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12/26/2004: "Red State + Green = Christmas!"

The Times Week in Review section today has a great compendium of words coined during the year. Many of these (for example Flip-Flop) were picked up by Dittoheads and thus documented as part of SherWright.com’s Great Work. But is merely documenting Dittohead usage enough? Nay we say! We’re thus gingerly moving onto thin ice today by proposing entirely new words as candidates for the Times to pick up next year. This will of course require that you, the beloved loyal visitors to this site, get busy getting the word out to the world at large. We’ll make the job easier by providing alternatives around a core idea. So let’s get to it: Today’s candidates for a memorable coinage from 2005 (jumping the gun a bit) are “Red-Green State” (or maybe just “Green State,” in the spirit of less is more), and “Christmas State.” These new words come from the observation that 2004 was a bountiful year for the Red State heartland for multiple reasons. To quote the Times, “farmers…earned more money than at any time in the history of American agriculture…” Much of this was due to record harvests (i.e., the green of the chlorophyll in the plants they grew, as we learned in Biology class) but just as much green came from Washington. Here again is the Times: “Despite the fact that farm income has doubled in two years, federal farm subsidies have gone up nearly 40 percent over the same period…” In other words, the Red States are awash in both crop green and government green. The irony of it all, of course, is that The Heartland enthusiastically drank in the GOP’s railing against “federal bureaucracy” and “big government” and were also enthusiastic supporters of tax cuts in the face of a $650 Billion imbalance between government receipts and expenditures (also in today’s Times). They thus clearly believe in the power of the Christmas practice of giving gifts, in this case gifts from posterity to themselves. And of course there is the debate du jour about the “war on Christianity” that Red Staters decry so loudly. Many of this war’s skirmishes are tied to Christmas observance. Put these all together and you’ve got Red States awash in Green waging a war to observe Christmas 24/7/365 (particularly those nice presents) and particularly in those few lonely, final bastions of secularist thought, public school History and Biology class.