Listen, This Is Impor-int.
Please indulge me here. I’ll go back to savaging Donald Trump and his cabinet of filthbags tomorrow.
Why are Americans suddenly saying “impor-int” instead of important? Or “buh-in” for button? And why do they all seem to be twentysomethings? And why do I give a crap?
I give a crap because I always notice when people speak incorrectly, and I feel — usually, when the sin is by the young and callow — that this is a sign of impending societal decay, thus giving me something ostensibly significant to write about.
The term for the rise of “impor-int” and the like is “T-glottalization,” a phonetic shift where the middle “t” sound is replaced by a very brief soft glottal stop. The airflow is stopped by the vocal cords rather than the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth. This allegedly makes speech faster and easier on the tongue. It is lazy as hell. There are variants of this septic trend involving the loss of other middle sounds — “shuh -int” for “shouldn’t,” and so forth.
It sounds a bit British, like Cockney, or commonspeak English by the Geordies in the north country, only without the gritty regional authenticity.
You’ve been hearing this stuff everywhere for the last few years, most annoyingly on TV and on the radio, where people should know better. It’s almost always an affliction of the young. It is the modern equivalent of upspeak or valley girl patois, both of which are, thankfully, in remission. Let’s excise this one too, before it continues to metastasize.
Why is this impor-int?
Because it represents intellectual and physical lassitude. Because it is bullying and hostile —making the listener do the work that the speaker is unwilling to do. And because I just don’t like it, and I am a National Treasure.
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Okay, now a Gene Pool Gene Poll, aligned to the season:
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In advance of Presidents’ Day, I’d like to share this corny but fascinating short video of early American presidents that AI has re-imaged as they would look were they living today.
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And finally, this, from the mailbag:
Q: Have you considered escaping Substack, the Nazi enabling and sympathizing site?
A: Ah, yes, Substack’s supposed “Nazi problem.”
This question was playing off a recent shitty article in The Guardian. It was billed as an “investigation” but was basically a re-hash of a 2024 article in The Atlantic, which was, surprisingly, also shitty. The gist of both was the allegation that Substack makes money off sites that promote Nazism, white supremacy, and genocide.
When I first read the Atlantic piece, it bothered me, of course, and I looked into it. The original story didn’t hold up. They were making a mountain out of a thimble.
I would explain why, but someone did it waay better than I can. His name is Shalom Ausfelter. He is a highly respected novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He is Jewish, from an Orthodox family. He is appalled by real antisemitism. He looks like this, so you know this is one serious guy.
Auslander — who also is on Substack — looked into the allegations two years ago and also found them absurd. He did this in a great piece called The Nazi In The Haystack. To read the whole thing, you need to be a paid subscriber to Auslander’s substack, The Fetal Position, which I recommend. I subscribe for you, so I’m gonna cut and paste the top of it here, under the art it ran with:
The Nazi in the Haystack
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By Shalom Auslander
Six Nazis.
That, if the research being published about this is accurate, is how many Nazi Substacks there actually are – assuming they are actual Nazis and not just ordinary assholes.
Six.
Fucking.
Nazis.
There are, if I recall correctly, somewhere in the area of 500,000 Substacks. We’re talking about .0012 percent of all Substacks.
One thousandth of one percent. Barely.
Six.
Fucking.
Nazis.
To put that number in context:
- My two ultra-Orthodox brothers-in-law have, between them, three times as many children as Substack has Nazis.
- Those numbers could be off by 200%, and my brothers-in-law would still have more kids than Substack has Nazis (if anyone should hate Jews, it should be their wives’ uteruses).
- If the Substack Nazis were ultra-Orthodox Jews, they wouldn’t be able to pray together because the minimum number needed is ten.
- If the Substack Nazis were cookies, Cookie Monster could count them, and he can only count to ten.
Six.
Seen from another point of view, Substack might have an entirely different problem than the one being discussed. It might reasonably be said that to be considered a major platform in the new media landscape, that to claim you have reached a certain mass, you have to have at least a base number of Nazis. Until you pass a certain Nazi Threshold, you haven’t really “arrived,” media-wise. Now I don’t know that the base Nazi Number is, I’m not in the new media biz, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than six, so in actuality, Substack might have a Nazi shortage. Substack may be running low on Nazis.
The six Nazis have a combined 29 paid subscribers.
There are at least 2,000,000 paid subscribers on Substack.
Thus .00145% of the paid subscribers on Substack subscribe to Nazis. If that’s enough to make you leave Substack, I suggest you leave Planet Earth while you’re at it. The purity you’re looking for doesn’t exist.
These aren’t Nazis. These are Not-Sees. One one-thousandth of one percent of Substack – 0.0000000003625 percent of the 8 billion people on Earth, according to my probably wrong calculations – even knew of these Not-Sees until someone shouted “Nazis!”
Of course, yes — Nazi or Not-See, one is too many. If they break the rules, they should get kicked, they same way I would be or you would be for any other infraction.
I write for a living. I’ve been writing for thirty years. I am published around the world, translated into many languages and I still struggle to make ends meet. Trust me, there are faster way to get lower middle-class than writing. So when I heard that people were leaving Substack, and writers earnings were being impacted, writers who had nothing to do with any of this, I thought, “You have to be fucking kidding me. Over assholes playing Nazi?”
No.
Over six assholes playing Nazi.
PS: Don’t despair if the Nazi numbers creep up. My sisters-in-law will be pregnant again soon.
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This is Gene again. What Substack critics seem not to understand is that one does not apply for a job to write on Substack, and then Substack decides whether to admit you to their publication based on your looks, merits, experience, diversity considerations, etc. You do not have to have gone to journalism school, taken a writing test, or read an ethics guide. That’s not how it works.
Substack is more like Facebook. Basically anyone can be a Substack writer. All you have to do is start a Substack newsletter page — like a Facebook page — and you are a published writer! Substack sends your stuff out to whoever subscribes. It doesn’t cost you any money. You aren’t vetted. You can write for Substack if you are mentally incompetent. You can write for Substack if you use only profanity. You can write for Substack in Wingdings. Substack management are not your editors. I have never, once, been asked by Substack to tone down or change anything I have written. I am not even sure they read what I have written. That’s how it works.
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of substackers are earnest people who want to write interesting things — whether or not they can write well or think clearly. A very low percentage of Substack newsletters make significant money from it, let alone anything approaching a livable income. These are mostly enterprises of love, and ego. And emotion.
Substack only makes money from a newsletter if the newsletters have paid subscription options. Many never ask for, or make, ANY money, and Substack makes nothing from those. I don’t want to give away too many things, but if you have a newsletter that has, say, 12 paying subscribers at $50 a year, Substack walks away from that deal with a giant, fat wad of $60.
Anyway, when Substack is alerted to a problematically bigoted site, they will investigate, and squash it if warranted. They have. It’s the best they can do, given this business structure. No one in Substack management is saying, hey, let’s open this thing up to The Hitler Youth, or, we need to veer sharp to the right. Substack is not X, under Musk.
Do you see something you think is hate speech on Substack? Tell ‘em. Most probably they don’t know about it, and will look into it.
Okay, I’m done.
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This might be a great time to hit you up for money, now that you know how little I make! If you can afford it, please consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.”