Lutey Tunes

Steyn On-line ^ | July 10, 2017 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

Apologies to all my readers: Last week I carelessly wrote about President Trump's Warsaw speech as if the words therein corresponded to the definitions ascribed to them by Oxford, Webster's or any other English dictionary. My mistake. Apparently the plain meaning of the words is entirely irrelevant. Because the words aren't words per se, they're "dog whistles":

Trump's white-nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw

As James Taranto noted during a previous dog-whistling frenzy:

"The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it's intended for somebody else," he wrote. "The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you're the dog."

Indeed dog whistles are all they hear. If Trump is, as has been said, the all-time great Twitter troll, in Warsaw he was trolling for western civilization, and an entire army of mangy pooches began yowling and - to mix canine metaphors - set off like greyhounds in pursuit of a mechanical hare.

[Quality_Not_Quantity]

I can’t tell if this is a pro-Trump piece, an anti-Trump piece, or something completely different altogether.

[Bratch]

Mark is definitely pro-Trump.

He’s trolling the MSM.

[Colinsky]

What are you, some kind of lutatic?

[litehaus]

, some kind of lutatic? = lover of lutefisk ??

[TTFlyer]

The Left - A Special Kind of Stupid.

[katana]

In case someone is wondering about "lutey", here's the money and kick to the nuts Steynism. It is about how western music owes a debt to Muslim warbling.

Insofar as the lute has anything to do with Islam at all, it derives from the pre-Islamic east - like the one I saw in the British Museum a couple of years back from Mesopotamia, circa 3,000 BC. Then Mohammed showed up and that was the day the music died: Drove my camel to the wadi, but the wadi was dry.

This man is a Canadian national treasure, if only his imbecile compatriots would realize.

[Intolerant in NJ]

To be fair to the left, they invest a lot of time in undermining language, to spectacular effect...which is why the left is quickly losing credibility - when words have special idiosyncratic meanings known only to the user and those meanings even shift as the user needs to manufacture some point or another, listeners soon become confused and eventually bored in trying to keep up.....

[AZLiberty]

Though I live in Arizona, this is one Canadian that would marry Mark Steyn, if one of us were (a real) female.

[Quality_Not_Quantity]

What are you, some kind of lutatic?

I see what you did there - just not at first.