Among my responses on this earlier post was one from a long-time contributor who was, alas, banned from the blog in the last Great Civility Purge. He wrote, and I quote directly:
“lollygaggin”…???
… which I interpreted as being a request for an explanation.
Well, just in case any of the rest of y’all were wondering, too, I’ll clear up the mystery. It’s from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Here’s a use of the word, in context:
Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot … coming over the intercom … with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless! – it’s reassuring) … the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because “it might get a little choppy” … the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): “Now, folks, uh … this is the captain … ummmm … We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin‘ gears’re not … uh … lockin‘ into position when we lower ’em … Now … I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin‘ about – I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right” … faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into – still, it may amuse you … “But … I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol’ light … so we’re gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they cain’t give us a visual inspection of those ol’ landin’ gears” – with which he is obviously on intimate ol’ buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship – “and if I’m right … they’re gonna tell us everything is copacetic all the way aroun’ and we’ll just take her on in … and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: “Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground – it must be too early for ’em or somethin’ – I ‘spect they still got sleepers in their eyes … ’cause they say they cain’t tell if those ol’ landin’ gears are all the way down or not … But, you know, up here in the cockpit we’re convinced they’re all the way down, so we’re just gonna take her on in … And oh” … (I almost forgot) … “while we take a little swing out over the ocean an’ empty some of that surplus fuel we’re not gonna be needin’ anymore – that’s what you might be seein’ comin’ out of the wings – our lovely lovely little ladies … if they’ll be so kind … they’re gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call ‘assumin’ the position'” … another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it’s so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it) … and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off, and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered … while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field – and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were … how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation more intimately … how could he keep on drawlin’ and chucklin’ and driftin’ and lollygaggin’ in that particular voice of his –
I used it to describe a characteristic of Mark Sanford’s idiosyncratic mode of speech, specifically, his frequent tendency to sound more offhand, less interested, more casual than the situation would seem to demand. In pilots, this quirk is indicative of the Right Stuff. In a governor, it’s indicative of … I don’t know what.
Tom Wolfe had a big influence on me in my early, formative years as a writer. I think it was from him that I picked up my habit of using a lot of italics for emphasis…
And random interjections — like this! — set off by dashes.
I once had to help Chuck Yeager get dressed for an Air Force Association dinner here. He was fretting over whether to wear a suit or an aloha short. I told him to wear an aloha under a sport coat. He was doubtful, but when we hit the Hickam officers club, 90 percent of the guys there were dressed exactly the same way.
“Good thang too,” he drawled at me. “It’s hotter’n a whore’s pillow in there!”
indicative of a liar Brad
I just looked up the phrase “Tilting at Windmills”. I never really understood what that meant. It’s from Don Quixote. Don was fighting a windmill that he perceived to be a giant monster. Seems like Brad does a lot of ’tilting at windmills’ when it comes to Mark Sanford. It’s time to give it up Brad. Sanford has long ago become nothing but a lame duck has-been. To continue piling on only makes me have sympathy for the guy. I’m far more concerned with really dangerous monsters like Lindsey Graham and Sarah Palin. They’re the folks who get people killed, not Mark Sanford.
Sad news. Air America has filed for Chapter 7 Bankrupcy. This has not been a good week for liberals.
Bud,
That’s the free market at work. There’s more demand for right wing idiocy than for left wing idiocy.
Actually, Annie, I don’t think so. I was just having a discussion (an actual face-to-face discussion) with KBFenner down in Five Points, and we were talking about Sanford, and I made the point that one thing I don’t think of him as is a liar.
Yeah, he may have hidden his affair for a while from his wife — although the clumsy way he let himself be found out indicates that he is not practiced in deception — but in his public life I generally don’t see him lying. He may try to make you see what you want to see when he wants your vote — such as trying to get me to see him as a government reformer, rather than an anti-government zealot, when he was running for office — but generally he’s a WYSIWYG kind of guy.
And bud, Doug is right. Your more rabid liberals just aren’t into talk radio the way your more rabid folks on the right are. The Air America folks were trying to create a market, a demand, where none existed. So they were doomed to fail.
Oh, and bud — I’m going to address the other thing you said in a separate post.
I guess it was obvious Air America was doomed pretty much from the beginning. They got a bit of a boost during the 2008 presidential campaign. I suppose any political broadcasts would have drawn an audience during that fascinating election year.
The real question is why. Is there something about the DNA of a liberal that simply rejects the idea of listening to other people who agree with them on the radio? Given the Obama victory it’s clear that there are plenty of liberals or at least folks who are willing to give liberals a hearing. Yet liberal radio talk show hosts have never caught on. WVOC had a balanced approach in the 90s. But eventually they abandoned any pretense of balance and now it’s basically a 6 hour conservative gab fest from noon – 6pm.
I would like to think that liberals are more secure in our thought process and don’t need constant re-enforcement that what we believe is correct. We simply check out the facts from all sides and reach a conclusion based on the merits. Conservatives on the other hand are insecure and have to be constantly reassured. And the facts be damned.
Maybe “conservatives” (and I really object to the use of such a respectable word to describe Dittoheads; I see nothing conservative in their behavior or their philosophies) are more social. Or more tribal. I picture them as being more into giving each other high-fives (really HARD high fives, where you see just how hard you can smack the other guy’s hand, and watch him to see if he winces).
And bud — that other post where I answered you is up…
Air America–well, let’s see, Senator Al Franken is kinda busy these days, as is Rachel Maddow. Some of their biggest names are still talkin’–just more people are listening. Works for me.
Air America’s problem was that conservatives started buying up radio stations years ago and created monopolies like clear channel. AA couldn’t get airtime penetration in major markets.
You can count on the far right to play ruthless hardball. If you don’t play the game on their terms you’ll get squashed, and it’s your own fault. And you can count on the far right to always portray themselves as victims.
Gee, I didn’t know I was so insecure I need Rush, Hannity, Laura, or any of the talk show hosts to give me reassurance or speak for me. I wasn’t aware I was incapable of checking facts and coming to an informed, merit based conclusion.
I thought maybe the reason Air America failed was because no one was listening to the message. Who woulda thunk it? Especially since the overwhelming percentage of Americans identify themselves as conservative. I guess we need the liberal minority to guide us poor, unfortunates through the pitfalls and obstacles of life.
Opinions spewed by Rush and other conservo-tainers are not “facts.”
People who work in radio know that the “playlists” are corporate and nation-wide, and that includes wall-to-wall political yapping.
Look at your local radio listings and count up the conservative radio yappers and then add up the liberal radio yappers.
Liberals, by definition, strive to see value in all viewpoints, etc. Tolerance is a harder sell than raving lunacy.