. Wait several minutes just in case. I didn’t say take off the gloves. Then carefully slide the books off of the trap and put the trap and plastic bag into a second, larger plastic bag and get it out of the apartment as quickly as possible.

This is not the first time I’ve dropped a large book on representatives of an invasive species in an apartment where I lived. The first time it was the Norton Anthology of Literature and about 400 million ants. There were so many ants that if you left a glass of orange juice (empty except for a little OJ residue at the very bottom of the glass) on the table by the couch like my roommate did once, the glass would be covered in ants within seconds. It was a horrible basement apartment. It wasn’t my finest hour.

Partial rent-reimbursement: -$220
This is the part where you ask yourself whether you would rather have $220 or a life that did not involve crushing a couple of doomed shrieking mice with all three volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Even for a frugal person like me, this is not a difficult choice. But nobody asked me and here we are. There’s a little bit of glue stuck to the box the Feynman Lectures are in. I wonder if there’s a chapter about adhesives. There must be.

Aubrey Henretty writes about language and critical thinking at wordmonster.org. Photo: Brett Jordon

Cass Sunstein sees Uber – the app that connects people to luxury car service - as an existential threat to “taxi dinosaurs,” if it can get past the various regulatory hurdles that keep popping up:

[T]here is an important place for rules designed to promote safety and to prevent fraud or deception. But regulation of the taxi industry goes far beyond those goals. That regulation is a dinosaur; it should become extinct. Uber’s innovative approach raises a still more fundamental question. In countless domains, people have to spend a great deal of time and effort on searching and matching. For auto repairs, home repairs, household help, tutors and even child care, it can be difficult to find a convenient and reliable service. Wouldn’t it be a great improvement, indeed an amazing boon to people (and the economy as a whole), if a wide range of services, available on simple apps, emerged to decrease the costs of search?

Because of the happy combination of new technologies and private entrepreneurship, that possibility is getting more realistic every day. We shouldn’t allow pointless regulatory barriers, and self-interested private groups, to delay its time of arrival.

Previous Dish on Uber here.

lifewithajetsetter:

At the function 

M. Night Shyamalan, King of the Twist Ending, has revealed that he ghost-wrote the screenplay to the 1999 teen rom-com She's All That, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook. Shyamalan, whose Will Smith apocalypse movie After Earth just flopped, opened about his secret screenwriting credit to Movies.com but didn't go into any detail. Shyamalan also wrote The Sixth Sense and family movie Stuart Little, both of which he received credit for, around this same time, so he had a pretty eclectic list of credits as a burgeoning screenwriter. Here's hoping he wrote more teen rom-coms that he'll fess up to soon.

---

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Remember that time Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? #NotTheOnion

— Jon Henke (@JonHenke) June 10, 2013

"This Is Not The Onion” is a seemingly innocuous phrase that strikes such loathing into my heart that after I read it I want to punch a wall until I feel okay again. Even if you stop reading after this paragraph, please internalize at least this much: Stop. Comparing. Everything. To the fucking Onion.

As long as you’re a sentient being and you’ve been on the Internet in the last year, you probably don’t need to be clued in to what I’m over-complaining about. But just in case, here are a few recent-vintage examples of the odious phenomenon in question:

In Politico’s Playbook, Mike Allen prefaced a story about the lack of warning signs surrounding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev this way: "Not the Onion: College Friends Saw No Hint Of Trouble." (Hilarious stuff, Mike!) There’s an entire Subreddit devoted to stories that are "not the Onion." (Sample headlines: "GOP Congressman Uses Bible to Justify Punishing the Poor"; "Amanda Bynes in negotiations for a rap deal.") Even the New York Times dropped it in an article about Cathie Black recently; Jim Dwyer wrote that unearthed correspondence between mayoral aides trying to salvage the tenure of Bloomberg’s erstwhile superintendent "read as it might have been lifted from The Onion, the satirical newspaper."

Where "not the Onion" truly thrives, though, is on Twitter, where hackneyed phrases go to die a slow, repetitive death.

