Muhammad Ali, who died Friday at 74, inspired glorious prose from a murderer’s row of marquee writers: Norman Mailer, Robert Lipsyte, and David Remnick, not to mention a generation of hip-hop artists. “He had been a splendidly plumed bird who wrote on the wind a singular kind of poetry of the body,” rhapsodized sports journalist Mark Kram in 1975. In 2006, ad guru George Lois gathered the mantling colors of the fighter’s verbal ephemera into Ali Rap, a book in which he proclaimed the boxer “the first heavyweight champion of rap.” Who could argue? With quicksilver rhyming dexterity and the braggadocio of a Homeric hero, Ali spoke the language of Compton long before Kendrick Lamar resurrected his floating butterfly as a symbol of black creative expression.

Boxing and talking were Ali’s one-two punch. About six months before his career skyrocketed with a world championship title—and before he converted to Islam and dropped his “slave name” Cassius Clay—he released an album of spoken word poetry, 1963’s I Am the Greatest. (His co-composer was the humorist Gary Belkin.) Featuring couplets like “Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment, / I’ll hit him so hard, he’ll wonder where October and November went,” the record showcased Ali’s wit, whimsy, and irrepressible ego. The poet Marianne Moore penned the liner notes, observing, delightfully: “He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist.”

He fights and he writes. Moore’s chiming summary reminds me of a quote from Ali’s mother Odessa, who once told Remnick:

He was always a talker. He tried to talk so hard when he was a baby. He used to jabber so, you know? And people’d laugh and he’d shake his face and jabber so fast. I don’t see how anybody could talk so fast, just like lightning. 

Lightning was a recurring motif for Ali—in the ring, he boasted, “I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail.” He didn’t just jabber; he jabbed. An athlete and a poet, he honed two modes of expression—physical and verbal—and applied to each a governing aesthetic defined by velocity and grace. Even in high school, Ali would preface his matches with a cocky couplet: “This guy must be done / I’ll stop him in one.”

I’m not surprised that Ali charmed Moore, whose poetry reflects many of the same characteristics he displayed in competition: precision, delicacy, beauty, and speed. He was a Marianne Moore poem brought to life. “Neatness of finish!” she evangelized in “An Octopus.” Her liner notes praise up-and-comer Clay as “neat, spruce; debonair with manicure.”

When Ali first arrived on the boxing scene, he bemused audiences with his unconventional style—a distinct, dancelike mix of “circling, shuffling, hopping, dipping, ducking, feinting, jitterbugging.” The journalist A.J. Liebling hedged, “He was good to watch, but seemed to make only glancing contact.” Glancing contact is a perfect description for how Moore’s poetry relates to the world: She blended visual perceptiveness and fine-grained observation with a love of oddity, indirection, idiosyncrasy. She wrote poems about creatures—snails, pangolins, reindeer—whose glowing eccentricities became metaphors for individual artistic styles. It’s not hard to imagine Clay, the butterfly-bee, the “mouse” who could “outrun a horse,” as a Moore-ian invention, especially in the context of his own awareness of himself as spectacle. “Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich white people,” Ali said in 1970, reflecting painfully on his status as a racialized wonder. “Beat up on each other and break each other’s noses, and bleed, and show off like two little monkeys for the crowd.”

But what about Ali’s linguistic pageantry, the words he used to talk about himself? As John Capouya recounted in a 2005 Sports Illustrated profile, he partially owed his “approach to flamboyant self-promotion” (as well as his interest in aesthetics) to the wrestler Gorgeous George Wagner. The 19-year-old Cassius Clay met Wagner in a locker room after the ebullient 46-year-old star had defeated his rival Freddie Blassie. “A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth,” Wagner advised the future champion, explaining his own vow to “crawl across the ring and cut my hair off” if somehow Blassie beat him. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing and always be outrageous.” (“I said, ‘This is a goooood idea!’ ” Ali told Capouya.)    

You hear Gorgeous George in Ali’s cheerful bombastic self-mythologizing. (“Sooo pretty!” the elderly boxer marveled to Remnick, watching videos of himself fighting as a young man). Leibling called him “Mr. Swellhead Bigmouth Poet”; others referred to him as “Gaseous Cassius.” On June 4, 1975, Ali treated a class of freshly minted Harvard University grads to one of the shortest verses ever drafted, an ode to his greatness that reads, in its entirety: “Me? Whee!” Some of his other greatest hits include: “If you even dream of beating me, you’d better wake up and apologize” and “I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.”

As for “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” that iconic pair of similes reportedly came courtesy of Ali’s friend and assistant trainer Drew “Bundini” Brown (who copyrighted the lines). Brown joined the Greatest’s entourage at the recommendation of Sugar Ray Robinson: “I saw Muhammad on television reciting poetry in Greenwich Village … he needed somebody to watch over him, somebody to keep him happy and relaxed. I had just the guy.” The writer of Brown’s obituary didn’t specify which poets Ali invoked on the way to meeting a future soul mate—was it Gwendolyn Brooks, whose “We Real Cool” ripples beneath boasts like “I done handcuffed lightning”? Was it his old collaborator Marianne Moore? Either way, word and act, style and movement, fused beautifully in the life of the world’s best boxer. As both poet and athlete, Ali was more than gorgeous—he was a knockout.

Read more Slate coverage of Muhammad Ali.

From every Internet niche comes a native shorthand, so we should not be surprised that includes putrescent swampy niches from the putrescent swamps of Twitter. New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman shared his war story in the paper: 

The first tweet arrived as cryptic code, a signal to the army of the “alt-right” that I barely knew existed: “Hello ((Weisman)).” @CyberTrump was responding to my recent tweet of an essay by Robert Kagan on the emergence of fascism in the United States.

“Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in brackets denoted my Jewish faith.

“What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!” CyberTrump came back. “It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.”

Truly though ((those brackets)) are not ultrasonically subtle enough to qualify as a dog whistle and not heroic enough to conjure Aesop’s image of belling the cat. Let’s call the construction the Jewish cowbell. The cowbell is a series of parentheses, anywhere from one to three, around the name of a Jewish person, to signal Jewishness. It proliferates in the dank margins of online conservative discourse, where anti-Semitism glows like a weird mold; tweets exhort Jews to follow trails of dollar bills into ovens and warn readers, via photographs of goose-stepping Nazis, not to “piss off the white boys.”

That critiques, or even mentions, of Trump can incite brain-atomizing gusts of anti-Semitism from certain corners of the Web is, sadly, not news. Just ask writer Julia Ioffe, who weathered Holocaust-themed abuse after she profiled Melania Trump for GQ, or journalist Bethany Mandel, who felt so intimidated by the violent threats of the #MAGA, or Make America Great Again, crowd (she was called a “slimy Jewess” and told she “deserved the oven”) that she went out and purchased a gun. But such vituperation often begins with this curious Jewish cowbell, a typographical indicator of ethnicity that hearkens back to the starred armbands Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Looking at these parentheses is a surreal experience: Not only do they mark out Jews, but they visually contain them, sequestered as if in a camp or prison.

According to historian Sarah Werner, there are few precedents for using typography to signify particular forms of identity. In 17^th century multilingual dictionaries, various typefaces could connote various tongues: blackletter for Flemish and English; roman for Italian, Latin, and German; and italic for French and Spanish. Though most English texts switched from blackletter to roman in the mid-1500s, works that strongly evoked a shared English culture continued to be printed in blackletter, including the great national bibles, such as 1611’s King James Version.

Leaving aside clandestine methods for designating the race of potential jurors, the closest many texts come to telegraphing ethnic or regional background is dialect. Mark Twain shaped the language of black characters to mirror “Negro speech” (or his perception of it) in Huckleberry Finn; so too William Faulkner in his fiction and George Gershwin in Porgy and Bess; novels by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Zora Neale Hurston allowed men and women to voice the vernacular music of their communities. 

Mic has a good exposé on the origins of the cowbell: Known to alt-right activists as an “echo,” the symbol sprang from a hardcore conservative podcast named the Daily Shoah. The Shoah “featured a segment called ‘Merchant Minute’ that gave Jewish names a cartoonish ‘echo’ sound effect when uttered,” Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith explain. When they reached out to the podcast editors for more information, they were told that the meme also functioned as a critique of “Jewish power”:

"The inner parenthesis represent the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism."

After just a few hours of research for this post, I cannot begin to describe the vile Freudian effluvium that pours out of Trump-adjacent spigots of the Internet. Think cartoons of purple-lipped black guys spilling McDonald’s drinks across the desks of white employers (to support Trump’s scorn for affirmative action) and Jews vacuuming up money through their fantastical schnozes. Men who criticize Trump can expect to find themselves starring in rococo gay sex scenarios: id-soaked fantasias of BBCs (big black cocks), cucks (cuckolds), “receptive homosexuals,” and “romping groups” of “alpha males” mingling with “subversive degenerates.” Women face gross comments on their bodies, accusations of mental instability, solicitude about their “meds,” and social Darwinist speculation on their corrupted “bloodlines.” The craziness highlights posters’ fluency in Internet porn even as it foregrounds intense erotic and racial anxiety. And all this is preceded, often, by a ((symbol)) whose clarion call-to-viciousness evokes the clang at the start of a boxing match.

“Hey, look at this fetid thing!” journalism has its limits, but its value is unmistakable in the Age of Trump, and this particular fetid thing should make us step back and reflect. The Republican nominee for president is riding a wave of support that looks for all the world like Hitler nostalgia. As a casually Jewish woman without the financial means to get my horns removed or my cloven hooves separated into toes, I am dismayed. Cowbell bigots may represent a tiny fraction of Trump followers, but they’re too toxic to be written off as a mere parenthetical.

Who will be the Lorax for the adverb, that most-maligned part of speech? Who will speak on the adverb’s behalf? For once again, it would seem, it is under attack. Christian Lorentzen’s New York Magazine piece, “Could We Just Lose Adverbs (Already)” is not quite the diatribe its title (parenthetically) promises: Lorentzen is more nuanced and reflective than to call for an outright ban, and by essay’s end, he has arrived at reluctant acceptance. But even then, Lorentzen maintains “their power is best spent in small doses”; he expounds on ways to prune adverbs and other “needless” words from one’s writing. It reminded me once again that we desperately lack a full-throated defense of this runt of the grammatical litter. We need an outright celebration of adverbs, and it is that celebration that I offer—stridently, boisterously, unapologetically.

The hatred of adverbs amongst writers, and specifically teachers of creative writing, has become so commonplace, so unquestioned, and so unthinking, that it ranks only with “show don’t tell” as the most ubiquitous cliché in writing advice. One finds it everywhere. When Lorentzen comments that an “excess of adverbs in prose signals a general lack of vividness in verbs and adjectives,” he’s only parroting the same advice writers have been doling out for years. One finds it throughout William Zinsser’s oft-taught On Writing Well (first published in 1976), which advises that “the secret to good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.* Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”

Zinsser here basically follows his forebears, William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, whose The Elements of Style (published first by Strunk in 1918; expanded in 1959 by White) loudly proclaims: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” The word “adverb” doesn’t cross the page, but Lorentzen is correct that “they’re talking about adverbs without their having to say it.”

Henry James once wrote of adverbs, “I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect,” but his is most definitely a minority report. To Graham Greene, adverbs were “beastly.” Elmore Leonard thought their use constituted a “mortal sin.” Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti called for their abolition, complaining they give sentences a “tedious unity of tone” (though, to be fair, Marinetti also called for abolishing adjectives, punctuation, conjugated verbs, and syntax in general). Even Hollywood, the last refuge of all manner of clichéd and hackneyed writing, understands the adverb to be verboten: in 1995’s Outbreak, Kevin Spacey’s character, during the height of a public health crisis, takes time out to dismiss the adverb as “a lazy tool of a weak mind.”

And then there’s Stephen King. “The adverb is not your friend,” he writes in 2000’s On Writing, italicizing the sentence to show he’s very, extremely, deadly serious about adverbs. King’s advice seems to have taken root with many writing students today; of all the adverb admonishments, I find King’s to be the most likely to be bandied back and forth by my students in writing workshops, students who’ve taken these words to heart, no doubt in part because of King’s sincerity. “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” he concludes, “and I will shout it to from the rooftops.” How could you ignore such a bellowed proclamation?

It should come as no surprise that the writers who most strenuously cavil against adverbs are themselves habitual users of them. Here is a lovely passage from E. B. White’s famous “Once More to the Lake”: “We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod.”*

And here is another great passage, this one from Zinsser’s American Places: A Writer’s Pilgrimage to 16 of This Country’s Most Visited and Cherished Sites, where Zinsser finally beholds Mt. Rushmore for the first time. “What I finally made out were four dirty gray faces that looked like postage stamps side by side, their features as flattened as the statues on Easter Island, hardly separable from the rest of the mountain. They didn’t even look particularly big. ‘Is that all?’ I said to myself—or, more probably, to Borglum [Gutzon Borglum, Mt. Rushmore’s sculptor].”

And here is King from his novel 11/22/63, which made the New York Times’ “The Ten Best Books of 2011” list, where the English teacher protagonist Jake Epping*, lamenting the poor writing of his students, recalls an essay by a former student: “It was certainly better than the stuff I was currently reading. The spelling in the honors essays was mostly correct, and the diction was clear (although my cautious college-bound don’t-take-a-chancers had an irritating tendency to fall back on the passive voice), but the writing was pallid. Boring.” Even in a passage ostensibly decrying terrible writing, it seems, a stray “certainly,” an erstwhile “currently,” and even a weak-willed “mostly” have all crept in.

Why do these writers—hidden friends to adverbs that they are—decry the modifier so brazenly? What are they trying so fiercely to deny within themselves? For one, haranguing against the adverb is a cheap, easy piece of advice, one that offers a mechanical solution to the abstract question of good writing. Adverb hatred attacks a symptom, rather than a cause. Creative writing teachers tell beginning writers to avoid adverbs because, on some level, bad imitations of Hemingway are easier to slog through than bad imitations of Proust.

