From Steven Hayward on Power Line, I’ve learned of this nifty random academic sentence generator. Here’s the first sentence it produced for me: “The reification of the gendered body invests itself in the engendering of normative value(s).”
That’s reminiscent of the random judicial opinion generator, which has regularly spewed out pompous idiocies like: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” And: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Speaking of Justice Kennedy: I’ve had occasion to ridicule his pronouncement that “speech is the beginning of thought.” But in his dissent last week in Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, Kennedy seemed to correct his confusion about the relationship between thinking and speaking, as he stated: “Free speech begins with the right of each person to think and then to express his or her own ideas.” (Emphasis added.) Let’s hope that he proceeds promptly to correct more of his errors.