Too Much To Dream

The obsession has in fact caused Mr. Davies to need to respond to counterattacks on many, far-flung blogs. He's taken quite a flogging at Jane Galt's Asymmetrical Information, for instance.

Somehow I don't think it has much to do with Mr. Davies's use of a vulgar Anglo-Saxon synonym for the female genitalia, do you?

I was amused to see his long decrying of the "need" to use an epithet that is in his view based in a devaluing of women. The hope for inflicting harm on Stephen apparently outweighs the fear of causing harm to women oppressed by his using that word, but not before we have to sit through his angst over it. How lame, how PC, how completely does it rob him of any sting. And actually while I've seen "pussy" as a slam against a man, I've not seen "cunt" used except to women (including, memorably, me). But then maybe I just run with the wrong crowd.

The young man has no logic, no cajones, and precious little viable vocabulary.

You've run with the wrong crowd, Susanna. In Britain this is a not uncommon insult from a man, to a man. There is an expression, "a shower of cunts", which means that the target is particularly incompetent. (This may be specifically a group insult, I don't know.)

In Jan 2002 this bit turned up in a Mark Steyn column, talking about snotty Ministry of Defence functionaries who are unimpressed with the capabilities of the US military: ...Washington should let our chaps handle the show because frankly these Yank special forces have always been an absolute shower and should just stay out of the way.

That's what "shower" refers to in that article.

Well, that was a useless comment, but at least I got to link to a great Mark Steyn article.

(Not to say that the rest of your assessments are wrong, Susanna.)

Andrea,

I love you and everything you say.

Would you have my babies?

Love,

Anonymous Admirer

[Note: this comment has had the inexplicable and not very funny use of my own name and URL edited by me into something that is possibly more suitable. -- Andrea Harris]

Angie, that "shower" idiom completely defeats me, but then, a lot of British idioms go past me. The American military's approximate equivalent to the term you cited is a "cluster f**k," which is probably equally impenetrable.

Angie is right about the British use of "cunt," as any reader of Martin Amis novels, like me, can testify. In any case Davies deserved what he got and then some; I took a crack at him myself.

I just read a book called Grunts, in which a bunch of orcs in a parallel-fantasy world somehow manage to become Marines. One of them explained "cluster-f*ck" this way:

If you cluster up, you're f*cked. The enemy can pick you all off with one grenade.

Since I'd always heard the term to mean general incompetence, both from above and below, I can see how this explanation might be accurate. Obviously if the senior orc grunts hadn't corrected the rookies, it would have been a cluster-f*ck either way.

The way I heard it, the original term was "Mongolian c.f." and was supposed to refer to some sort of vaguely preposterous form of sex; I suppose the reference to Mongolia was to give it a suitably exotic origin. The phrase was then taken up by the military, among others, to refer to any situation where too much of something, be it vehicles, men, supplies, or whatever, somehow wound up in the same place at the same time.

My past experience with folk etymology strongly suggests that every explanation anyone has ever offered, including this one, is wrong.

I bow to the greater knowledge of the group. I also asked a friend of mine with a much wider knowledge of colorful language (before coming back to see what others had said), and he pretty much echoed what was said here - it's a British term. OTOH, that doesn't mean Davies isn't lame and PC, as well as an idiot for attacking Steven (see, I spelled it right that time).

This reeks of the specious Chicken Hawk argument, does it not? Pretty soon, no one will be able to hold an opinion on any issue unless they have personally experienced it.

Having never heard an etymology of "clusterfuck," I always imagined it as simple shorthand for cascading system failure: one fuck-up fucks up something else, which fucks up something else, and so on, until you are not just fucked but clusterfucked. Most uses of it that I've heard are consistent with that.

It should be noted that the "chickenhawk" "argument" amounts to a logical fallacy of the Tu Quoque variety.

Hmm, I'd always assumed it was a reference to cluster bombs...

In my military experience, clusterfuck was used to describe any operation that was badly planned, organized, or executed, or any combination of the three.

See also "goat rope".

A "shower" is a rather dated way of describing a useless group of people. It is offensive (you don't want to be described as a shower, or a useless shower), but not obscene. It can be used without fear in polite company. Steyn uses it to capture the arrogance of a WWII era inter-military rivalry quite succinctly.

As to the other word - no-one in my acquaintance ever uses it. My children won't either, unless they want the wrath of God to descend upon them in pretty short order.

Clusterfuck was used by Clint Eastwood in the movie Heartbreak Ridge to describe a poorly planned and executed drill.