A few years ago, Adam Haslett lamented that bans on parts of speech lead inevitably not to better writing, but to a uniformity in bad writing. “Too often the instruction to ‘omit needless words’ (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull,” he notes; “minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem.” Writers who militate against adverbs have given up on the pleasures of writing; they have been beaten down by a few examples of bad writing, and, wary of dealing with more, they advocate that all of us adopt the same remedy: writing denuded of anything unusual, stripped down to its barest elements so as to be the least likely to offend.

But there’s something lurking deeper beneath this adverb hatred, something more primal that goes beyond simply a desire to write better. “Again and again in careless writing,” Zinsser tells us, “strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs.” And it goes without saying that one’s writing must be “strong,” must never be “weak.” Good writing is, per Strunk and White, “vigorous,” which is to say it’s manly, aggressive, assertive. It’s no wonder that Hemingway, Mailer and Carver are often cited for their courageous, hard denial of adverbing, since they are our go-to men for strong, virile prose.

Adverbs, it seems, dilute the potency of one’s seminal thoughts. “Adverbs,” King writes, “like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind.” He likens adverb users to  “little boys wearing shoe polish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels.” Adverbs, the last refuge of squeaky-voiced children, are what stands between the writer and adulthood. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child,” these men all say, “but when I became a man, I put away childish adverbs.”

In addition to being childish and vaguely feminine, adverbs waste the reader’s time, and good writing is never wasteful. Good writing gets to the point; it does not use two words when one will suffice. It is not, in Zinsser’s words, “cluttered” (adverbs, like cats and National Geographic back issues, are the province of hoarders). Good writing is efficient in the sense that a computer or a downsized corporation is efficient, and in advice like this it’s easy to detect the extent to which a capitalist business ethos has infiltrated writing advice. As Mark Dery explains in an article for The Daily Beast: the golden rule, “omit needless words,” “complements the ‘less is more’ ethos of the Bauhaus school of design, another expression of Machine Age Modernism. Optimized for peak efficiency, Strunk’s is a prose for an age of standardized widgets and standardized workers, when the efficiency gospel of F.W. Taylor, father of ‘scientific management,’ was percolating out of the workplace, into the culture at large.” Adverbs, weak and prepubescent, are execrable precisely because they’re an affront to the very masculine underpinnings of capitalism. They should be avoided, Zinsser argues repeatedly, unless “they do necessary work.” Adverbs: the welfare queens of the sentence.

I, for one, am for sloppy writing, writing which uses two words when one will do. I’m for writing that isn’t always vigorous, for writing that sometimes is fey and effeminate. I’m for writing which is wasteful both of time and of ink.

Reader, I want to waste your time. Needlessly, deliriously, unrepentantly.

*

Anne Carson writes of adjectives that they “are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity.” Adverbs, then, curtail and refine—but in doing so they can pick out the unexpected resonances, the hidden valences in the words they modify. An adverb, at its best, offers a sudden shift in direction or tone, all the more unexpected considering the adverb’s seemingly slavish subservience to the word it modifies.

Adverb detractors tend to focus on the straw man example of a weak verb modified by an adverb: don’t write “he said indistinctly,” write “he mumbled” instead. It’s true that this is not great writing, and in many cases the replacement verb is indeed better. But where adverbs get interesting is when they modify an already strong verb. The adverb in such a situation allows for far more complexity: it can contradict the verb, alter it subtly or dramatically, change the meaning of the sentence in some irrevocable manner, or provide a puzzle of sorts for the reader, giving her pause. If “he walked slowly” is bad, and “he ambled” is good, then “he ambled purposefully” is great—a kind of precision that emerges only when words are at cross purposes with one another.

One great use of an adverb comes from Ben Ehrenreich’s novel Ether, wherein the author describes the actions of a half-asleep homeless man dozing under a bridge: “He pawed at his groin and farted sweetly.” It is the sweetness of the “sweetly,” the incongruous note in a world of grime, that captures the imagination. Or take Djuna Barnes, who in Nightwood says of the protagonist Robin’s lover that her “head rocked timidly and aggressively at the same moment, giving her a slightly shuddering and expectant rhythm, and that she is “one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time.” Just as the sentence gets steamrolling towards its end, it’s often the adverb that gums the works, monkeywrenching the meaning and steering us towards some otherwise missed valence.

A good adverb stages a slight rebellion, flipping the script of the verb. Michiko Kakutani, Arthur Plotnik noted, favors such adverbs, describing books with such phrases as “eye-crossingly voluminous,” “casually authoritative,” and “engagingly demented.” Adverbs can also turn against themselves, cancelling one another out, as in Eileen Myles’s Inferno: “The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days, whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window.”

Deployed skillfully, the adverb backstabs lovingly, subverts daintily, insurrects gallantly.

Unsurprisingly, Henry James is a master of adverb use, and even writers who eschew his languorous, labyrinthine style have something to learn from his adverbs. Describing Daisy Miller through the eyes of Winterbourne, James calls her neither “pretty” nor “beautiful,” but “strikingly, admirably pretty”—offering a precision unavailable in standard descriptors of beauty. When he describes Strether in the opening of The Ambassadors as keeping to himself, “independently, unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion,” each adverb comes at that “alone” from a different perspective, as though the narrator is turning over in his mind each possible meaning of loneliness. To demand of writing like this that it lose its “clutter” is to completely miss the richness offered in such a careful layering of meaning.

The other underappreciated use of adverbs is as a rhythmic pause or a break in the flow of a thought. A pause, a gathering of a moment—an adverb sometimes achieves these, working as the held note. When James runs together a series of seemingly unnecessary adverbs as he does in The Portrait of a Lady (“At present, obviously, nevertheless, he was not likely to displace himself; his journeys were over and he was taking the rest that precedes the great rest.”), he does so not to convey information, but rather to mimic that rest preceding great rest, reminding us that even prose is music.

An adverb is a great way to hold one’s breath, to build tension, to hang on a thought—the adverb is like the backing band vamping while the singer struts onto the stage. E. B. White writes of “staring silently” not because he believes it’s possible to “stare noisily,” but rather to hold, for a beat, the reader’s mind on the act of staring. When he writes of tentatively and pensively dislodging that dragonfly, those adverbs are important not really because of what they mean, but because they work primarily to draw out the time of that moment, to render it delicate, to hold onto the sweetness of the gesture that would get loss with only the bare verb “dislodge.”

Loving adverbs in this way, in other words, is less about the meaning of the words and more about the space in time they hold, the moment of breath they offer the reader, the space they carve out against the din and the noise of everything else.

In both cases, what’s striking about adverbs is the way in which they resist a treatment of language that sees it as a bare conveyance of information. We’re in a data-driven age, and that data drives us to force language into its most easily assimilated form. New apps arrive seemingly every week with the promise of increasing one’s reading rate and comprehension. Sites like Medium render articles in terms of the minutes it will take to consume them, and are calculated on a formula that treats every word as having the same temporal value. The presumption here, of course, is that no sentence need be re-read, no allusion need be looked up, no thought need be untangled.

The goal, it would seem, is to render language so transparent that its meaning can be absorbed directly and instantaneously. We want our language the way techies want their Soylent: bland packets of protein and nutrients, without taste or individuality.

We must continually seek out and praise writing that resists this tendency, that asserts itself as more than just information to be read and consumed as quickly as possible. To encourage young writers to avoid certain parts of speech is to discourage them from experimentation, from testing the limits of expression. It is to dull them inside before they’ve had a chance to begin. Writers like Hemingway and Carver made a choice to write without adverbs—good for them. Now go out and make your own choices.

*Correction, June 3, 2016: This post originally misstated the title of William Zinsser's writing manual, On Writing Well, and of E.B. White's short story, "Once More to the Lake." It also misidentified the protagonist of a Stephen King novel, who is Epping, not Eppling. 

This post originally appeared on Strong Language, a sweary blog about swearing. 

This is the story of a bygone Hollywood recording studio whose name was an acronym for a sweary Arabic-Yiddish (and also maybe Turkish) epithet. I learned about it in a comment on a blog post about a Korean–English translator.

Needless to say, I love the internet.

The post, “Why She Learned Korean,” appeared in Language Hat, Steve Dodson’s excellent and often scholarly blog about language. About halfway into the comment section, the conversation turned to acronyms, and a commenter identified only as “Y” offered this, a propos of nothing in the original post but extremely interesting to me (and to you Strong Languagers, I’ll bet):

TTG Studios, who recorded several seminal albums of the 1960s, got their name from the Arabic-Yiddish compound Tilḥas Ṭīzī Gesheftn, ‘Lick my Ass Enterprises’, which had been used as a code/inside joke in the anti-British Jewish underground in Palestine.

The other interpretations of the name, “Two Terrible Guys” or “Two Talented Gentlemen”, are apocryphal.

This turns out to be a highly plausible argument, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute. But what about the “apocryphal” stories?

