I have nothing against word play. I do have something against painfully amateurish wordplay of the ha ha, did you hear it — I just told a joke kind. To each their own, obviously.

Regarding The Lounge — it could have been a good show if they just didn’t try so hard to be hip. There’s just something craven and somehow terribly sad about desparately trying to pander to a demographic. They tried to “young it up” and failed. Badly. It was the audio equivalent of a balding fifty year old getting a bunch of tatoos and piercings and trying to hang out with the 20 year olds.

@steve: I enjoyed the fun Lederer and Elster seemed to be having with language. I would listen with one housemate who liked it but another housemate hated them fervently (he found wordplay the crudest form of humor). Of course it is now 8 years later and I don’t really know how the show has evolved. It is ingracious not giving a fair listening to the new hosts but I missed the old hosts.

I don’t remember hearing the particular segment, but I am surprised that Lederer never acknowledged the apocryphal nature of that story, or rather while he did so in email but not on the air. This deserves a quick Snopes http://www.snopes.com lookup…. In contrast, Says You often cocks it up especially at Definitions and Derivations, but at least there is the Daily Dispatches on the SaysYou.org SaysYou.NET website.

You are right that Guzman-Lopez was an on-air newbie having only been a segment producer up to that point. At the time, I wasn’t sure The Lounge’s intention of hitting a 20-something audience was going to work. However, being in that demographic, I appreciated KPBS for at least trying. When Guzman-Lopez was replaced, I was disappointed that they abandoned the project.

In the couple of years that I listened to The Lounge and AWWW, I must admit they definitely were going through growing pains and were missing much spit-and-polish. I remember when there were rumors of syndicating AWWW, I didn’t think it would do well because of the show’s structure and the local flavor of the hosts that I didn’t think would translate well. I guess they solved that problem with the new hosts.

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=4200931n

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/22/sunday/main4200708.shtml

Well, it’s just text. I’ll look around for video…

Congratulations to all involved!

Humor gives no license to lie. It’s a pathetic sort of person who would refuse to make it clear that the story, while humorous, was also bogus, and thus defamatory for Smathers. I do remember that story meandering about back in the day. Political humor is at best useless if it does not also enlighten. Truth is its raison d’etre.

The Senator was named George Smathers and he was alleged to have given a stump speech during the 1950 election campaign in which he is quoted as saying

“Do you know that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? [. . .] Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”

The notion was the rubes in backwoods Florida were too uncultured and illiterate to understand what the words meant.

Smathers denied ever making the speech and there is significant evidence to indicate that the story was made up out of whole cloth by a bored wire service reporter.

I can’t put my fingers on the debunking of the story at the moment though if you Google some of the key words along with Smathers’s name, you should be able to find them.

As I mentioned above Lederer knew that the story was dubious at the very best (and admitted so in an email to me) but refused to retract or apologize for using the story. While A Way with Words isn’t precisely a news program I think you can still hold it to a standard of accuracy.