Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see a mixture of clouds and sun with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:31 for 15 hours 15 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1975, Sony launches Betamax, the first videocassette recorder format.
There’s a silly headline at the Journal Sentinel for a story on Trump’s Friday visit to Wisconsin:
See Molly Beck and Laura Schulte, Unflappable in face of headwinds, Trump draws loyal Wisconsin crowd, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 5, 2026.
At the Journal Sentinel and other newspapers, a headline isn’t always a reporter’s choice, but may instead be a decision between reporter and editor, or editor alone. (USA Today Co., Inc., formerly known as Gannett, publishes the Journal Sentinel.) In any event, choosing a headline that describes Trump as unflappable reveals a deficient grasp of an ordinary English word.
As with millions of others, English is my first language, and I’ve spoken it for a considerable time. Having met many other English-language speakers, I’ll venture confidently that no one with even a rudimentary grasp of that large-vocabulary language would describe Trump as unflappable. (That is, “persistently calm, whether when facing difficulties or experiencing success; not easily upset or excited.”)
There’s nothing about a temperamental, whining, excuse-making, vindictive Mar-a-Lago man that meets the definition of unflappable. He’s certainly not persistently calm, and a setting among devotees and sycophantic officials was hardly a test of remaining calm.
The Journal Sentinel has fallen on hard times, and their circulation is in steep decline. Misusing the language in which the paper is published cannot be helping their prospects.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”: