Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Nones

Nones: A term used by religion scholars and pollsters to describe Americans unaffiliated with any religion – people who respond “none of the above” in a survey about religious preference.

Image source: Secular.org.

 

The recent presidential election revealed the rising influence of “nones” in public life, according to a New York Times story published November 10 (“Christian Conservatives Failed to Sway Voters on Issues”):

The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

 

Chart source: “Nones on the Rise,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Among the findings of the Pew study:

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans – sometimes called the rise of the “nones” – is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones. A third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation (32%), compared with just one-in-ten who are 65 and older (9%). And young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives.

According to the Pew study, the religiously unaffiliated are “about twice as likely to describe themselves as political liberals than as conservatives, and solid majorities support legal abortion (72%) and same-sex marriage (73%). In the last five years, the unaffiliated have risen from 17% to 24% of all registered voters who are Democrats or lean Democratic.”

November Linkfest

The leaves are falling, the turkey’s defrosting: It must be time for the first Word of the Year 2012 announcement! Oxford Dictionaries, the traditional early bird, picked one WOTY for the US, GIF (the verb), and one for the UK, omnishambles. For background on omnishambles—which made a brief appearance in the US this year as well—see my post on “wazzock.” And for background on how Oxford chose GIF, see this hilariously be-GIFed blog post. 

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Turducken: chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. Cherpumple: cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies stuffed inside cake. Now online dictionary Wordnik invites readers to invent a new Thanksgiving-related Franken-word (portmanteau). “It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.” Tweet your nominations with the hashtag #turkeyword.

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This one goes out to all you graphic designers and creative directors: horrible client feedback turned into hilarious works of art. (Full gallery at SharpSuits.net.)

“I’ll know what I want when I see it.” – Clients everywhere

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Astronomy and space startup Uwingu – that’s oo-WING-oo, the Swahili word for “sky” – is building “a baby book of names” for newly discovered planets. For 99 cents per nomination, you can submit a name to the database; for another 99 cents, you can vote for your favorite name on the list. The money goes to a good cause, of course. According to the Bad Astronomy blog, “The folks in charge are professional astronomers and space scientists at the tops of their fields, people like Alan Stern and Pamela Gay.”

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Cast your vote for the name of the year at Baby Name Wizard. The NOTY “isn't necessarily the most popular baby name,” writes BNW’s Laura Wattenberg. “It’s a name that changed during the course of the year, and points to more changes around us. It’s a one-name time capsule that reminds us of how names are woven into our lives, connecting to and reflecting everything that goes on in our culture.” The 2011 winner was Siri.

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Do we need a new name for the fiscal cliff? The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein proposes “austerity crisis”; his readers have their own suggestions, including Policy Meltdown, Lemmings Moment, Fiscal Spliff, and Mole Hill. (What’s the fiscal cliff, you ask? Here you go.)

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Corporate tagline or university motto? Take the quiz (it’s tougher than you’d think).

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Minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league hockey) is divided into narrow age ranges, and the names for those ranges vary wildly and whimsically around the world. In Canada the 9-10 age group is called “Atom”; in France the 10-11 group is called Poussins (“young chickens”). More minor hockey lore at (where else?) Wikipedia. Hat tip: Bruce Fulton.

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Remember Cuil, the search engine that was supposed to be a Google-killer? It died in 2011, possibly of pronunciation failure. “You might think that making a pronounceable name is a no brainer,” writes Andrew Hennigan on his blog about communications, “but there are actually several separate issues you need to think about, and Cuil got all three wrong.” (Hat tip: FussFactory.)

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Green-suiter, Yuk, 2% Club and other West Point slang: a lexicon.

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What does the “signature” mean in “signature burrito”? Lexicographer Orin Hargraves, writing for the Macmillan Dictionary blog, says “signature” has been “so diluted by modern usage as to become meaningless.”

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Speaking of meaningless, William Germano has had it with passion. He writes in Lingua Franca: “In its new, overexposed phase, passion has come to mean something else. I’d hazard the definition ‘an outsized, all-consuming enthusiasm that leads to achievement.’ That seems to be where passion is drifting in our outcome-driven society: It’s become a word signifying the precondition of success.” I’ve written about passion overload a number of times myself, starting with a 2006 post, “Our Passion Is Your Problem.”

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The Romney campaign named its (badly botched) get-out-the-vote program Project ORCA, but why? Language Log’s Mark Liberman goes fishing: “It would be a little weird, in my opinion, to name a GOTV program after a boat used to hunt a fictional monster shark. Clearly the shark would be Obama, or perhaps Obama’s appeal — but in that metaphor, where are the Romney voters?”

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After Hurricane Sandy struck, New York City gained a new neighborhood: SoPo, for “South of Power.” As The Atlantic Wire’s Jen Doll tells it, “New York City has a history with this sort of name.” (Hat tip: @nextmoon.)

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From the public-radio show A Way With Words, hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, here’s an excellent list of reference resources for writers and word lovers. A good place to start your holiday shopping!

Word of the Week: Epistemic Closure

Epistemic closure: In US political debate, a reference to closed systems of deduction that are unaffected by empirical evidence. The term was borrowed from epistemology (the study of knowledge), where it’s sometimes called “deductive closure” and means, roughly, “we know all of the consequences of those things that we know.” The political sense may imply “echo chamber,” “groupthink,” “information bubble,” “false consensus,” “willful ignorance,” or “denial.”

Bertrand Russell by JIMBO 105 on Flickr.

The first political use of “epistemic closure” is usually credited to Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. In a March 2010 blog post, Sanchez wrote:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

The term caught on quickly. In April, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote in his Plain Blog About Politics: “Sanchez's point is that if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves … one will have a closed mind (not his phrase, by the way) regardless of what one does with that information.” (In a comment on another blog, The Philosopher’s Eye, Sanchez explained why he didn’t go with “closed-mindedness”: “I wanted to distinguish the collective/media phenomenon from any kind of individual disposition. The problem … is not that conservatives happen to be individually closed-minded people; the lockdown is at the group level.”)

Later in April, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times provided a summary of the fledgling epistemic-closure debate that quoted, among others, Bruce Bartlett, Jonah Goldberg, and Ross Douthat. Meanwhile, in his Times blog about economics and politics, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman noted that epistemic closure is also prevalent in his own field: “And like the political version of epistemic closure, it’s not a ‘both sides do it’ issue. It’s a fresh-water phenomenon; salt-water macro isn’t subject to the same problem.” (Fresh-water and salt-water economics explained here.)

There’s epistemic closure in discussions of climate change, too. And it’s a pitfall to be avoided in branding – a topic I hope to explore in a future post.

“Epistemic closure” got a boost after President Obama’s reelection last week, which appeared to catch many of Mitt Romney’s supporters – including professional pundits – by surprise. In his column for the conservative British magazine The Spectator, Alex Massie rounded up the “howling and wailing and gnashing of teeth” from US conservatives; the headline was “The View from the Cocoon of Denial and Epistemic Closure.” On this side of the Atlantic, David Brooks, the conservative-ish opinion writer for the New York Times, chimed in during a November 9 chat with NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Epistemic closure, Brooks said, “is a very useful phrase these days, believe me.”

BROOKS: Epistemology is the study of what we know, and epistemic closure is being in an information cocoon where you just believe what you want to believe. Confirmation bias is another phrase. And there’s a lot of that going around, not only on Fox News but apparently with Mitt Romney, who we now know was totally shocked. Well, doesn’t he read the newspaper?

For a corrective to epistemic closure of all stripes, I recommend The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. It’s about the moral “matrices” that bind us and blind us, liberals and conservatives alike: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. It certainly challenged my own assumptions. Read a review of the book here. To discover your own degree of epistemic closure, answer the questionnaire at MoralFoundations.org, a group created by Haidt and his colleagues to test theories about morality and social psychology.

