Cletus safari, Boulder County edition
I saw a pick up truck driving on the outskirts of Boulder today, decorated with the following bumper stickers. In the middle of the back bumper:
This is a rare sighting in these environs, but I was more intrigued by the bumper stickers to each side. (Unfortunately I can’t find images of either on the internet, and I didn’t try to take a photo, since that could have been literally triggering for this particular suburban cowboy.)
One declared:
Whatever liberal (There may have been a comma).
I’m assuming the other was a bespoke production of some sort, because it hyphenated a word in order to fit the rest of the word onto a second line of text below the first. I reproduce it here exactly as it appeared:
Liberalism is true-
ly a mental disorder.
This is a particularly rich text. Consider that someone had to think about how to fit the word “truly” into the text of a bumper sticker that usually appears, per google images, as
Liberalism is a Mental Disorder
So the author of this variant on the classic ur-text was focused specifically on interpolating an extremely common, two-syllable word, which was then misspelled in the process. Was this intentional? Is the author gaslighting the English language itself, just to make liberals even madder? I had an urge to do a little on the spot anthropological fieldwork, but then again, triggering.