The Bill of Rights is a hot, slutty stewardess!

Okay, maybe not so hot and not a stewardess, but what a slut! Especially that saucy little Amendment I! Such a cougar...pretty much anyone with a pen, mouth, or keyboard can take a ride on that one. Shopgirlove likes to hold out for dinner, but she has standards. Free speech, apparently, does not. Lately, the First Amendment has been keeping some rather distasteful company. Von Brunn's own son didn't even like him. And what to make of the loathsome Scott Roeder and his friends? A1 must feel very dirty the morning after partying with this lot. So, what's to be done? Some governments have come up with a kind of chastity-belt around the waist of self expression. Deny the holocaust? Bad idea in the country where it actually happened. Naughty comics can get you into very hot water in Japan. But you may cartoon away in this country. See here, here, here, and here. So why not throw the tart out with the bathwater? Because Shopgirlove has never learned anything that she didn't learn from someone else. And if someone else couldn't speak, how would she learn? Free speech isn't pretty. Often, it's pretty stupid. But sometimes, it sparks a dialog that changes everyone for the better.

Tancredo is actually a secret Democratic operative using his crafty wiles to drum up support among Latinos!

How else could you possibly explain this?

What's in a name?

Uber-American, Mark Krikorian, over at the always thoughtful and provocative NRO, has stubbed the big toe of his brain's language center. It seems that the muy formidabile Sonia Sotomayor causes the poor man pain by clinging to the Spanish pronunciation of her surname. Shopgirlove knows it's hard, but Mark, the boo-boo in your temporal lobes shouldn't affect the functioning of your occipital lobes. Just because you can't remember how to pronounce Judge Sotomayor's name doesn't excuse you from having to write with logic and clarity. Shopgirlove would like to draw your attention to a few problemas: 

"...the whole Latina/Latino thing -- English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?" Shopgirlove has to give him credit for the m-dash, but she hadn't noticed the third person singular going neuter. Nor certain quaint holdovers from our francophone youth: "My she's yar!"

"...[some emails suggest] we should just pronounce [a name] the way the bearer of the name prefers, including one who pronounces her name 'freed' even though it's spelled 'fried,' like fried rice. (I think Cathy Seipp of blessed memory did the reverse -- 'sipe' instead of 'seep.')"

Again, lovely m-dash. Just by the way, ie in German is pronounced ee and ei is pronounced eye. Mark, this is an excellent suggestion, don't you agree? Mark does not agree: "...an unnatural [English] pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to." (Ooopsies! Dangling.) Pray tell, why not? Well, it turns out that Mark's antecedents stopped correcting Americans on the pronunciation of his last name at some point along the way: "...'ian' is one syllable..." so no one else should either! So there! Shopgirlove does not like this, no she doesn't. Not one bit. You see, her given name is one of those English-defying combinations of letters that, pronounced correctly in the Irish, she has been assured sounds rather beautiful. (Spelling it is another story, but Mark doesn't seem too interested in spelling.)

"But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch." Just who are these new countrymen, Mark? The approximately 43,000,000 Latinos in this country? And to whom are they new? Certainly not to Judge Sotomayor -- she of the Bronx. In New York. In the United States of America.

Sometimes a rose smells even sweeter when it's a rosa.