Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post up about Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” comment during the president’s speech last night, putting it in the context of other … altercations.

There are certain stock joke phrases that always seem to work, and that unlike cliches or groaner puns manage to have a respectability along with their inevitability. (Perhaps because it’s impossible to use them unironically, so you sort of inoculate yourself against the joke’s failure before it’s even out of your mouth.) I’d sort of noticed these in the past, but you really notice them on Facebook.

I have a friend who’s got it bad for “So’s yer mom!” jokes, for example. As an “Office” fan, I’m partial to “That’s what she said!” myself. I’ve been known to do the “What has two thumbs and [insert other qualifying clause here]? This girl!” or “Welcome to Nounville, population: me” occasionally, though not as often as some of my younger friends. One joke phrase — or phrasing — is that “must … talk … like … dying … Kirk” thing that you can either do when you’re talking, or in writing by inserting ellipses like I just did so that any pop-culturally literate reader will hear your words in the voice of William Shatner. It’s a good way of ramping up the humor factor of an otherwise so-so joke.

Probably, as a person who likes weird words, my most common cliche joke phrase is, “That would be a great name for a band.” Such a cliche. Never gets old. (And being involved with the Ig Nobel Prizes gives me reason to say this a lot. Doggone it, “Cheap Placebo” would be a good band name. So would “The Fesmire Method.” Not to mention “Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Duck.”)

What are your favorite — or least favorite — joke cliches? I strongly suspect the ones I know and notice are very much Gen-X. Do you think there’s a generational aspect to stock humor?

Welcome back!

Did you have a good weekend? I hope so. I certainly did. And here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

I’m of mixed feelings about this, and would be interested to hear your thoughts. I’m not likely to take seriously “OMG teh internetz are destroying our branez!!!” hysteria; knowing that someone has written a book entitled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future doesn’t incline me to give weight to their words. But this editorial — which asserts with compelling logic and no evidence whatsoever that technology-mediated communication is destroying young people’s ability to read nonverbal cues — raises some good issues, if only to run around underneath them shrieking about the coming apocalypse. (I’m going to write a book on the effect of technology on the human mind one day, and it’s going to be called Actually, We’ve Always Been Stupid, It Didn’t Take the Internet. )

A brilliant guest post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that expresses some of what I’ve been trying to about why social confusion — in this case, about gender norms and who picks up the check on a date — isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A review of anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s new book, Mothers and Others, about how “cooperative breeding” led to humans’ advanced social skills. (Cooperative breeders are species, like humans and meerkats, in which the mother requires help in order to take care of both herself and her offspring. I mention this concept in the “children” chapter in Mind Over Manners.)

A delightful article from Sunday’s Globe on the odd things mathematicians notice at the movies (including the equilibrium of zombies).

Speaking of zombies, if you’ve been on Facebook at all this past week, you’ve probably seen people posting, “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.” This response was going around over the weekend: “No one should die because of zombies if they cannot afford a shotgun, or even just a machete, and no one should be turned into a vampire if they get bit by one–or a werewolf for that matter. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

And finally, don’t forget — Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony tickets are on sale now, and Miss Conduct will come to your book group!

And if you’ve been reading anything good — online or off — leave it in comments!

I believe I am going to take a very long weekend off from this blog. (Do check out the lively commenting action at the other one, though.)

In honor of school starting again, may I direct you to two blog postings from last year, in case you missed them:

Advice for teachers

and

Advice for students.

Feel free to add your own back-to-school advice in comments!

Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Tuesday. (Note: because of the holiday, there’s no Globe magazine this week, and hence no column.)

I’ll be chatting from noon to 1pm (EDT) here. Come join the chat if you can – and if you can’t, you can read the transcript later.

So, let’s talk a little more about religion and language. As noted, we use magical talk to express our hopes for others (and for ourselves). I’m not really sure I have a point with any of the below–but hey, I’m blogging, I don’t have to have a point. These are just some ideas I’m batting at you.

So if I sneeze, perhaps you’ll say to me, “God bless you.” If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I know what I’ll be saying, and it will be rather on the opposite end of the devotional spectrum. And my blue streak might serve a purpose. A study published this summer indicated some scientific backing for the folk belief that yes, cursing up a storm does, in fact, help you cope with pain. Subjects could hold their hands in ice water, and reported less pain, if they got to swear while they did it. Words are magic. (The scientists point out, interestingly, that swear words can lose their mojo if overused–no, mojo wasn’t their exact word, but you know what I mean–and thus not have a pain-relieving effect.)

