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This past week, writing in the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg sized up the president’s nomination of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court and, in so doing, passed along a lethal anagram of the judge’s name.
“He is not a Bush crony, and — notwithstanding the curious happenstance that ‘Samuel Alito’ is an anagram of ‘I am a sellout’ — his integrity is not in question,” wrote Hertzberg.
The next day, writing for the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto countered with an alternative Alito anagram.
“Irritated by litmus tests?” wrote Taranto. “We have just the balm: Samuel Alito, whose name is an anagram for “a litmus aloe.”
Over the past week, both anagrams have spread through the back corridors of the Internet. Along the way, the Alito anagram has become a sort of litmus test of its own — with the appearance of Taranto’s anagram tending to signal a Web site’s conservative bona fides, and vice versa with Hertzberg’s.
Not that everyone is content to fall into one of the two camps. Recently, several laptop pundits have tried to out-anagram the pros.
The Pillage Idiot gave Alito’s letters a whirl: “Justice Samuel Alito = usual ice jams toilet.” Or alternatively, “Samuel A. Alito, Jr. = jealous marital = a jail’s male tour.”
In the meantime, Cerulean Blue posted an item, titled “Instead Of Useful Political Commentary, I Offer Pointless Anagrams.” One of the highlights: “Samuel Anthony Alito” equals “A hen oils my aunt a lot.”
Congrats to one and all for mastering those Internet anagram generators. Too bad the letters of Alito’s name can’t be rearranged to spell, “Get a life, guys!”
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.