Neologisms To Love – including “Marathon-gate”

by Mary Maxwell, LLB

Don’t ask me how I found my way into the business of being almost a fulltime critic of government.  Anyway, there I be. When writing about this-or-that problem, I often wish there was a handy word available to refer to certain phenomena that recur in many cases.

It is well known, especially because of the Kennedy assassination, that the mainstream media keep on referring to the blame of a lone assassin long after it has been disproved. Hardly anyone still believes that Lee Harvey Oswald – a “commie” – killed JFK.  Yet the media and even school textbooks happily re-run the original theme (“a shooter in the 6^th floor window of the Texas book depository”) without mentioning the mountain of refutation of Oswald’s guilt.

Journalistic Recidivism

One day I was writing, not about Dallas, but about Memphis, i.e., the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King. Above, you see the photo of James Earl Ray. He looks so sad — as well he might.  He had to bear for 30 years (until his death in 1998) the pain of being accused of doing something he did not do. He definitely did not shoot MLK.

To refer to the way in which the media keeps up the old story, I introduced a neologism, the term “journalistic recidivism.” No one has taken it up as far as I know. But feel free, copyright is not involved. Journalistic recidivism is public domainsville.

To my pleasure, I learned that it caused some solace to the brother of Jimmy Ray, namely Jerry Ray. Tamara Carter wrote the book A Memoir of Injustice, about the hardships imposed on Jimmy Ray’s brothers and Jimmy himself. I published a review of Memoir of Injustice and Tamara showed Jerry my pun on the term “recidivism,” which usually means a convict once released, gets jailed again.  Tamara said Jerry smiled.

Curial Recalcitrance

Another term we need is one that could, in the space of a few syllables, bring to mind the sad new “tradition” of judges ignoring the facts or just plain ignoring rule of law. They do it again and again and thus are recalcitrant.

Curial is a word meaning “related to a court.” So I offer “curial recalcitrance” to indicate this behavior.

As far as the word “recalcitrance” goes, The Merriam Webster Dictionary provides these synonyms: contrariness, contumacy, defiance, disobedience, refractoriness, unruliness, waywardness, willfulness.

Although there may be a lot going on in a particular case in which the judge is making wrong moves – outrageously wrong moves — I do not want my new term to be used to convey a particular naughty thing that the judge is getting up to. I mean curial recalcitrance as a way of referring to the fact that the judge is not sticking to proper rule of law.

The Yeakey-ization of Evidence

In 1995, in Oklahoma City, America had its first “terrorist” incident of note (168 deaths).  Someone bombed the Murrah federal building wherein many people were at work, including in an FBI office (no, wait, the FBI agents belonged there but were absent at the moment). The building also housed a Day Care Center, and thus 16 kids died in the blast.

If you want to see some fine journalistic recidivism, just go to the Wikipedia entry on “OKC Bombing” where they tell you how Tim McVeigh and colleagues made the bomb from ammonium nitrate. (Oh, please.)   I imagine there was some curial recalcitrance involved, too, as McVeigh was sentenced to death with no one asking key questions.

Let me introduce the 5-syllable neologism “Yeakey-ization.” Oklahoma Police Sergeant Terrance Yeakey was on duty in OKC on that day, April 19, 1995. (By the way, April 19, which is also the day Tamerlan Tsarnaev died, is big in the Satanic calendar. It is known as Beltaine, but I am not going there now.)

Yeakey entered the bombed-out building and found explosives.  This ruined the official story, which is that Tim McVeigh drove a Ryder truck up close to the building and exploded a homemade bomb that resulted in the destruction of much of the Murrah building.

Sgt Terrance Yeakey died, for his trouble. Officially it was called a suicide (and still is, 24 years later). Clearly he was murdered.  I mean how many people are strong enough to stab themselves 16 times before dying of suicide?

I do not tarry here to give him the credit he deserves as a hero, or to describe the sorrow of his much-loved children. I want to get on to the fact that there are plenty of important cases where the true facts about a “terrorist” bombing have come out (Boston, anyone?) but where this does not lead to resolution.

Hence, in regard to, say, the child-stealing that is rampant in Australia, we have outed the evidence, but recalcitrant judges won’t listen to it.  I now call that “the yeakey-ization” of evidence. This sin can be committed by any person, not just a judge.  Of course it is committed by the media, wholesale.

For clarity let me again demonstrate what I would call yeakey-ization of evidence.  In Jahar Tsarnaev’s trial and appeal, there is excellent evidence that exculpates him. It is the black backpack. Oddly enough, the item was actually put forward, not hidden, by both the Prosecution and the FBI (both of whom are under the US Attorney General.)

I am not saying that we have to parallel what Terrance Yeakey historically did – he found explosives where there weren’t supposed to be any (i.e., inside the building). Rather, for the Marathon trial, the evidence is sitting right there on the Exhibit table in the Moakley Courtroom, but it is being Yeakey-ized. It ain’t being used.

Kindly state, in the Comments section below, any cases that come straight to mind where evidence has been Yeakey-ized.

The word is almost synonymous with “suppressed.” But had Sgt Yeakey’s findings been completely suppressed we would not know of them today. For Yeakey-ization there has to be a blatant mismatch between awareness of the truth and the way the law then proceeds.

Some know about the Yeakey-ization of the evidence. For instance they are aware that the pencil found on the boat could not have acted on fiberglass to do all that confession-writing. (Just as Sgt Yeakey’s trove of explosives kills the theory of the “ammonia bomb.”)

Gates Galore

The next item was inspired by a Eureka moment I had today. I was planning to go to the esplanade tonight (July 4, 2019) for the Boston Pops Concert along the Charles River. Not to get musicalized but to hand out leaflets about the Marathon trial-appeal which is rapidly wrapping up.

It dawned on me that although many people are skeptical of the “Muslim terrorist” aspect (Jahar is Muslim), hardly any realize that the behavior of the government at trial was a monumental scandal. I needed to think up a heading to put on my leaflets, in large print. Eureka – “Marathon-gate.”

That word is very easy to understand.  “Gate” did not start out as a neologism. In 1973 Nixon’s men (aka “the plumbers”) broke into the Washington DC office of the Democratic National Committee. The office was located in the actual Watergate Hotel. Perforce, Nixon got in trouble for  — literally — “Watergate.”

I don’t know who decided that we can just add the suffix “gate” to a word, to indicate “somebody got in trouble over it,” but it soon became popular. In 1976 we had Koreagate — members of South Korean government were bribing Congressmen. In 1980 there was Billygate, when President Carter’s brother Billy was exposed for doing deals in Libya.  In 1993 “Nannygate” forced Zoe Baird, a candidate for Attorney General, to drop out, as she had not paid Social Security for her maid.

There was Faceliftgate when Trump made an insulting remark about a woman’s appearance. In 2016 Pizzagate came about from a claim that Comet Pizza was a front for child exploitation. There was also a “gate” involving illicit sex in the US Navy but I can’t recall the first part of the word.

Marathon-gate!

Back to Boston now. It’s terrible that 6 years after the event, and four years after the Death Penalty verdict, official Boston acts like it does not know there is something amiss.

Many “folks” do know. Many are aware of one thing or another such as the roundup of Jahar’s friends which removed anyone who would support him. A slew of Youtubes saying the injuries were faked attracted much attention.

Some know about the Yeakey-ization of the evidence. For instance they are aware that the pencil found on the boat could not have acted on fiberglass to do all that confession-writing. (Just as Sgt Yeakey’s explosive trove kills the theory of the “ammonia bomb.”)

Still, very few know that there is a whole set of wrongs that make the blaming of the Tsarnaev brothers a huge scandal. I think if they were to hear that there is a Marathon-gate, their thinking could easily shift.

And then they could get angry at the curial recalcitrance, too. Look, best not to get me started.

Oh heck, I got so busy writing this I missed the last bus to Boston!

Never mind, there’ll be other Pops concerts. Please help me spread the Marathon-gate idea.