Missing Louisiana’s Most Notable Wordsmith

By Calla Jones Corner

I'd been wondering when Louisiana's Republican Senator John Kennedy might comment with his inimitable, unforgettable wit, on the attempts on Trump's life.

 Then before a hearing by the Judiciary Committee on the attempted assassination of the former president, the senator didn't disappoint. When Acting Director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe, Jr. (who replaced the disgraced Kim Cheatle, following her resignation) tried to excuse the nearly successful attempt by saying the agency needed more money for personnel, Kennedy quipped, "In the real world when you screw up you get fired; in the government you get more money."

During the hearing, Kennedy called the deadly attack (that killed one man and injured others), "A goat rodeo," while praising the agents who jumped on Trump at the first sound of flying bullets. "A twenty-year-old punk outsmarted the Secret Service. I'm not going to bubble wrap it. I'm going to chase him (the Acting Director) down the for answers like he stole my dog. You can take this down and take it to mother."

In the past, Senator Kennedy has described Nancy Pelosi (one of his favorite targets) as "part of the managerial elite" and as someone who "can strut sitting down.” The “managerial elite,” he explained, “live in the condos with the high ceilings and the important art on the wall. I call them the shaved-truffles-crowd. They think they are smarter and more virtuous than middle-class, ordinary Americans. They are not, of course!”

 I’d been wondering what the Senator had been thinking or saying, since I’d moved back to France (French news has been consumed with that other Kennedy [RFK, Jr.] deciding to back Trump) since Nancy Pelosi took off her former Speaker's spiked lapel broach to stab Biden in the back.

 Kennedy’s disdain for Ms. Pelosi goes back to 2017, when he was first elected to the Senate, calling her a “billy-goat brain with a mockingbird mouth," when she opposed Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.

 Senator Kennedy called Pelosi's $3-trillion bill she passed in the House "As dead as fried chicken [in the Senate]", saying, "We've tried to see the Speaker's point of view, but we can't get our heads that far up our rear ends."

In October 2016, We were with British friends in Paris hoping to be amused by some Churchillian zingers over BREXIT. The only amusing and not memorable moments, however, were when two House of Commons members vented to a BBC reporter that they had missed their sixtieth birthdays parties because of Labor’s intransigent nonsense. One left-wing female reporter commented: “But, you’ve had three and a half bloody years to get it right.”

Just a few years ago, the “B” word, uttered by a female would have marked her forever as un-ladylike.

 We told our friends about the Tory quip and our conversation quickly focused on how the English language had degenerated into ungrammatical gibberish on both sides of the Pond. I contributed that my decades-long assault on Valley Talk (the name given to inserting “like” into every sentence), seems to have worked so far with my children and grandchildren. I had to add, however, that Granny Lilly (me) recently caught an eight-year-old grandson telling his brother, “Give me the damn ball," which he confessed he’d learned from a school pal. I assume, had his parents heard the word, they would have said something. But would probably not have threatened to “wash your mouth out with soap,” as my mother would have.

“Oh”, said our female friend about the contagious use of like, “it’s invaded our shores too!”

The husband, a quick witted and scholarly old Harrovian and Cambridge graduate, noted how many Brits leave out consonants, making the Queen’s English unintelligible. He gave as an example “little,” now pronounced “li’l.” His wife commented that Etonians, who could once be distinguished from Harrovians by their exaggerated clipped speech, are now considered too posh, not only for the general British public, but also other prep school graduates. They both agreed that the Queen’s English was about to become a dead language.

Soon, the conversation turned to the sexualization of words that, once never heard in polite discourse, forever stigmatizing the speaker, have become acceptable. From there, we four analyzed how the French seem to be able to get away with more than Brits or Americans when it comes to four letter words. My husband, also a posh British prep-school and Oxford graduate, only learned how to use the “F” word when he did his two years in the British National Service before university. Had he used the “F” word at prep school, he would have been caned.

 I mentioned how, in the seventies, when I was teaching American business slang to French businessmen at IMEDE, the branch of Harvard Business School, in Vevey, Switzerland, a student asked me why American English didn’t have a usable-in-polite-society ‘S’ word, like “merde.” I was at a loss to answer.

I told our British friends how the French use of “putain” (whore) by Frenchmen, is now often used in French conversation to replace the “F” word. French feminists don’t seem bothered. Nor did French feminists seem bothered by the outrageous depiction of Leonardo's Last Supper by drag queens in the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony.

After my husband and I heard Senator Kennedy’s remarkably restrained use of a “B” word about Pelosi, we looked up the word’s history. Less than a century ago the act of buggery (Oscar Wilde comes to mind) would put a man in jail in the U.K.

My, how times have changed!

 We both suspected that Senator Kennedy, a Vanderbilt Phi Beta Kappa, graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and Oxford University with first-class honors and an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University’s Law school, knew exactly what he was saying. We also agreed that if anyone should be able to speak his mind, it’s Senator Kennedy, and his mouth shouldn’t be washed out with soap, but rather applauded.

I miss Senator Kennedy's quips. But then they probably wouldn't translate well into French – the zing would be lost.

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