My grandmother used the word crib. It was the thing she put babies in. I imagine yours did likewise.

That form of hustling was not aspirational and was intrinsically tied to criminality and con men. If you called someone a hustler back then or refer to their job as “their hustle,” it would be seen as an insult. No one was using the phrase the way that, say, Katt Williams uses it in 1975.

Holy fuck we are some defensive ass honkies today. We have people talking about Dutch etymology, and how their tennis coach used to use the word “hustle” as if that’s remotely analagous.

C’mon. THIS usage of hustle did not precede hip-hop. The fact that someone’s tennis coach told them to hustle to the net is tangential at best, and more accurately, willfully obtuse.

Without defending the costume, I don’t think the analogy plays. I can dress as a person who is black without doing blackface, whereas it would be hard to dress as Caitlyn for Halloween with in some way dressing similarly.

Why are you talking about more than six month old news stories as if they are current?

Am I so out of touch? No. It’s the children who are wrong.

I see the point your making, but at the same time, not every story has to be all the stories. Sometimes I can tell a story about A without it also being about B. By analogy, it isn’t rude to write a story about poverty in Detroit because I didn’t mention Flint even though they are proximate, since my story was about…

To continue making paper. Duh.

But I heard that ball(er) don’t lie.

That’s just what the job is called. It might be archaic, but it’s like “waitress” in that it is the overwhelmingly predominantly term.

Sorry, ain’t got time in my life for your willful misreadings even after I’ve clarified.

Yours is a well-considered and well-taken reply. I think you are on to something about the semantic meanings of left and right. There is, presumably, a middle point between looking at it and complete isolation, and considering literally every political view ever held (as another commenter suggested). And I may be…

That’s slightly different than the point I was making (also, you chose not to mention the ones who are in fact right of Obama, which is what ‘if at all’ was meant to imply. There are several in that list. In addition, there is the issue of leaders’ respective Overton windows which make this comparison more nuanced,…

Indeed they are here to stay and I don’t really argue for using 30 different more specific terms because that’s frankly unwieldy. But I don’t think we agree on what they mean in modern parlance. Left and right are generally used as relative terms, simply implying where the people in question fall on their contemporary…

So, your reply wasn’t to me, but I don’t think it’s “crazy,” really. I just don’t think it is pragmatic and useful. I think framing things in the fashion that you are describing is not a useful lense for American politics, as it bases its poles on views that are generally absent from the actual, existing populace in…

Are you claiming that the Conservative Party is center left in the UK? Or CDU? Or UPM? That view is... unusual.

And the point of the word “center” or even left/right is to have some meaning. If you consider 90% of the voting populace right wing or center right or whatever, I would say that these terms are no longer useful for discourse.

You know what, you’re pointing out some word choice I regret.

You mean the countries that are or recently have been led by, among others, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Shinzo Abe, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Stephen Harper, Jose Aznar? All of whom are barely left of Obama if at all?