A psychotic weasel, in the nonscientific sense

See if you can guess where Dr.  Krauthammer is going with this one:

HUGH HEWITT, HOST: ... I know you’ve said before you no longer practice psychiatry. You’ve given that up. But I want to tempt you to do a little armchair diagnosis here. On the New York Times front page yesterday, Peter Baker wrote about a series of dinners the President’s been having, and our friend John Hinderaker at Powerline says he sounds whiny. He sounds depressed to me. What do you think is his mental state?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: That’s very funny, because my specialty when I was a psychiatrist was bipolar disease. And I wrote some papers on manic disease. He’s not manic, and I don’t think he’s depressed. And I, you know, look. I’ve foresworn psychiatry simply because you really can’t do it at a distance. And one other thing is that you remember 1964 when about 500 psychiatrist signed a statement that Barry Goldwater was psychically unfit for the presidency?

HH: Well, I’ve read about it. I don’t remember it.

CK: Oh, you’re not young enough. Actually, I probably got it second-hand, for all I know.

I expect that's true. Chuckles was born in 1950, the article that made the matter famous was published in '64, and the last appeal of the resulting lawsuit was rejected in 1969. (The Supreme Court declined to hear it the following January, with Black and Douglas dissenting.)

Short version: Fact magazine, one of Ralph Ginzburg's gifts to the free-speech world, had run a special Goldwater issue -- "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater" -- the month before the 1964 election, including among other things an ill-concocted "poll" of psychiatrists. Goldwater sued. Ginzburg more or less admitted at trial that several assertions in the issue were, well, you know, kinda-sorta made up despite evidence that contradicted them. So Goldwater remains one of the rare public officials to win a libel case under the Sullivan standard. Anyway, continue:
 
But that’s a real abuse. Psychiatrists, doctors and others who use their science, or even the global warming folks, you know, you have your expertise, and some people just use it to try to bludgeon other people with their authority. 

Yes. That seems to be kind of what the American Psychiatric Association had in mind a few years later when it banned jackleg pseudo-diagnosis for the media.

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Bizarre language assertion of the week

"Just like adjectives," you say? Modifying nouns and everything? At the risk of angering the Miami Herald stylebook,* whose entry under "dialect" warns us not to go around making "a longshoreman sound like a college professor," one is tempted to add: No f***ing s***?

The bigger point for editors on a story like this is the lede:

A Brooklyn, N.Y., man says he is considering a lawsuit after he was thrown off a flight in Detroit for dropping the F-bomb.

... and the ensuing heds: "Cussing man tossed from flight may file suit" in print" and "N.Y, man may sue after being tossed from Detroit flight" online. "May sue" and "is considering a lawsuit" are banned under all circumstances, permanently, forever, amen. The threshold for filing a lawsuit is low as it is, and the threshold for telling a naive member of the press that bygod you're gonna SUE is even lower. It's a lawsuit when it has a number -- as in, when the clerk has whacked it with the stamp -- and not before. The correct answer to "You know, I'm thinking about suing" is "Thanks! Call me back when you do, OK?" Period. /rant.

As long as you're being appropriately skeptical toward kinda-sorta hints about lawsuits, though, you might as well be skeptical toward specious assertions about language. And when some minor-league pop-culture figure plays the New York Awesomeness card -- hey, kid, in the Big Town, we use curse words like adjectives, you know? -- it's perfectly all right to ask: Which fucking turnip truck did you just fall off of?

* And the Grauniad's, which hates asterisks and approves of "fuck" but not "political correctness." Sorry, guys.