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Update: Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow envisions wearable epistemic closure: information-containment suits that are impervious to unwanted facts and ideas. Hat tip: ArmaVirumque.

Election Roundup

You know by now that President Obama was reelected yesterday. Here’s some other election news from Twitter and the blogs – with special attention to language-y, name-y tidbits.

Josef Fruehwald is a linguist in Philadelphia. More on “vote” as a mass noun in this Mr. Verb post.

 

Nate Silver is, of course, the stats whiz at FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times’s blog about political polls. The cryptic joke here is in the tweet’s syntax, which pretty accurately represents a Times predilection. Last week Twitter turned that tic into a game, #nytbooks.

 

Tunku Varadarajan is the editor (“for a few more days”) of Newsweek International.

Nate Silver’s predictions turned out to be so eerily accurate that the Is Nate Silver a Witch website had to make some changes.

 

There was big news in local elections, too.

Negropolitan’s slightly cryptic reference is to Colorado’s passage of Amendment 64, which legalizes the use of recreational marijuana. –sterdam has become the de facto suffix for “legal pot,” in tribute to Amsterdam. (See Hamsterdam and Oaksterdam). The ver-ster combination makes this coinage especially hilarious, at least to me.

 

From the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog. 

Of course, Tammy Baldwin made history for a much more significant reason: she’s the first openly gay person to be elected to the US Senate. But she won’t be the only Tammy in Congress: Tammy Duckworth won her contest in Illinois’ 8th District, defeating Joe Walsh. UPDATE: Read Laura Wattenberg’s analysis of the name Tammy at the Baby Name Wizard blog.

There was naming news in Florida, too.

 

Ted Yoho: large animal veterinarian, small business owner, Christian … and the new unofficial CEO of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Finally, my favorite tweet of the night.

Thank you, Bryan King, for inserting just the right note of absurdity into the celebration.

Bayonets

It’s a fairly safe bet that no one’s drinking game for last night’s presidential debate included “horses and bayonets.” Yet that phrase, with its antique echoes of the Charge of the Light Brigade, was the evening’s surprise zinger, inspiring hundreds of tweets and an instant Horses and Bayonets Tumblr.

 

(Source)

 

(Source)

 

The line was President Obama’s, part of his response to Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s familiar charge that the US Navy has fewer ships than it did in 1916:

Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we're counting ships. It's — it's what are our capabilities.

By amazing coincidence, I’d been preparing my own bayonet zinger, and I thank the president for giving me such a high-profile introduction to a little naming oddity: the Bayonet Sofa, brought to you by a company called – no joke – Handy Living.

The sofa is available (cheap!) from Amazon and Walmart, where a customer complains that “it’s not super comfortable.” With a name like Bayonet, what did she expect? Ouch!

I learned about the Bayonet Sofa from Twitter pal Amy Silvers, who drily noted, “And here I was thinking that club chairs are bad enough. #violentfurniture.”

A bayonet, for the record, is “a steel stabbing weapon fitted to the muzzle of a firearm.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word comes from French baïonnette. That may or may not be because the weapons were made in the French city of Bayonne. Yes, it’s another case of “uncertain origin.”

Equally uncertain: why anyone would want to name a piece of upholstered furniture after a sharp steel weapon. Maybe the folks at Handy Living thought Bayonet just sounded fancy and special, like baronet or coronet. Or maybe they hoped the suggestion of bristling bayonets would inspire shoppers to, you know, charge.

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Bonus link #1: “Bayonet Charge,” by Ted Hughes.

Bonus link #2, for those of you with Visual Thesaurus subscriptions: everything you need to know about bayonets, by James Harbeck.

Bonus link #3: A Canadian take on the bayonet reference, by Dennis Van Staalduinen at Beg to Differ: 10 Reasons Mitt Romney Likes 1916 So Much.

