Rotting in August

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

These are the dog days of summer. Though, to be honest, they’re all dog days for me. Don’t worry, I’m not going to write a G-File about my dogs. Nor am I going to hype the apparently false, or at least very exaggerated claim that Abdul El-Sayed ran a canine “slaughterhouse.”  I had high hopes for that story as a column topic, but while it turns out that the outrageous slaughterhouse claims are true, the abuses largely happened before El-Sayed was appointed to the job overseeing animal control in Detroit.

 

It’s sort of a convention to refer to the “dog days of summer” in columns written during the dog days of summer, especially August. It’s also a strange convention to claim that nothing important happens during the summer. Not to go all conspiratorial or anything, but I think some of this cliché is driven in part by columnists and reporters to justify writing evergreen columns and fluffy articles in advance so that they can go on vacation. At least in the old days, the number of political columns with few, if any, news pegs seemed to skyrocket in August, as big-name columnists cleared the decks for vacations in Maine or Europe. A bigger contributor to the myth of the August doldrums probably stems from the fact that members of Congress need to justify leaving town for pretty much the whole month.

 

The problem: Some of the most important news stories break during the dog days of summer. Indeed, one reason events blindside Washington is that nobody is here to be on the lookout for trouble. As Tevi Troy and others have noted, August screws Washington the way tainted lettuce stews the bowels. The Guns of August wasn’t about August Wilson’s firearms collection.

 

Notable things that happened in August: President Warren Harding had a heart attack, Japan surrendered after we dropped the big ones, the Gulf of Tonkin business started the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington, Watts rioted and so did Democrats at their convention, Richard Nixon resigned, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Soviet hardliners tried to force out Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton admitted to a dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the tiki-torch peckerwoods marched in Charlottesville, Kabul fell to the Taliban and mortally wounded Joe Biden’s presidency, and the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, boosting Donald Trump’s presidential comeback aspirations.

 

Something else worth pointing out: The phrase “dog days of summer” has little to do with dogs, though some did believe that dogs went crazy during the dog days. The saying comes from the ancient Greeks and Romans to designate when Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (the big dog!), sidled up next to the sun, like a basset hound moving on a dude eating a meatball sub. “Meatballs sometimes just ‘fall,’ sir,” his eyes explained. “No one has to know.”

 

I think the Swedes and Finns have a better term for this time of year: “rot month” (rötmånaden in Swedish, mätäkuu in Finnish). During the “month of rot” food goes rancid and wounds go putrid. And given how D.C. in August goes, I think it’s best to leave the dogs out of it. It’s not their fault that D.C. this time of year feels—and often smells—like the interior of an unmaintained porta potty next to a Louisiana bayou meth lab and brothel.

 

Listing the time away.

 

Still, I feel obliged to honor this venerable D.C. tradition by mailing in an epistle (it is a “news”letter, after all) completely untethered to the news of the day or month. I wrote a very long G-File on Wednesday, and I feel like I checked a bunch of boxes with that one, so I invite you to read that one, even if you aren’t a paid subscriber, because I think it’s worth reading. So here’s a gift link).

 

Actually, I like weird lists. Some that immediately come to mind:

 

Lists of weird collective nouns for animals: A clowder of cats, a skulk of foxes, a mob of kangaroos, a parade of elephants, a troop of monkeys, a murder of crows, a dazzle (or zeal) of zebras, a raft of ducks (when on water), a flamboyance of flamingos, a parliament of owls, a murmuration of starlings, a knot of toads, an army of frogs, etc. I am annoyed that a group of alligators is a congregation and a group of crocodiles is a float. Alliteration demands a congregation of crocs, and I’d vote for an assembly of alligators (“Alligators, assemble!”).

 

Ever the logophile, I am particularly keen on lists of words. (Indeed, there’s probably no obscure site I’ve spent more time on than this one. I fear that once Kevin Williamson sees it, we will lose him to years of spelunking).

