It was the sound bite of the night on Wednesday, the word that, as soon as it was uttered, exploded across the audience both in the auditorium in Charlotte and in living rooms across the land. In the midst of a quintessentially Clintonesque speech – a monologue of pummeling precision, folksy rhetoric and exhausting duration -- the former president launched into a rebuttal of Paul Ryan's claims that Barack Obama has been ravaging Medicare.

"When congressman Ryan looked into the TV camera and attacked President Obama's Medicare savings as the 'biggest, coldest power play,' I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," he shrugged. "Because, that $716 billion is exactly, to the dollar, the same amount of Medicare savings that he had in his own budget." And then came the killer ad-lib: "You got to (admit) one thing -- it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did."

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Perhaps you are the sort of person who wasn't aware that saying things like, "Hopefully, it won't rain this weekend" has long been considered a grammatical faux pas. One hopes that you received a deeper language-arts education than that. "Hopefully" is an adverb. An adverb, I tells ya, one that means to do something in a hopeful manner. For decades, however, the word has also been a common shorthand for "I hope."

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If you met me after I moved to America, you would likely notice a few things. I'm tall. I wear a lot of flannel. I have questionable taste in shoes. And I sound absolutely adorable. I know this because I have been told it over and over since I moved from Canada five years ago. "You sound adorable," said a neighbor in my East Village walk-up during my first week in New York. "Adorable," said a classmate at grad school orientation, right before he told me that Canadians all seemed dreadfully boring.

I had no idea I even had an accent, let alone that I sounded adorable, before I moved here. But in learning about the way I spoke, I ended up learning a lot about my adopted country -- and about myself.

For most Americans, it's almost impossible to tell a Canadian accent from a Midwestern one. And to be fair, the differences are pretty subtle. We pronounce some of our vowels like the British (something linguists call "Canadian shift"), and raise our diphthongs before voiceless consonants (called "Canadian raising"). But most people identify us by our different ways of pronouncing "au" sounds -- which, to some people, sounds like "oot" and "aboot" -- and our tendency to say things like "eh" and "heh" at the end of tentatively declarative sentences.

To make it more confusing, most Canadian celebrities seem to lose their accents as soon as they become even mildly famous. You'd never think that Rachel McAdams or Jim Carrey both hail from Ontario by listening to them. The Canadian of the moment, Ryan Gosling, has famously shifted from a Cornwall, Ontario. accent to a butch Brooklyn truck driver accent over the course of his career. There are even companies that specialize in teaching Canadian actors to start talking like Americans.

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The "Concise" differs from its behemoth cousin, the OED, in philosophy as well as size. As the following promotional video explains, the shorter work aims to provide an accessible guide to "current English" -- the language as it is actually used day-to-day -- rather than a survey of its words' historical meaning. (Where size is concerned, it's worth noting that the new COD boasts just over 240,000 words and phrases, compared to the 20-volume OED's 600,000.)

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Kira Cochrane writes that "the use of the word 'rape' to describe all kinds of bad experience -- from getting beaten up in a boxing match, to having your hairdo completely ruined -- has recently become usual, average, shruggable." She compares this linguistic shift to how "the word 'gay' has been twisted by pop culture, used to refer to someone or something a bit uncool" -- rape is "now regularly used where 'nightmare' or an apt expletive would previously have been in order." She gives some familiar examples: "Twilight's" Kristen Stewart comparing being hounded by paps to being raped, that controversial scene in "Observe and Report" and the usual vitriol from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Cochrane also gives a more startling personal example:

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But even the mere suggestion of profanity is enough to set concerned viewers reaching for the smelling salts and threatening to boycott the show's advertisers. On Monday, the Parents Television Council informed the world that CBS is "on notice," stating, "Unless or until CBS chooses a different title for this program, we are urging advertisers to avoid sponsoring such an abomination purported to be lighthearted fun." Bitch, please.