The link in Y’s comment goes to a Wikipedia entry that gives three citations for the “Two Terrible Guys” interpretation, none of them a primary source. One of them, a 2010 article in Analog Planet, is an incomplete reprint of a 1997 Analog Planet article—so incomplete that the name of the interview subject was lopped off. He (I assume it’s a he) is identified only by the initials “BB.” Piecing together the evidence, I surmised that BB was Bruce Botnick (born 1945), an American audio engineer best known for his work with the Doors. He told Analog Planet’s Matthew Greenwald:

The rest of that album [the Doors’ “Waiting for the Sun”] was recorded at TTG Studios, which stood for “Two Terrible Guys” (laughs).

Was “BB” laughing because he knew the real story of what TTG stood for? BB continued:

They weren't terrible guys. It was Ami Hadani and Tom Hildley, the same guys who designed and built all the famous Record Plant studios. Anything but two terrible guys. The cool thing about Ami was that he was a General in the Israeli Air Force, and he'd be doing a session and there'd be problems and he'd have to leave the session and go fly off to Israel, fight the war, then come back and finish a session. Weeks could go by, it was kind of funny.

The early history of Amnon “Ami” Hadani, who also went by Omi Hadan, is vague. After he and Tom Hidley founded TTG, at 1441 N. McCadden Place in Los Angeles—a stone’s throw from Hollywood High School—they recorded many of the era’s prominent rock musicians: the Doors, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Jimi Hendrix, the Monkees, Linda Ronstadt.

Hadani died in 2014; I was unable to find an obituary, or a birth date, but I did find a short tribute that audiophile and music-restoration specialist Steve Hoffman published in one of his music forums. The tribute misspells Hadani’s first name and gives the wrong location for TTG Studios, but it includes this bit of information:

For those of you who remember TTG Studios, TTG stood for Tilhas Teezee Gesheften a name of a group of Jewish Brigade members formed immediately following WWII. Under the guise of British military activity, this group engaged in the assassination of Nazis and SS conspirators, facilitated the illegal emigration of Holocaust survivors to Israel, and smuggled weaponry for the Haganah.

The Haganah was a Jewish paramilitary organization during the British Mandate of Palestine; after Israeli independence in 1948, it became the core of the Israel Defense Forces.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Israeli TTG:

The three words that make up the phrase are Arabic [تِلحسْ طِيزي, “tilhas tizi”, “lick my ass”] and Yiddish [געשעפטן, “gesheften”,”business”], combined to form a modern Hebrew slang expression, meaning “You-lick-my-ass business.”[1] It has been more colloquially translated as “up your ass/götveren”,^[2] whereas [sic] “götveren” is a vulgar Turkish slang term for “queer/fag/faggot”.

The footnotes reference Howard Blum’s 2009 book The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvataion, and World War II. “The Brigade” was the Jewish Brigade, which was formed in 1944 as a unit of the British Army and continued its activities after the war. According to a Wikipedia entry, “Under the guise of British military activity, this group engaged in the assassination of Nazis, facilitated the illegal immigration of Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine, and smuggled weaponry to the Haganah.” One of the Brigade’s members, Israel Carmi, “realized that it would require an army” to move refugees out of Europe, writes Blum:

So he invented one. And he did it with just three letters: TTG.

TTG had the short, crisp punch of a military acronym. It sounded like the name of an army unit. But Carmi had chosen the letters from a phrase in a contrived, nonsensical portmanteau language, part Yiddish, part Arabic. The words were “tilhas tizig gesheften.” Roughly – and it was meant to be rough – translated, it sneered, “Up your ass.” But only the Jews from Palestine knew that.

According to some sleuthing done by Yuval Pinter, who writes the bilingual Hebrew–English linguistics blog Blazing Hyphens, Hadani not only was living in Palestine during this period, he served in the Brigade himself—and so would have been intimately acquainted with the acronym.

Modern spoken Hebrew is a young language; the first child raised to speak only Hebrew was born in 1882. That child’s father, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, compiles the first modern Hebrew dictionary, for which he coined hundreds of new words. (“Ben-Yehuda” is to modern Hebrew lexicography what “Webster” is to American.) But there were no swear words in the lexicon: with the exception, say, prostitute and bastard, off-color words were absent from the Hebrew Bible or its commentaries, and the high-minded Ben-Yehuda and his protégés had no place for them.

Still, swearers gotta swear, and so modern Israelis turned to their Arabic- and Turkish-speaking neighbors (and not infrequently to English, Russian, and Yiddish) for linguistic relief.

I’m still searching for the definitive lexicon of Hebrew swears. In the meantime, I can point you to this glossary of swears used by Israeli soldiers, in which Arabic shows up a lot; and to this video tutorial from Swearport, which is disappointingly mild but at least provides a Sabra (native) pronunciation.

I predict that people commenting on this article will be dismissive, if not hostile.

What do I mean by that? Am I predicting that commenters will be dismissive, and possibly even hostile? Or am I predicting that commenters will be dismissive, but not to the point of being hostile?