Word of the Week: Curlbro

Curlbro: “A pejorative slang term referring to gym-goers [who] focus on training their arms when weight lifting.” (Source: Know Your Meme.)

Despite being closely associated with the Jersey Shore aesthetic, “curlbro” first appeared in a UK fitness forum, The Student Room, on November 11, 2010. An Urban Dictionary definition was posted on December 10, 2010: “The word curlbro consists of the two words curl (for biceps-curl, a popular isolation exercise in hypertrophy training) and bro (brother, but here: fake tan, borderline-retarded, gel-in-hair, unintelligent person).”

“Curlbro” gained traction after Time magazine released a set of photos of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan working out. Something about the pose, the facial expression, the backward baseball cap, and the earbuds proved irresistible to amateur caption writers.

 

(Source.)

“Paul Ryan is a total curlbro,” wrote Caitlin in “Dissecting the Cult of the Curlbro,” an October 16 post on her Fit and Feminist blog:

You know who they are. They are the men who line up in front of mirrors in gyms all across the United States, who pass hours curling their way into oblivion, who look at a squat rack and see not a squat rack but a really fancy contraption in which they can do curls. Every day is arms day for these guys.

The female counterpart of a curlbro, I learned from Caitlin, is a “cardio queen”:

The sadly ironic thing is that the curlbro has more in common with the cardio queen than just about anyone else in the gym. In fact, I’d say the two are photo negatives of each other. Each one is so focused on making their body look a specific way – a way that is defined strictly according to their gender – that they completely ignore all of the things that actually make for a strong, healthy body. I mean, who cares if you have twenty inch biceps if you can’t run a mile or you can’t bend over at the waist. And big deal if you can fit into a size 0 but you can’t even open your own damn jar of pickles.

Administrivia

I’m stepping away from the screen for a few days. If you leave a comment, please be patient: I’ll publish it as soon as I’m back online. Posts will resume next week.

In the meantime, I recommend that you go over to the Visual Thesaurus and read Ben Zimmer on last night’s presidential debate, in which President Obama said Mitt Romney’s economic plan was “a sketchy deal.” (No paywall on this and all other Word Routes columns.) That use of “sketchy” was “marvelously ambiguous,” writes Ben, in that it may carry the slang sense of “untrustworthy.” I’ve written about that sense of “sketchy” myself a couple of times, here and here.

And just for fun, check out the “Binders Full of Women” Tumblr that instantly materialized after Mitt Romney made that awkward comment (a misstatement, as it turned out) about his hiring practices as governor of Massachusetts.

October Linkfest

Forget everything you know about Banana Republic as it is today, and try to imagine the company in its crazily unconventional youth, when the stores had animal-call soundtracks and Jeeps in their windows and the mail-order catalogs—this was pre-Web, kiddies—featured sly, literate copy, interviews with famous-ish and once-famous people (James Fallows; the American-born former crown princess of Sikkim), and illustrations instead of photographs. I don’t have to imagine any of this, because I worked for Banana Republic back then*, after it was sold to the Gap but before Gap-ization eliminated every last whiff of creativity from the endeavor. Now, though, we can all return to that khaki-hued era, because BR’s founders, Mel and Patricia Ziegler (who, by the way, hired me), have written a history of their time with the company. In alternating first-person voices, Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic tells how an unemployed newspaper reporter (Mel) and artist (Patricia) used their powers of storytelling to spin heaps of military surplus from the far corners of the earth (but mostly the British Commonwealth) into gold. For a preview, listen to an interview with the Zieglers on the public-radio show Marketplace. (“I wish they’d changed the name,” Mel says of BR’s current incarnation.) And to get a sense of the hold the original Banana Republic still has on loyalists—including a few who are too young to have shopped in the 1980s—see Scott C. Adams’s blog, Abandoned Republic, which lovingly reproduces and annotates every one of the old catalogs.