First of all, let’s get this key fact out of the way: none of the stories in question ever sound anything at all like The Onion, which, after all these years, remains unimpeachably hilarious — often imitated, never very well.

But “not the Onion” isn’t just about not being The Onion. It’s indicative of a larger problem we face as a society, which falls, in its level of seriousness, somewhere between “there are too many good TV shows now” and “irreversible climate change.” That problem is a dulling sameness of phraseology, a glib shorthand that has bloomed everywhere, but especially online, and especially on social media. If you hang around Twitter long enough, you’ll become alternately inured to and irritated by the grinding repetitiveness of a few stock phrases, which come at you like a Greek chorus of unoriginality. While much has been made of Twitter groupthink — the tendency to inflate the importance of your chosen hive-mind’s opinion at the expense of what the Real World actually thinks — just as pernicious is Twitter groupspeak: everyone tweeting the same goddamn horrible stupid empty phrases over and over again.

Two distinct types of cliche are currently poisoning our Twitter discourse. The first is all about exaggeration: blowing up the significance of the item you’re sharing with the world to unreasonable proportions. "Not the Onion" fits snugly into this box: "Check out this wacky story!" you’re telling your follower. "It’s so crazy!!" (Spoiler alert: It’s not so crazy. Christ, I just dropped “spoiler alert.” That might actually be worse than “not the Onion.”)

If you see something mildly surprising and want to let everyone else know that you’re surprised, the Twitter-groupspeak way to react is "Wow," "Whoa," or its gratingly misspelled offspring, "Woah." (All of these usages popped up, like clockwork, as I was checking Twitter to avoid writing this article. A new variant is the simple "Oh," preceding an objectionable retweet.)

Whoa. This smart helmet monitors cyclists' vitals slate.me/10FB6nj

— Slate (@Slate) May 29, 2013

Whoa RT @rosiegray: via @dylanbyers, apparently Larry King is joining RT. politico.com/blogs/media/20…

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) May 29, 2013

Woah, @michkeegan 'had strong words with @brookelvincent' on her birthday night out!? ok.co.uk/celebrity-news…

— OK! Magazine (@OK_Magazine) June 11, 2013

Spot a story that’s of interest to you and probably a few of your followers? Why not label it the dreaded "must-read"?

MUST-READ: "I was a liberal mole at Fox News" — @joemuto reveals inside dirt on O'Reilly, Hannity & Ailes slnm.us/pXTLzFT

— Salon.com (@Salon) May 29, 2013

Must-read lunch links: You've been playing Monopoly all wrong | ti.me/142SZgP (via @timenewsfeed)

— TIME.com (@TIME) May 28, 2013

Gun Makers Saw No Role in Curbing Improper Sales. Another must-read on guns from McIntire and @michaelluonyti.ms/13VK8Rp

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) May 28, 2013

Look, there are wonderful things published on the Internet every day. But must-read? Is anything really a must-read other than, say, a stop sign? Maybe "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold"? No, probably not even that.

Perhaps most egregiously—if you want to label someone an irritant, just call them a "troll." As Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has astutely observed, that word’s definition has slowly devolved from "an online troublemaker whose specific intent is to create havoc" to "someone on the Internet who disagrees with me," or "someone who is merely seeking attention." On Twitter, the word pops up roughly once every three seconds. It has spawned a new mini-catchphrase, "Now he/she’s just trolling us," which means "Before, this person was being obnoxious, but now, they have stooped to the level of actual malignancy." Like trolling itself, the phrase doesn’t actually mean much of anything.

he's just trolling us now, right? is this burnt sienna? twitpic.com/cthjo5

— Bomani Jones (@bomani_jones) May 27, 2013

What is the purpose of all this amplification? For news organizations—and many of these examples come to you by way of their social media editors—it makes some sense; play up your headline, get some social media love. For individuals, it’s a little more complex. Certainly we’ve all become accustomed to overzealous call-to-action headlines everywhere ("This Skateboarding Fail WILL Make You Cry With Laughter"). Following that lead, we’re also willing to promise to entertain our followers and solidify our own important in the social media pecking order. These tics are often a way of imparting urgency to followers: to get the message across that your Twitter feed is important, essential, worth paying attention to—and, by the by, so are you.

