Quick takes

Sweary links, the return of Manolo, and a little more about AI slop.

I’m back at Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, with a new collection of sweary links — our twenty-seventh! Learn about sweary robots, sweary Democrats, sweary Formula One racers, and much more.

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One of the most delightful characters of the Early Blogging Era was a fellow who called himself Manolo the Shoeblogger and who between 2004 and 2015 wrote a series of charmingly eccentric posts, sometimes several times a day. This Manolo was not Manolo Blahnik the famous shoe designer but rather some other Manolo of mysterious provenance who wrote about, yes, shoes, but also about whatever else struck his fancy, in a voice that seemed to have been channeling one of the Eastern European Mmes. D.J. Trump. (A sample post from February 2005, in its entirety: “Manolo says, the Manolo he is not the big fan of any couture that looks like a skin condition.”) I guest-blogged for him a couple of times about one of my interests, oddly named shoe styles. (Here is “If the Shoe Name Fits,” and here is “They Named That Shoe WHAT?!?” Apologies for the janky formatting, over which I have no control.) In 2016 another fashion blogger, Wendy Brandes, unmasked his true identity: He was Howard D. Miller, chair of the department of history, politics and philosophy at Lipscomb University in Nashville. He had three advanced degrees from Yale!

And here’s the reason for this rambling nostalgia trip: Manolo, I mean

H.D. Miller

, now writes on Substack! Not, alas, about shoes, but about Eccentric Culinary History, the subject he addressed in a previous website. His Substack bio is terse — “Food Historian, Blogger, Writer, Professor, Prodigious Eater, Bon Vivant” — but you can read a more extensive About Me here. The credo he summarized on his former website is the one he adheres to in his Substack newsletter: “This isn’t academic history, with footnotes and a dreary tone of measured knowingness. It’s loosey and goosey and anything-goesy. It is meant to be enjoyed, so enjoy it.”¹ His most recent post is about Baldassare Forestiere, an Italian immigrant who created Fresno’s Forestiere Underground Gardens in the early 20th century. (I’ve visited those gardens; they are enchanting.) Manolo, I mean Miller, muses that Forestiere must have been “the ultimate incel.” And he goes on from there. Nancy says, read it.

And here is an oddly named shoe from my own archives:

The absurdly named Aquatalia “Flubby.” I wrote about it in 2011.

I’ll bookend this newsletter with another bit of self-promotion: A piece of my writing appears in the May issue of American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society. It’s about AI slop, and it’s the very first entry of the alphabetically sorted “Among the New Words.” Scroll down to find the article, which isn’t paywalled and which includes entries on brainrot, girlypop, -maxxing, and the ADS’s word of the year for 2024, rawdog. Had you already forgotten about rawdog? Here’s a refresher.

1. I rarely come across “loosey-goosey” in the wild, but today (Thursday) I spotted two additional fresh usages of it. One of them appears in another delightful food-centered Substack,

emily nunn

’s The Department of Salad, which on June 12 contained this rhymey subhed: “Loosey-goosey slightly juicy salads that will make you a better person. Or at least make ME a better person.” That fennel-and-cherry salad does look tempting. The other is from another Emily: Nussbaum, who wrote about Gertrude Berg, “the forgotten inventor of the sitcom,” for the June 16, 2025, issue of the New Yorker: “In 1945, Berg’s radio show ended—and four years later she rebooted it as a television sitcom on CBS, during the loosey-goosey early days of the medium, when shows still aired live and were run by advertisers.” The expression loosey-goosey is thoroughly American and only about 60 years old — Merriam-Webster says it first appeared in print in 1964 but doesn’t provide a citation. Loose as a goose, also from the U.S., had been around since the 1930s; it originally alluded to diarrhea.