Tainted Merkin

The public editor of the New York Times used the word taint in a headline. Heh.

Then ol’ William Safire in his “On Language” column in the magazine deployed this sentence: “The American language — ’Merkin, as it is proudly called — is rife with classic lines from movies as well as lines from classic movies.”

I thought a merkin was a prostitute’s pubic wig, not our country’s common parlance.

Reading the Times this weekend apparently unleashed my ten-year-old sense of humor. Merkin. Taint. LOL.