And before we move on, please allow me to correct a common misconception: Banana Republic, founded in 1978, came first; J. Peterman, which appropriated the copy and illustration style and was parodied during several seasons of “Seinfeld,” was founded in 1987.

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If the comic site xkcd baffles you, help is on the way: Explain xkcd is the “For Dummies” of xkcd-dom, providing an earnest exegesis of every panel of almost every strip.  

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Speaking of humor and not getting it, let’s see how stories from The Onion (satirical!) would look on Facebook (credulous!). Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Literally Unbelievable. (Via Karen.)

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The book-recommendation site Goodreads polled its users about their presidential-candidate preferences and then analyzed reading habits across party lines. The result is the fascinating infographic “You Are What You Read.” There’s some crossover between the two camps, but I bet it doesn’t surprise you that Romney supporters think much more highly of Atlas Shrugged than Obama supporters do.

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Did you miss the recent kerfuffle over Britishisms (a k a Briticisms) in American speech? Catch up right here! The first salvo was fired by the fabulously named Cordelia Hebblethwaite of BBC News (“Bit by bit British English is invading America”), which prompted two responses from Geoff Nunberg on the linguistics blog Language Log and one from Mark Liberman. Then came “Americans Are Barmy Over Britishisms” in the New York Times (the print edition had a better hed: “And Bob’s Your Uncle”), and a Times blog post that rounded up tweets with Americans’ favorite Britishisms. The Atlantic Wire and The Economist’s Johnson blog eagerly piled on, while Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language attempted to bring some academic rigor to the discussion.

Meanwhile, Ben Yagoda continues to add entries to his Not One-Off Britishisms blog. Lately, “toff,” “twee,” and “snarky” have been hotly debated in the comments section.

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Calling all peevologists: Ragan.com has published a list of “9 completely pointless corporate words” that will rally your blood pressure. (Decisioning! Solutionize! Planful! And, as suggested by multiple commenters, the ever-unpopular reach out!) For lots more—in dictionary form, no less—see Learnings.org, “where corporate speak goes to die.” (Via Deborah Schneider.)

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Mazel tov to Lena (“Girls”) Dunham on selling her essay collection for $3.5 million. For that kind of dough, Ms. Dunham can afford a less generic title than Not That Kind of Girl, which is not that distinctive. (Via Jessica Testa.)

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Why are men’s nicknames on the decline? Possibly because there’s more diversity in first names nowadays—and thus less need to distinguish one Jim or Joe from another.

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Today is National Dictionary Day in the US. Let’s celebrate with a “30 Rock” dictionary that goes from Avian Bone Syndrome to zing. And who could forget EGOT, fun cooker, and KDate?

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The titanic taxonomy of wrestler names. Suitable for framing! (Via @Catchword.)

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Got 15 minutes? Check out Milking “Got Milk?”: “A photo essay of the ad campaign that won’t go away.”

 

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“I hate beverages with names that tell me how to drink them.” – Impulsive Buy.

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Finally: Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.

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* In fact, I interviewed Mr. Fallows—I woke him up in his Kuala Lumpur home, to my chagrin—and Ms. Hope Cooke, the former crown princess who had divorced the prince and was leading walking tours of Manhattan.

Word of the Week: Malarkey

Malarkey: Nonsense, horsefeathers, bushwah, humbug, bunkum, rubbish, twaddle, exaggeration, lies. Originally US slang, first seen in print in 1924 in the Indiana Gazette (“The rest of the chatter is so much malarkey …”). Its origin is unknown; attempts to connect slang malarkey to the Irish surname Malarkey or to modern Greek malakia (“soft”) have proved fruitless.

Malarkey was all over the news after last Thursday’s debate between Vice President Joe Biden and his Republican challenger, Congressman Paul Ryan. Biden used the word twice: “With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey” and—clarifying his characterization of Ryan’s comments as “a bunch of stuff”—“We Irish call it malarkey.”

Malarkey bumper sticker, Café Press.

