The eye-opening content and transgressive humor of Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (2022) deserve attention, but they will have to wait for another day. Instead, I want to focus on Miller’s hip lingo and confess my ignorance of the current colloquialisms lacing his prose.
If I’d been reading Why We Did It on a device, I could have clicked my way to comprehending these words and phrases. Instead, with an antique paper product in my hands, I had to jot down the slang or interrupt my reading to grab my phone. Alas, sometimes I just plowed on and thereby forgot some notable usages. I’ll share with you here a few that I noted, and if you already know them, feel free to dance a superior dance.
Humina, humina, humina (or simply humina) often has a hubba-hubba sexual connotation, but it can also imply a strong emotional reaction that cannot be expressed in words. Miller uses it more like Seinfeld’s yada, yada, yada, meaning “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” Interestingly, it derives from Jackie Gleason’s avoidance of incriminating questions, usually from his wife, Alice, stuttering, “Humina, humina,” instead of answering cogently. Why millennials would have picked up a phrase from “The Honeymooners,” which ended in 1956, escapes me.
“Finkle is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkle” also derives from popular media. It’s Jim Carrey’s critical line when famous pet detective Ace Ventura figures out who the villain is: his co-investigator Lois Einhorn and perpetrator Ray Finkle are one in the same person! Tim Miller, discussing how some Republicans valorize Mike Pence, demurs: “From my vantage point Pence and the boss [i.e., Donald Trump] were one and the same. Finkle is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkle.”
In one sentence, Miller provides me with two more puzzlers. He’s writing about Alyssa Farah Griffin, one of the young women who worked in the White House and later became a Never Trumper. Her father, Joe, “the human manifestation of Trump’s political id,” edited a right-wing website called WorldNetDaily. It seems, Miller muses, that Joe should have been working for the White House, not daughter Alyssa. He was, after all, “no more porangi than half the other jabronis walking around the West Wing.”
Maybe you’re way ahead of me, but in case you’re not: the Maori word porangi means “crazy, mad,” and a jabroni is a “foolish or contemptible person.” The latter is an alteration of the Italian giambone, meaning “ham.” There you go: two vivid insults to add to your arsenal.
In another passage, Miller accuses Trump of punishing his staff with boar-on-the-floor treatment. You “Succession” viewers have an advantage here. On that series, the boss humiliates heirs by forcing them to crawl on the floor, oinking, in a competition to find sausages. I didn’t even watch that series but found the scene painful to watch on YouTube. Making Miller’s pop-culture reference bitterly pointed.
If you know any of my selected terms, it’s probably lulz. I’ve seen the term at least three times since i began writing this post several days ago, indicating that it was here all the time, and I just didn’t see it. Lulz answers a question you may never have asked: What’s the plural of lol , that is, “laugh out loud”? (I don’t know why the spelling changes to a “u.”) Miller points out that Trump fires employees on Twitter, such as Reince Priebus, merely for the lulz. Just for the fun of it.
I did not find Tim Miller’s use of these unfamiliar idioms off-putting. I found his style funny, original, and engaging, as is the whole book. (Also depressing.) I’m talking about Why We Did It to everyone and will talk more to you about it in a later post.
Your post made me think of the olden days, when the Watergate criminals used plain old language to demonstrate their sense of morality.
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in. H. R. Haldeman
Three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead. G. Gordon Liddy
No one is entitled to the truth. E. Howard Hunt
Well, I think we ought to let him hang there. Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind. John Erlichman
I remembered “humina humina,” thought of the Gleason show and laughed, but the others were all new to me. Current pop culture remains a mystery.
Our rising college sophomore grandchild explained to us recently that one of Harris’s superpowers is her ability to use this language, presumably because she talks with her stepdaughters. However, you would think the Donald would have picked it up since he calls his granddaughter at school all the time.