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A federal appeals court has tossed out a government policy that can lead to broadcasters being fined for allowing even a single curse word on live television.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Tuesday found the policy to be unconstitutional. It says the policy violates the First Amendment.

That's via the AP. You can also read the full opinion in Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FCC at the Circuit Court's decisions page.

This decision has been a long time coming. In 2004, the FCC changed its own rules to state "that a single, nonliteral use of an expletive (a so-called 'fleeting expletive') could be actionably indecent" in response to a slew of complaints the agency got after Bono dropped the f-bomb at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards when receiving the award for, I don't know, the Last Relevant Album by U2.

Since then, the FCC has been regularly and aggressively fining companies for indecency violations -- and they've multiplied the fines by the number of member stations the word was broadcast on to, vastly increasing their indecent haul. As the Court writes here, "the fine for a single expletive uttered during a broadcast could easily run into the tens of millions of dollars."

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"Thank you," I say.

His response: "Not a problem."

A couple hours later, I order lunch at a coffee shop. The server brings the food. As she sets it on the table, I say, "Thank you."

"No problem!" she replies.

What ever happened to "You're welcome"?

Yes, I know, this is a tiny thing to obsess over. But it irritates me to an extent that cannot be captured in print without the use of capital letters, boldface, italics and multiple exclamation points, none of which would make it past Salon's copy desk. In an ideal world I'd convey my passion by teleporting Jack Nicholson into the room with you so that he could screw his face into a mask of constipated rage, half-clench his fingers as if he were about to strangle somebody, and growl the phrase with the impotent fury it requires: What ever happened to "You're welcome"?

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It was this past April, and the contestants' task was to create a viral video promoting All detergent.

"I got a bad feeling as soon as I heard them say 'small and mighty,'" says Jimmy, referring to All's line of highly concentrated soaps.

His instincts were dead on. "What about if we use little people and let them wash themselves in All detergent in the bathtub ... and you hang them out to dry?" suggested superstar running back Herschel Walker. Joan Rivers: "We can hang them out on my terrace."

The resulting video, starring motorcycle maven Jesse James and titled "Jesse James Gets Dirty With Midgets," features three very short actors clad in All-bottle blue, whose yelling and hose-squirting and zippy fast-motion action (including an unexplained mallet to James' gut) leave his T-shirt sparkling clean.

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This history goes back to the throw-down in the 1980s and 1990s over “political correctness,” and the history of that in turn goes back to the 1960s. The notion of political correctness is an outgrowth of the civil rights and feminist struggles on college campuses. The result of this fight, one of the left’s few enduring victories from the late 1960s, was the acknowledgment of literature and art outside the Western canon, the establishment of departments of African-American studies, Feminist studies, and, accompanying them, a gradually developing consensus that people should quit acting as if women and minorities are less than full people.

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Basically, we used the word to describe any annoying person (or rule or homework assignment). There was also the timeless "loser," of course, and the more ephemeral "dink" -- "douche bag," for its part, came later -- but "retard," and "retarded," with all their variations, packed the most playground punch.

And today, pop culture and the Twitterati, tirelessly mining those formative years for irony pay dirt, have spurred -- for descriptive better or for derogatory worse, depending on whom you ask -- a "retard" renaissance.

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How can I love my parents when they are supporters of the most corrupt, willfully ignorant, deceitful, lying administration in our nation's history?

If we were not related by blood, I would have nothing to do with these people. The Bush presidency has ruined our reputation in the world, destroyed many of our civil liberties and increased the divide between the rich and the poor. Plus they think torture is just dandy!

I don't have any Republican friends. I don't like to talk to Republicans mostly. I find them ignorant of other cultures, and smug -- feeling that our country is the best in the world -- period.

I lived in a foreign country for several years and have traveled to several others. I find many things good about America but I think there are many things to be improved. When I visit my parents, politics is generally off the table for discussion. Occasionally it will come up with tense, sometimes angry results. They have no idea of my political thoughts and don't want to hear them. On the whole my relationship with them is better than many I've seen. We're not estranged, they didn't abuse me, but I don't really like them. I simply shut up and endure the visit.