Malarkey was the most looked-up word after the debate, according to Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. It is the 2012 campaign’s quaint-euphemism equivalent of 2008’s cockamamie, which GOP candidate John McCain used in reference to … Joe Biden.

Malarkey T-shirt, Café Press.

 

On Friday, the Visual Thesaurus devoted a column to malarkey. “Biden certainly knows his way around a colorful Irish expression,” wrote Ben Zimmer:

The word malarkey, meaning “insincere or exaggerated talk,” originally found favor in Irish-American usage, though its exact origin remains unknown. We can likely thank a cartoonist of Irish descent, Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (“TAD” for short), for popularizing the word.

Romney-Ryan Malarkey campaign button, Café Press.

The Atlantic Wire also devoted a column to malarkey. (“Adding a ‘With all due respect’ to the phrase, [Biden] is clearly insinuating, or outright stating, that Ryan’s words are not to be taken as truth, that it’s just a bunch of hooey, right?”) At The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan called malarkey “literally, the word of the night.” (The “literally” was a sly reference to Biden’s repeated use of that word in his Democratic National Convention speech.) And in The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, Robert Lane Greene said he was skeptical of the Irish-origin story: “Giving English words Irish etymologies is a proud Irish and Irish-American pastime,” he wrote, adding, “Whether malarkey’s putative Irish origin is malarkey, bunkum, hokum or legitimate may be lost to history.”

Big Malarkey/Little Malarkey T-shirt, Zazzle.

 

By Friday morning the Obama campaign had embraced malarkey:

 

And a hyperkinetic gif made malarkey mesmerizing.

Although malarkey has American roots, it occasionally shows up in the UK. Helen Dunmore, a British poet and novelist, titled her recent poetry collection The Malarkey. (“You looked away just once / as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, / and forty years were gone. / You have been telling them forever / stop that malarkey in the back there!”)

In the US, malarkey has been used as a trademark, most often as an eponym (Malarkey Roofing Products, Malarkey’s restaurant). But I also found a Malarkey clothing brand, originally registered to a company called Shenanigans. Shenanigans (trickery, skulduggery, a prank, an exhibition of high spirits) is another charming and mysterious American word. It first appeared in print in 1855, in a San Francisco publication called Town Talk; the next two citations (dated 1856 and 1857) are also from California. According to Online Etymology Dictionary, the word may have come from Spanish chanada, a shortened form of charranada “trick, deceit.” Lacking corroborating evidence, though, lexicologists throw up their hands and declare shenanigans, like malarkey, to be “of uncertain origin.”

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UPDATE:  Lucy Ferriss considers malarkey at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s  Lingua Franca blog:  “We have waded through misstatements, false claims, and fiery pants. And finally we have arrived at malarkey, which has the extra advantage of being fun to say.”

Word of the Week: Hustings

Hustings: A place where political speeches are made; more generally, the campaign trail. plural and singular. From Old English husting, “meeting, court”; adapted from Old Norse hus-thing, “house assembly.” A related word, Althing, is the name of Iceland’s general assembly. (This thing is analogous to the Latin legal term res: an issue or matter.)

“Hustings” is a word that appears only during political seasons in the US, and then infrequently: the synonym “stump,” which can also be a verb, often replaces it. The late language maven William Safire, in Safire’s Political Dictionary, said “hustings” was “archaic” and “often used semihumorously.”

One place “hustings” is taken seriously is the Wall Street Journal, where the word has appeared five times in the last two months. “Obama Hits Hustings on His Own” was the headline on an August 31 story.

 

In a September 18 blog post about the Romney campaign, “Time for an Intervention,” WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan addressed the candidate directly:

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings.

“Hustings” is used differently in the UK and Commonwealth countries (and ex-Commonwealth nations such as India), where it means the proceedings at a parliamentary election. It often appears as a modifier: “a hustings event.” The word has been used in many contexts since it first appeared in print in 1030; the modern British sense, according to the OED, comes from the term for the temporary platform from which Parliamentary candidates were nominated.