It pops in your head and you just start jabbering.

As befits a retired constitutional law professor, Ann Althouse always has a great respect for language and meaning. She can be quite savage when people are sloppy with language and meaning.

She has a post up, Richard Cohen (the WaPo) columnist doesn't "quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations." Richard Cohen? Hadn't thought of him for some years. He was a reporter/columnist with the Washington Post (as he still is) way back in the late seventies and early eighties when I was an undergrad at Georgetown University and reading the WP every day.

He can write but I quickly tired of him - he was highly predictable as to what he would say and that was substantially dictated by the passing nostrums of the Democratic Party. A writer but not a thinker.

Althouse takes him to task for wasting her time.

He's got an image, but he can't picture it. I picture something like this:

[video clip from Wizard of Oz]

But damn, I find it annoying, starting off a column so lazily.

I don't quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations. Given a Republican incumbent who has never exceeded 50 percent in Gallup's approval ratings poll and who won the presidency thanks to a dysfunctional electoral college, the party is nevertheless determined to give Donald Trump a fair shot at re-election by sabotaging itself....

Yes, yes, I know, it's perfectly predictable, the point you're going to make. But you waste my time with a cliché, and you don't know how to use it. It pops in your head and you just start jabbering, padding out your column with the tedious news that you don't understand your own unfresh metaphor. How do you head anywhere in a basket? Is someone carrying the basket? Is it a basket with some automotive power? Is it a basket placed for some reason — by whom? — at the top of a slippery slope?

I'm so glad I stopped to ask, rather than to continue to read the scribblings of Richard Cohen

I did read his column for old time's sake. And it was as unoriginal, tired and predictable as ever. Althouse was right to pull the plug. Or should I say, put down the basket.

Althouse is on a language meaning roll today. Her next earlier post was When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked "Is it OK to still have children?," what did she mean and was she saying something new?

Again, Althouse drives down to the meaning of the words.

I'm watching this little video snippet:

"There’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people, to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?" Ocasio-Cortez said. "Not just financially because people are graduating with 20, 30, $100,000 worth of student loan debt, and so they can’t even afford to have kids and a house, but also just this basic moral question, like, ‘what do we do?’" she continued. "And even if you don’t have kids, there are still children here in the world and we have a moral obligation to leave a better world for them."

I'm seeing reactions around the web — mockery, contempt, even some stupid exultation (the kind that says: Ha ha great so the lefties won't have children!). But my questions are:

What did she mean?

There are 2 completely different ideas. One is that the world is going to be so bad that a good person would not choose to cause a new individual to suffer the predicament of having to live in it, that it might be so bad that you should visualize your future child yelling I wish I had never been born and really meaning it. The other idea is that human beings are the cause of climate change, so it's wrong to add to the mass of humanity that is wrecking the world.

I don't think she's clear. She's just throwing her thoughts out there, disorganized, and maybe it's up to the listener to complete the logic. But which way are we supposed to complete AOC's thoughts? She talks about morality but — unless there's more to this video — she doesn't face the difficulty of thinking about whether what she means is that it's bad that there are so many people on this earth or whether life isn't worth living.

There's also a third idea mixed in there, and it's not a moral choice for the would-be parent. It's just personal economics. It's expensive to have children, and a lot of young people, including perhaps herself, realize that the most effective way to economize is not to have children. That could be seen as a moral choice for the country as a whole: It's morally wrong to maintain a system that tends to make young people feel that they can't afford to have children, that it's a big economic sacrifice. It's morally wrong not to welcome and support those who are willing to do the hard work of bearing and rearing children.

These two posts highlight the different forms of the spoken or written word.

We can communicate as a means to an end - communicating knowledge and ideas as succinctly and effectively as possible.

We can communicate as a means of art - the spoken or written word is an aesthetic itself, done well or poorly (see Cohen).

We can communicate as a means of performance - the spoken or written word is just a hook to get your attention. It has monetary or political value.

We prefer the first two forms but instead we get mostly the third. Word salads with not much substance or coherence.

Is there a linguistic equivalent of Gresham's Law? Something along the lines of - In a low barriers-to-entry communication marketplace, bad communication drives out good communication.

Good communication takes time and effort to produce and has real value and a real market. But in the open commodity market of communication, the word producer with the lowest marginal cost of production floods the market. Low production costs are usually associated with low quality. The open marketplace of communication is flooded with the lowest quality communication. A la Cohen and Ocasio-Cortez

Artful communication and valuable communication still occur but they are segregated into closed markets by brand or paid access. In general. If you are careful and selective, you can still find great communication but it doesn't happen by chance. Random selection gets you word drudge.