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No blizzards, rats or owls, either.

That's because these words -- along with over 500 others -- have been banned under the mandatory bias guidelines that must be followed by publishers of children's textbooks and tests.

According to these guidelines, heroines are sexist, blizzards demonstrate regional prejudice, rats are too scary and owls are culturally insensitive because they're associated with death in some cultures.

Pressure groups from the far left and right have hijacked children's education, claims educational historian Diane Ravitch, and replaced it with adult politics. What's worse, she says, most parents have no idea this is happening. In her damning new book, "The Language Police," Ravitch, who was an assistant secretary in the Department of Education under former President Bush and served on a board overseeing the development of national tests in the Clinton administration, outlines the byzantine approval process publishers must go through in order not to offend any pressure group, no matter how small. She says that the results of these guidelines are bloodless history textbooks that border on inaccuracy and bowdlerized literature devoid of controversial language or topics.

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The patient needed a lifesaving procedure to replace one of the badly infected valves in his heart, but the surgeon said he couldn't justify the operation for an intravenous-drug user. He rank-ordered patients with HIV, he said unapologetically: He would operate on hemophiliacs who had contracted the disease through blood transfusions and on gay men who had contracted the disease through sex, but he wouldn't operate on drug abusers who had contracted it through dirty needles. Dumbfounded, Nuland realized at that moment that, for doctors, "the lives that have the most value are those with which we most identify."

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Dutton, 56, grew up in Los Angeles, got his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, spent time in India with the Peace Corps (he still twangs away at his sitar on occasion) and eventually accepted an appointment to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. A gleeful contrarian, he edits the academic journal Philosophy and Literature, and in 1996 founded the Bad Writing Award. A thinker who prefers to measure his thoughts against what actually exists, he once took time out to live with the wood carvers of the Sepik River region of New Guinea to learn what art, craft and beauty mean to them.

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Only his novel stinks and his most closely guarded secret is that he hasn't worked on it in years. His other two books are out of print and he's approaching 50. In other words, the hero of Francine Prose's 11th novel, "Blue Angel," is in hell. And when he starts obsessing over the work of a talented and enigmatically seductive student -- soon after the dean's warning to the faculty about the growing threat of sexual harassment litigation -- we know that life in hell is going to get a lot worse.

Prose has taught writing at numerous colleges and is clearly appalled by the puritanical mood on campus today. Yet her dissection of the chilly campus climate goes way beyond simple p.c.-bashing. Things weren't so good in the old, pre-feminist days, either; Swenson's wife, Sherrie, the college nurse, has seen enough students "destroyed by faculty Romeos." But nowadays the students seem oddly childish and fearful. At the heart of the malaise lies an odd sense of entitlement -- the students' insistence that they don't have to hear anything they might find disturbing or that might make them feel "unsafe."

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This Associated Press headline, crisp and gripping to the average
reader, is a joke to any honest parent of a disabled child. Try "Parents
at Brink of Collapse Don't Abandon Boy" for a real shockerooni. As the
parent of two disabled children myself, I often visualize headlines like
"Mom Drives Self and Two Boys Off Bridge" -- and the only shocking part
is that it hasn't come true.

News accounts of Richard and Dawn Kelso leaving their 10-year-old son,
Steven, at a Delaware hospital the day after Christmas with his toys,
medical supplies and a note saying they could no longer care for the
boy, dwell on the fact that the Kelso family lived in a $200,000 house
and drove BMWs. Clearly, these selfish, privileged bastards ... Well,
enough said.

No, NOT enough said. I understand exactly how a desperate parent could
do what Dawn and Richard Kelso did. The part that makes them heroic, in
my book, is that they took Steven somewhere where people are trained to
give him the care he needs, instead of loading him into one of those
spiffy BMWs and heading for a bridge abutment.

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