I ran a Twitter poll asking the same question, with different words:

The statistical insignificance of Twitter polls aside, anecdotal experiences as a journalist and educator lead me to believe that if you use the “it’s X, if not Y” formula in your writing, about half of your readers will think you mean one thing and half will think you mean the exact opposite.

Comprehension is at stake, so this is a language problem worth correcting, unlike the perfectly fine “I could care less” idiom, which almost everyone interprets the same way despite the fact that it literally means the opposite of how we use it.

With the “it’s X, if not Y” formula, ambiguity is built right into the word “if.” That conjunction exists to help us describe situations in which one thing might be the case, or another thing might be the case.

People in the “it’s X, if not Y = it’s X, but not Y” camp are presuming that you already know the answer to the question you’ve implied with your “if.” Take this example:

Many, if not all readers have already skipped to this article’s comment section to tell me I’m wrong.

My use of “if” in that sentence implies that there was — at some point — a possibility in my mind that all of you would have already skipped to the comment section before you got this far. However, there are context clues that would lead you to believe I had already considered and dismissed that possibility before writing my sentence; clues such as the unlikelihood that I would write and seek publication of words that I sincerely believed no one would read.

In contrast, people in the “it’s X, if not Y = it’s X, and maybe Y” camp are taking my sentence more literally; they think I’m saying there’s a possibility that all of you have already skipped to the comments, but in the event that some of you haven’t, certainly many of you have.

Both of these interpretations of my sentence are defensible, which means it’s a bad sentence. If two equally intelligent and informed people can come to opposite conclusions about what you mean, then it’s time to rephrase.

You should never write that something is “X, if not Y.” But you should feel free to say that out loud.

It’s easy to communicate which of these two options is your intended meaning by using inflection. However, it is impossible to render that inflection in text without using non-English characters or symbols, because the difference is tonal, not emphatic. For example, try reading this out loud implying one meaning and then the other:

The problem with writing nitpicking articles about language is that most of the time, if not every time, somebody will point out a language problem in your article, which damages your credibility.

If you wanted to communicate that something happens most of the time, but not every time, you’d emphasize the word “every.” If you wanted to communicate that something happens most of the time, and possibly every time, you’d also emphasize the word “every,” but with a different tone. In common English, we can indicate emphasis in text with italics or ALL CAPS, but we have nothing to indicate tonality (or do we?).

The solution here is simple: When dealing in text, write that things are either “X, but not Y,” or “X, and perhaps Y,” instead of “X, if not Y.”

I expect that one, and perhaps more of you will point out in the comments that I’m not the first person to make this argument. However, I think I am one of the first, and perhaps the first to do so using this many prismatic, self-referential examples. I’m nothing if not precious.

(Wait, does that mean I actually am nothing? My god, I’m vanishi—)

The singular they is gaining acceptance as a resourceful solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun. But it’s not settling in without controversy. What’ll be next? critics fear. Themself? As in, Jo went to see the movie all by themself?

Actually, yes. We should be falling all over ourselves – or, if you’re a monarch, ourself. Got a problem with themself? You should take it up with Her Majesty.

Like singular they, the royal we, in which a sovereign refers to themself with  plural pronouns, takes a curious reflexive form. Ourself, joins a plural our with a singular self. While unusual, ourself is all over Shakespeare. Take Macbeth: “The sweeter welcome, we will keep ourself/ Till supper-time alone.” Richard II shows us the pronoun’s intensive form: “We will ourself in person to this war.” Even the heroic and eloquent Henry V employs it: “It was ourself thou did abuse.”

Chaucer, Dickens, and Tennyson join Shakespeare to form a literary pantheon of ourself. John Wycliffe used ourself in his seminal 14th-century translation of the Bible into English. Some believe English’s majestic plural started with Henry II’s claim to divine right. When he spoke, he was also speaking for God. Hence we. The royal we, however, probably goes back to ancient Rome.

And the construction has evolved. Journalist and author Constance Hale identifies several modern first-person plurals. Like the political we: “We are taking this campaign all the way to convention.” Or the editorial we, employed representatively by columnists. There’s the urban we, which Hale ribs as a sort of smug, hipster sanctimony: “We should really compost, honey.” And then there’s the nanny we: “We don’t play with our food now, do we?”

 Since we still use various collective we’s, we are still referring to ourselves as ourself.

The up-to-the-minute corpus Newspapers on the Web finds hundreds of recent examples of ourself, often in quotations from individuals speaking on behalf of an organization or cause.

Both ourself and themself are attested earlier in the record than their plural counterparts, which superseded them in the 16th century. So they’re not just lofty and quaint: They’re original, even found in some foundational Anglo-Saxon texts.

