The Quailtard

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One of the best words ever coined was born just this week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - quailtard. I'd seen several references to it on blogs, and given its association with the now infamous event of last weekend, and the whole idea of canned hunting in general, I thought it was worthy of a Wikipedia entry.

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Quailtard

Quailtard is a word combining "quail," a mid-sized game bird of the pheasant family, and "tard," a contraction of the noun "retard," an often offensive word used to describe the mentally challenged, or retarded. First used on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The word was used in humorous reference to the farm-raised quail released for hunting by Vice President, Dick Cheney, and others on Katharine Armstrong's south Texas ranch. On February 11, 2006, while hunting these quail, Cheney accidentally shot hunting companion, Harry M. Whittington], a lawyer from Austin, TX, with his 28 gauge shotgun from a reported distance of thirty yards.

Among the many aspects of the story that became fodder for late night television comedians, were the quail themselves, and the whole idea of such staged hunting.

Cites

"Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quailtards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them."

- The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Monday, February 13, 2006

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Shortly thereafter, numerous Wikipedians came running to mark it for deletion. This is part of the beauty of Wikipedia. It's a democratic system where the articles can be started and subsequently edited by anyone, and inclusion and deletion is similarly open to debate.

But I still maintain that quailtard's got legs! And so I mentioned it to Mark, who then posted a quailtard piece on Boing Boing. Lo and behold, the Boing Boing posse came riding into Wikipedia and thus began a thrash over the quailtard's worthiness for inclusion. Currently, the entry has been redirected to Cheney's entry. We'll see if it eventually manages to regain its own rightful entry. Wikipedia is an amazing system, and I fully respect its system of checks and balances. Of course, net phenomena have their own dynamics, and so it's interesting to observe this in real time.

To wit, I propose that the term "quailtard" now has two distinct meanings. The original meaning, as a noun for farm-raised quail released for hunting.

And a new meaning, as a verb meaning, "attempts to retard the adoption of a clearly excellent new word or topic entry."

As in:

"HEY! Get over to Wikipedia now. They're trying to quailtard the Dictator Appreciation Day entry!"

I love these! I just knew that some excellent drawings were being submitted! Philipp said that they're going to begin approving fewer "unsatisfying" drawings. I still hope they post some galleries, even if they're reduced to thumbnails, because it's awesome to see assemblages of the huge amount of creativity out there.

So go visit and do your best!

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So I tried out an interesting new site called SketchSwap, created by Dominik Schmid and Philipp Lenssen, and which provides you with a virtual pen and a blank space for you to sketch on. The concept is simple. You create a drawing, hit the submit button, and receive back a radom drawing that somebody else had created.

I hit the submit button, and received back this sketch of a pig: