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The Three Whisky Happy Hour Celebrates Stanford’s Christmas List

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As you may have heard, Stanford "University" embarrassed itself this week by issuing a list of 160 words or phrases that you shouldn't use because they are not sufficiently "inclusive" or sensitive, including even "trigger warning," because, Stanford helpfully explained, "The phrase can cause stress about what's to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular person." And although "American" is among the terms Stanford disapproves (which prompted Steve to break precedent and quaff Maker's Mark instead of Scotch whisky, because damnit), strangely the phrase "Merry Christmas" does not appear on the list of "Harmful Language." Must be an oversight, or perhaps Stanford's geniuses are among those ignoramuses who deny that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

You could hardly ask for a more entertaining Christmas gift than Stanford's list. We thought to make the list a drinking game for this episode, in which we take a shot every time each of us used one of the terms from the list, but we quickly realized that we'd all be passed out within five minutes. Of the 160 terms or phrases on the Stanford list, your 3WHH bartenders managed to use 108, (several of them multiple times), which we expect will get us banned from campus henceforth.

This politically incorrect vocabulary came in handy for reviewing the insanity of the omnibus budget bill and Mitch McConnell's role in its passage, and the release at last of the J-6 Committee report, which, at 800 pages, is going to require a lot of whisky and milk and cookies in the morn to get through.

Cheers, and merry Christmas. We'll be back with one more episode before New Year's next weekend, and we'll aim to use the remaining 52 words from the Stanford list that we overlooked this week. To invoke John McClain, "Welcome to the party, pal!"

Host:
Steve Hayward
Guests:
JYJohn Yoo"Lucretia"

Discussion (11)

  • Leslie Watkins@LeslieWatkins

    So much fun! Really appreciate this festive episode right before Christmas! . . . The worst part, to me, of Stanford’s sophomoric dictionary-i-tis is how much it reveals the inability of supposedly intelligent grownups to grasp the fact that discretion is often the better part of valor.

  • LibertyDefender@LibertyDefender

    I'm only partway through, having been busy and then my listening was interrupted by the Zoom live podcast, but I must pause to point out

    "Balls to the Wall"

    is a great phrase meaning "go all out" or "full throttle," but it does not refer to male anatomy. The origins of the phrase lie in multi-engine aviation. The throttle controls for airplane engines are levers that are pushed forward to increase power and pulled aft to decrease power. There are typically round knobs - balls - at the top of each lever. "Balls to the wall" means to push the throttle lever knobs as far forward as they will go, all the way forward to the bulkhead -to the wall, if you will.

    "Tar baby" - I don't have time to get into a discussion of the implication that Mitch McConnell might be a problem that is too complicated and sticky even to try and solve, therefore is best left alone.

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