But c’mon, you might be saying. Ourself simply doesn’t sound as wrong as themself. Compare Jo went to the movie by themself with a coach’s post-game analysis of We really pushed ourself hard this match. The first example just innately sounds more ungrammatical, doesn’t it?

Well, the latter example might enjoy an unfair advantage: The plural our agrees with the plural subject, dampening the din of disagreement some hear as more jarring between Jo and themself. (Conversely, many users of collective we may err on the side of ourself, as ourselves may jar some with its suggestion of multiple speakers.)

And are there any good alternatives to themself? Style mongers might blow their whistle at the alien-y xeself, the impersonal oneself, the clumsy him or herself. While we often judge grammaticality by our ear, we should be sensitive: themself, along with ourself and us self, are perfectly grammatical in certain speech communities. Not to mention that, for the person who identifies as genderqueer, some alternatives to themself don’t accurately represent their identity.

Once upon a time, we called ourselves whatever we wanted. As early as the ninth century, English speakers were using a simple, solo self as its general reflexive and intensive pronoun. The usage leaves us with some great examples in the annals, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: god self, man self, lord self, thing self, parties self, poet self. (By this token, Jo saw movie by Jo self.) Yet these usages didn’t stick around. Others did, and merged together with frequent and widespread usage, like himself, herself, myself, itself, and oneself, and, for a time, ourself and themself. Themself is a perfectly acceptable inflection for singular they. If you don’t like it, you’ll soon be by yourself – yet another pronoun that has managed just fine in both the singular and the plural. 

A few weeks ago, sports writer Brian T. Smith wrote a column for the Houston Chronicle about an outfielder for the Astros, Carlos Gómez, who has gotten off to a slow start this season. Smith interviewed the Dominican-born Gómez and quoted him exactly, relaying his words as follows: “For the last year and this year, I not really do much for this team. The fans be angry. They be disappointed.”

The quote stood out, because sports writers don’t usually transcribe so precisely the words of players for whom English is their second language. Usually, sports writers clean those quotes up. (Even Breitbart has rendered Go-Go’s speech with correct, if informal, grammar.) Critics, including Gómez himself, took Smith to task for seeming to mock the athlete’s incorrect English. Chronicle editor Nancy Barnes apologized, citing “less than adequate” AP guidelines on quoting news sources who did not grow up speaking George Washington’s tongue. On Deadspin, Tom Ley suggested that Gomez “has a right to be annoyed” that a reporter “went off and made him look dumb by not extending him a courtesy that most people quoted by reporters get”: that of subtly tweaked sentences.

Not everyone agrees. Over at ESPN’s brand-new site the Undefeated, J.A. Adande used the incident to inveigh against the cleaning up of quotes. “Since when should journalists apologize for being accurate?” Adande asked. Doesn’t objectivity demand absolute faithfulness to what a person says, not what he means to say?

But context matters. It’s common practice in journalism for writers quoting sources to remove filler words—like, ah, um—and correct tiny grammatical violations. (Slate’s policy is to handle such issues on a case-by-case basis, but many writers at the magazine I spoke to told me they make such elisions and alterations all the time.) This is done to present information to readers as clearly as possible. It services the idea that we should be focusing on the content of the quote, not the slight infelicities that distinguish spoken from written English. It’s also done because writers scribbling in notebooks are unlikely to recall every twist and turn of a quote, and tend to streamline and standardize sentences in their notes.

So that expectation of unfailing accuracy is already misplaced. But Adande argues further that fixing quotes patronizes sources, implying that their words “are inherently inferior and must be corrected.” Yes, this is a problem when, for instance, white newsrooms insist on doctoring the expressions of black people to make them conform to Standard English—as if Black English were not a legitimate dialect on its own.

But we are not talking here about established vernaculars like AAE. We are talking about the imperfect phrases of a non-native English speaker—phrases that, quoted exactly, read to many readers (including, in this case, the subject himself) as a writer needlessly lampooning a source’s manner of speech. “Reasonable people can make allowances for those who use English as a second language,” Adande wrote, referring to Gómez. “Instead of teasing them for their shortcomings, we can applaud them for successfully conveying their thoughts.”

But the role of journalists is neither to tease nor to applaud, but to deliver information as clearly and truthfully as possible. To include a grammatical error in a news story is to hint that such error is somehow significant, rather than something most of us do when we are asked to extemporize aloud. Certainly, there are times when replicating someone’s exact rhetorical tics on paper illumines a deeper truth. But what was Smith illuminating by preserving Gómez’ broken English in an article about his .226 batting average? What cultural heritage was he honoring? What characterological or intellectual traits did he highlight?  

Gomez read the untweaked quote as an unkindness, as many readers did. Gómez was right, and Smith was wrong, and you can quote me on that.