From our 19th century historian, Eudora Dickinson:
Word on the street is that President Trump is now looking to see how he can pardon his family and his friends -- and even himself.
Word on the street is that President Trump is now looking to see how he can pardon his family and his friends -- and even himself.
| Haven't we always said that "no man is above the law -- INCLUDING THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES"? Is this Trump's way of admitting guilt? If he's not guilty of anything, then why is he so obsessed with shutting down an investigation about how and why a foreign adversary attempted to (and did) hack into American accounts, publish and distribute false news, and influence the American election. Oh, I forgot. His son is guilty. All of this calls to mind a rather enigmatic poem from the late 1800s by Emmett Lee Dickinson (Emily Dickinson's third cousin, twice removed -- at her request). No one knows quite for sure whom Dickinson was writing about in his poem "I acted with Duplicity" (below on the left), but the poem calls to mind Don Jr's gleeful statement "I love it" when he was first asked to collude with the Russians. |  |
Of course, had Donald Jr. read Emmett Lee Dickinson's poem first, maybe that would have inspired him to do things differently -- as he lamented once he was caught. Now we'll never know for sure -- but we do know that Dickinson's poem inspired his third cousin to pen her poem "I stole from a Bee" (below on the right).
| By Emmett Lee Dickinson: I acted with Duplicity – Because – Glee – Sweet plea – He’ll pardon me! | By Emily Dickinson: I stole them from a Bee – Because – Thee – Sweet plea – He pardoned me! |
ON ANOTHER NOTE RELATED TO DICKINSON'S POEM:
The American Dialect Association's "Word of the Year" for 2013 was "because." Because why?
"It has to do with a new development in the syntax of because," wrote Neal Whitman on VisualThesaurus.com. He referred to the construction as "Because NOUN." However, in a recap of the ADS voting, Ben Zimmer cited other forms too: "What has been happening lately online, especially on Twitter and Tumblr, is that people use because with a more terse follow-up: introducing a noun ('I love ice cream because flavor'), an adjective ('I love ice cream because delicious'), or an interjection ('I love ice cream because yum!')."
As a result, some began treferring to this syntactical construction as "because X."
And how did this all come about? Because Dickinson. Take a look at the second line of his poem "I acted with Duplicity."
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