Or maybe, Twitter is just full of really, truly enthusiastic people. (That would explain why roughly 77% of users label themselves as an "enthusiast" of something or other in their profiles.)

Most other Twitter clichés fit into another, less noticeable but equally irritating category: the hoary, unfunny catchphrase. These are played-out expressions seemingly meant to telegraph to the reader that the writer is a humorous person who understands jokes. (Though they’re most certainly not jokes themselves.) Like "not The Onion," they aren’t specific to Twitter. They thrive there though, acting act as a sort of original-thought substitute, a way of saying something without actually saying something.

Take the phrase "I see what you did there." It’s a standard way of acknowledging someone else’s cleverness that’s been around forever. It’s long been big on Twitter.

Or "stay classy," which, nine years after it appeared in Anchorman, seems to show no signs of letting up as the default thing to say when a person or entity has disgusted you. (Anchorman 2 returns this holiday season, so, prepare.)

Or "well-played, sir" (a personal least-favorite of mine), which is usually a too-cute way of saying "you did something clever."

Or that thing where people start tweets with "that thing where." Or "shots fired." Or "I can’t even with this" or “Too soon.” Or “serious question” to preface an obviously serious question. “Or apparently __ is a thing.” Or “pro tip.” Or “this is why we can’t have nice things.” Or “derp,” which recently ran into a much-deserved backlash. Or...well, I could go on for a while here.

(Oh: the latest craze, for some reason, is to begin your tweet with "in which," as if you were a character in a 19th-century novel and this was one of your whimsical chapter headings. In Which this trend needs to stop now.)

In which, we learn “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” is an easy password to crack.arstechnica.com/security/2013/…

— NYT Bits Blog (@nytimesbits) May 28, 2013

In which Courtney Love offers advice to Amanda Bynes: bit.ly/1aw56Xd

— Jezebel (@Jezebel) May 28, 2013

In Which We Learn That The CIA Was Instrumental In Breaking The Swiss Bank Secrecy Code zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-0…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 9, 2013

What the phrases all have in common is their flatness. They feign cleverness, but, as with their real-world cousins—like the sarcastic “Really??”—they have become so trite as to be rendered filler. Each is the eighth song on a Chumbawamba album.

It’s kind of like modern TV commercials. Since “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the British version of “The Office” made awkward-silence comedy broadly popular, roughly 60% of ads feature three beats of silence that go where the joke used to be. If I were going to pitch a commercial now, it’d be a guy walking into a room, and he’s holding a bag of Fritos or whatever, and then a guy in a Batman costume crashes through the ceiling and they stare at each other for ten seconds like “Whaaaat just happened??” THAT’S NOT A PUNCHLINE. But I think the ad people would go for it, because it has all the outward appearances of “comedy.”

And I think “comedy” is what this is all about. As Salon’s Alex Pareene wrote last November, Twitter has become a sort of Improv for the masses, where everyone has to prove their joke bona fides, even if there’s nothing particularly funny to say. A choice stock phrase allows you to do that without really exposing yourself, but it's certainly not vital or interesting. While conversational puffery has no doubt been a scourge since the dawn of language, Twitter’s endless stream of opinions makes it particularly hard to take.

In the end, all these tics, no matter how silly, come at a cost. They amplify Twitter’s verbal echo chamber, and they also make everything feel, for lack of a better word, lamer. Far be it from me to subscribe to the "Twitter is ruining everything" crowd. And I don't sign on with the "Twitter has been ruined" folks. Those pieces are tiresome and wrong. Twitter remains great in fundamental ways. But squelching the clamor to turn everything into a quasi-joke will help preserve the things that are fun about it ,and striking rotten groupthink habits from your writing—yes, even your tweet-writing—will serve you and—more importantly, me—best. Just try to remember the fundamentals: it’s probably not a must-read, it doesn’t sound like The Onion, and it’s not trolling. Woah.

Benjamin Hart is a front-page editor at The Huffington Post. Despite everything, he'd like it if you followed him on Twitter.

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