Profanity and religious language overlap in the category of “blasphemy.” Subjects in the experiment were allowed to chant the “expletive of their choice,” so we don’t know if any of them were using blasphemy as well as or in addition to profanity. I use both, myself, with frequency and no small degree of skill–but the time in my life during which I was most blasphemous was when I was working at a Catholic college, because I picked it up from the people around me. All the same, though, I don’t think the blasphemy would have worked, would have had any mojo in it, if Christian/Catholic imagery weren’t highly accessible to me. If I had been in that pain and profanity experiment, I bet I could hold my hand in icy water a lot longer if I got to chant “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”–which feels like blasphemy even though those names are not sacred to me–rather than “Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva!,” which doesn’t.*

Just as taking the names of Jesus or the saints in vain feels like blasphemy even though, for me, it isn’t, using Christian religious language feels like a declaration of faith, even when it’s not. There was a lot of gospel and country music in July when I visited my cousins in the Ozarks. And I noticed, as I have at the occasional Christmas party-slash-singalong, that I feel really strange singing about Jesus. Singing in general, of course, is not a good idea for me, but I don’t usually feel the need to assess the truth conditions of lyrics before firing up the karaoke machine; I’m not going to refuse to sing “My Boyfriend’s Back” on grounds that I am a faithful married woman. (“But they did not in fact try to make me go to rehab, nor is my father in any position to have an opinion on whether I am fine or not, having been dead these ten years.”) Songs with religious language in them feel different, though; it feels strange to sing something I don’t believe in.

As long as I’m singing it in English. I suspect I’d have no (spiritual) problem singing a Christian hymn in Latin, however vocally challenging I might find it. The Traveling Psychologist does research on this kind of thing: one’s native language feels real in a way that other languages, even if spoken fluently, do not. People have a stronger physiological response to seeing emotionally charged words (sexual, aggressive, religious, or otherwise taboo) in their native language. She told me once that in China, the words “I love you” are used very rarely, perhaps at one’s wedding and/or deathbed. Chinese pop songs about romance will often use the phrase “I love you” in their chorus–in English. You can say the deeply emotional, taboo phrase in a foreign language, even if people know perfectly well what it means.

We once had some young neighbors, foreign grad students, who had a rather tempestuous relationship, and we could often hear them arguing in their native language. Occasionally, the woman would yell at the man, “I hate you!” I was always tempted to tell him that as long as she was saying it in English, he was probably safe.

*One spring while I was teaching at Emmanuel College, I was helping to clean up after a Purim celebration at my synagogue and dropped a table–not on, but frighteningly close to, my foot, and gasped, “Holy Mother of God!” At which another woman on the cleaning committee looked up and said, “Oh, do you work in a Catholic school too?”

Ads for Mind Over Manners are starting to pop up in the Globe and the New York Times, and occasionally people besides my in-laws do notice them. (Though only the senior Improbables regularly cut them out for me.) One of the questions that the ad mentions is “Is it acceptable to say ‘Bless you’ to a sneezing atheist”? Which led to this letter:

I felt like your prompt was meant just for me! What DO you say to a sneezing atheist?! My partner is a firm non believer and every time he sneezes my reflexes kick in and I end up getting an eye roll from him when I utter the ridiculous “God Bless You” that I’ve been raised to say. Now, I’m not so worried about hurting his feelings (he knows it’s a reflex more than anything else) but I do wonder about the random people I “bless” on the train. Is there something else I can say to strangers who may or may not believe in a god? And please, something a little less corny than gesundheit!

That’s not the only letter I’ve gotten on that question–there is something about it, somehow, that tickles people in some deep way, like a feather up high in your nose. (I could do this extended and very gross metaphor about how we should keep inhaling that feather-question deeper and deeper into our mind-nose, until we sneeze out all our clogged-up thoughts about it, and then we should look in the Kleenex to see what’s been inside us all this time. But that would be disgusting, and so I won’t, although I do think it would be a great Tracy Jordan rant on “30 Rock.”)

As I said way back when I answered the original question, “Bless you” is actually fairly neutral, as it doesn’t indicate by whom one is being blessed. I don’t really like “God bless you,” personally, whether I look at it from a secular angle or a religious one. Atheists are one of those minority groups that very rarely get a break in our religion-saturated culture, so I’m in favor of allowing them freedom from religion whenever there’s an opportunity. “God bless you” has always seemed like a bit of theological overkill, anyway. Let’s bring God into the equation when I have a mammogram that’s difficult to read, not because I sneezed. Especially during ragweed season. Besides, isn’t there something about the automatic nature of saying “God bless you” that puts it awfully close to taking the Lord’s name in vain?

And yet, we need religious or supernatural language. Even atheists, when announcing good news, will say, “Knock on wood!” or will offer “Good luck!” to a friend about to go off to an important job interview. In the face of potentially changing circumstances, we almost always revert to some kind of magical language to acknowledge that our own fortune may change or to indicate our hopes for others. A few months ago, I had some potential good news coming down the pike, and I requested good thoughts from friends in a status update on Facebook. People responded with everything from fully sincere promises of prayer to simple “Fingers crossed!” to joking pledges to sacrifice a goat on my behalf–but the one thing that no one, Christian or Jew or pagan or atheist, did, was simply to say, “That’s great, I hope you get it.” Such a response would have seemed almost insultingly non-committal. Whatever people’s beliefs, they felt compelled to drag a little magic into their words in order to wish you well.