Friday, September 23, 2022

tripping over your dick while trying to be witty

Here's a stupid sentence (seen here):

These two guys hesitated and missed their window, just like there are some folks – Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Felonia Milhouse von Pantsuit – who never actually had a window at all yet still tried to dive through one and ended up defenestrating themselves.

What's the joke, here? It's supposed to be some sort of window humor, but what's the joke saying? People like Hillary Clinton never actually had a "window of opportunity" to become president, but despite there being no window, these people tried to dive through what they thought was a window and somehow... successfully defenestrated themselves?

This is Schrödinger's window, isn't it. There, not there, there again.

The joke doesn't work because it can't decide on whether the window exists. I get the clever slide from a metaphorical window of opportunity to a literal window that one tries to dive through, but the joke makes it clear that such a window doesn't actually exist, literally or metaphorically. And yet, no: it does exist because these losers dive through it, thereby defenestrating themselves. Weird, right?

I understand what the writer is trying to say, but his window metaphor, as expressed, is utterly clumsy and cringe-inducingly bad. Here's a possible rewrite:

...who never actually had a window at all yet still tried to dive through one and ended up T-boning a wall.

My version isn't exactly scintillating with wit, either, but at least it makes logical sense, and it carries forward the idea of bad consequences for actions based on a delusion.

ADDENDUM: the Instapundit post that linked to the article cited above is here. I mention this because, under that post, there's a huge fight going on among conservatives as to whether Trump or DeSantis would be the better pick in 2024. If I were a liberal, I'd stand back and have a good laugh. More seriously, though, both the pro-Trump and the pro-DeSantis sides make good points (albeit sometimes acrimoniously).



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