I'm fisking a hole where the little green footballs get in

Dana Loesch and NRATV refreshed their offensive against the NYT on August 3 by tweeting a clip extracted from a longer April video. The clip became controversial because of Loesch's use of the arcane word "fisk"--which people (including NYT reporter Adam Goldman) heard as "fist"--as something the NRA was going to do to the NYT. The tweet and the clip seem to have been removed, but the original can still be seen (e.g. in the body of this article describing the whole dustup).

Full disclosure: I'm hearing impaired, so don't ask me what she actually says. It sounds like "fix" to me. The full version from April has closed captions, which say "Fisk," with a capital "f," giving a nod to the name that negatively inspired this eponym, that of British journalist Robert Fisk, something about whose writing prompted bloggers to reach for new heights of scathing rebuttal.

The best definition I could find is preserved in the Internet FAQ Archives:

fisking: n.

[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment.

Unsurprisingly, Loesch's supporters on Twitter enjoyed taunting her critics for their ignorance of the word, but their prescription seemed a bit off: "read a book maybe." I read lots of books, and it was a new word to me. It was also a new word to the six very literate members of my family (one Silent Generation, two boomers, three millennials)--five masters degrees and a juris doctor--who talked about this with me the other night. Five out of the six are big book readers, and the sixth reads widely online. The term was born on the Internet; it isn't too long a bet to say that it only exists there, and not at all in books.

Some things from the early 21st century blogger argot entered general use; many did not. Tracking the roots of "Fisk," I located a legacy document that lists and categorizes locutions popularized by the website Little Green Footballs. It is revealing to examine: many of the ones that originated outside it are very familiar to me--asshat, Islamofascism, LOL/ROFLMAO/STFU, etc.--whereas I knew none of the ones that originated or potentially originated (like "Fisking") within this community.

But after all, as Dana Loesch the proud pajamarine would like the whole world to know, the NYT is just the moonstream media not to be distinguished from the Krazy Kos Kidz, a bunch of blue-diaper demonrats whose LLL just serves the interests of the Aloha Snackbars and the splodydopes and the Koranimals.

"What u haven't heard those words before? read a book maybe."