 

Already I can feel my editors wishing they had the power to kill this “news”letter. Fortunately, I’m the editor-in-chief, bwahahaha. So rather than kill this, I offer you a very  abbreviated list of killing words:

 

·         amicicide (the killing or murder of a friend)

·         avicide (the killing of birds, or an agent used to kill them)

·         bovicide (the killing of cattle, especially a cow; also, one who kills cattle)

·         ceticide (the killing of whales or other cetaceans or a killer of whales)

·         deicide (the killing of a god or divine being; also, one who kills a god)

·         episcopicide (the killing of a bishop)

·         famicide (obsolete: a slanderer or destroyer of another’s reputation)

·         felicide (the killing of a cat)

·         femicide (killing of a woman or girl)

·         feticide (the causing of the death of a fetus)

·         filicide (the killing of one’s own child)

·          floricide (the killing or destruction of a flower; also, historically, one who destroys flowers)

·          formicide (an agent that kills ants)

·          fratricide (the killing of one’s brother)

·         giganticide (the killing of a giant; also, one who kills a giant)

·         gynaecide (rare: the systematic killing of women)

·         hereticide (the killing of a heretic or heretics)

·         liberticide (the destruction of liberty; also, a destroyer of liberty)

·         lupicide (the killing of a wolf)

·         mariticide (the killing of one’s spouse, especially one’s husband; also, historically the killer)

·         matricide (the killing of one’s mother)

·         menticide (the systematic and intentional undermining or destruction of a person’s mind, beliefs, or personality; brainwashing)

·         parricide (the killing of one’s father, mother, or another close relative; also, one who commits it)

·         patricide (the killing of one’s father)

·         regicide (the killing of a monarch; also, one who kills a monarch)

·         senicide (the killing of elderly people—useful for movie reviewers if they ever remake Logan’s Run)

·         siblicide (the killing of one sibling by another)

·         silvicide (an agent or practice that kills or destroys trees or forests)

·         sororicide (the killing of one’s sister)

·         speciocide (the elimination or destruction of an entire species)

·         tauricide (the killing of a bull; also a bull-killer)

·         tyrannicide (the killing of a tyrant; also one who kills a tyrant)

·         urbicide (the deliberate destruction or “killing” of a city or urban environment)

·         ursicide (the killing of a bear; also, a bear-killer)

·         vaticide (the killing of a prophet; also, one who kills a prophet)

·         verbicide (the destruction, corruption, or distortion of a word’s meaning)

·         vulpicide (the killing of a fox).

 

My favorite among these might be “verbicide.” There are linguists who think we should have no remorse over words that lose their original meaning. I disagree. The evolution of language is unavoidable, of course. But sometimes we lose words that we need. Don’t get me started on “literally,” a word we literally need.

 

C.S. Lewis wasn’t just a great wordsmith, he was a great friend of words, trying to keep them upright like wounded comrades on the battlefield. In his Study in Words, he writes:

 

Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example. So is diametrically when it is used merely to put opposite into the superlative. Men often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its ‘selling quality’. Verbicide was committed when we exchanged Whig and Tory for Liberal and Conservative. But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative—useless synonyms for good or for bad. We shall see this happening to the word villain in a later chapter. Rotten, paradoxically has become so completely a synonym for ‘bad’ that we now have to say bad when we mean ‘rotten’.

 

Words on my list of verbicide victims include: nonplussed, bemused, disinterested, factoid, fulsome, enormity, fortuitous, reticent, travesty, dilemma, infer, imply, and evacuate.

 

Nonplussed properly means bewildered or at a loss, but is now often used to mean its near opposite, unperturbed. Bemused means confused or preoccupied. Now people use it as if someone has been ensorcelled into a state of amusement. Disinterested is a great word that’s supposed to mean impartial or lacking a personal stake. We live in an age where people are uninterested in the possibility of disinterestedness. Indeed,  factoid, coined by Norman Mailer for something that merely has the appearance of a fact, has been reduced to meaning a small or entertaining fact. Fulsome once conveyed offensive excess, especially insincere or cloying praise, of the sort we might associate with some Trump Cabinet meetings. Now the fulsome deployment of Maileresque factoids about Trump’s greatness is supposed to be taken literally.

 

Likewise, enormity traditionally denoted monstrous wickedness, not merely enormous size. Fortuitous means accidental, not fortunate, while reticent specifically describes reluctance to speak, not reluctance in general. A travesty is a grotesque distortion or parody, not simply a tragedy or outrage, and a dilemma is properly a predicament involving two competing alternatives—hence the “di-” prefix—not just any difficult problem. I think fewer and less are different terms, and infer and imply mean different things. But most people see no dilemma in using them interchangeably.

 

We use evacuate to mean getting someone to safety, but evacuate means to empty out. So an evacuated person is someone who might have eaten too much of that tainted lettuce. Attendees at the burrito brunch had to be evacuated from the cafeteria because they were evacuating themselves.