CLADPAW

I stumbled onto a cool blog - 23/6 ("Some of the news/Most of the time")... I don't know how, or from where, or what I was looking for, though I'm sure it was something valuable and worthy. (Never mind that where I ended up was reading Bonnie Fuller's "Letter to Britney" - fascinating stuff, that - on the Huffington Post, another site and collection of blogs I really like.) And then I was all of sudden on 23/6 again, and read this...

Classic Dowd Pointless Antiphonal Wordplay (CLADPAW) involves combining a political reference with a pop cultural reference in the first clause of the sentence, and then recombining the two in a pointless way in the second clause, often with the addition of some kind of homophone, homonym, or pun. Turns out, it's as satisfying as it sounds.

The site sends you to Maureen Dowd's column today for some examples - but I thought I'd make it even easier and pull some out.

It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.

But her pitch is the color of pitch

Hillary’s case boiled down to the fact that she can be Trouble, as they say about hard-boiled dames in film noir, when Republicans make trouble

You gotta admit, he has a point...