the political urge to use noun phrases

It's too much to go into here, but reality is more like verb phrases than it is like noun phrases.

Nevertheless young USA Republicans have produced wallpaper for your PC [via], featuring a very long noun phrase.¹

“I'm a Freedom Fighter Protecting Freedom from the Authoritarian, Granola-eating, Elitist, anti-American, Socialist Do-gooders, Statist, Enviro-freak, Leftist, Power-hungry, Truthless, Left-wing status quo force fed on today's American Campuses.”

In case you have trouble reading that, the modified noun is 'status quo'.²

*
As it happens, Christopher Hitchens loves noun-phrases, too.

From last year, all in just one page from him:

'prisoners' dilemma',   'angry abstention',  'triangular calculation',  'banal,  unexciting assumption',  'two-party oligopoly',  'irony of history',  'underlying stipulation',  'formal quarrel',  'racist janjaweed death squads',  'pitiable, deep-seated Muslim grievances',  'near-impeachable irresponsibility',  'hypertense refusal',  'degraded, mendacious populism',  'self-imposed quandary'.

Could it be Hitchens has moved into alliance with these guys because they share his grammatical urges? Could that be part of it?

[I am wavering between this and the guess that Hitchens was treated rudely in Persia on one of his visits by locals who misunderstood his purpose there.]

1. In case the image goes away: the wallpaper has a muted blue background. Below the text is the YAF logo. There is a line break after 'Freedom Fighter'.


2. It is possible they don't capitalize 'status quo' because they don't think status quos are intrinsically bad.

[modified]

'hell' taken from cartoon pasta

Artificially dated - this blog did not exist back then.
This has been copied here in revised form.

The New Yorker magazine has removed 'hell' from a caption on a classic cartoon.^* It stars pasta.

[I have since lost my copy of the cartoon. It might have been Barsotti's, picturing a piece of Ziti(?) answering a phone. If this was the one, then the caption originally would have been "Fusilli, you crazy bastard! How the hell are you?"]

Perhaps it's funnier without the cursing. Or perhaps the editors think 'hell' is fading from use.

Or maybe something more subtle is happening.

going back aways
I associate the word 'hell' with the Victorians (roughly: 19th-century England). So I checked out John Fowles' The French Lieutentant's Woman.

Yes, a novel, but word-searchable on Amazon.com.

Within seconds I find that the book contains the word 'heaven' 30 times (in the dialog, mostly) and the word 'hell' only 2 times.

In this quote, Fowles describes a Victorian woman who thinks a lot about hell (but he doesn't have her say the word):

"There would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady; she had a way of interrogation that would reduce the sturdiest girl to tears in the first five minutes ... Yet among her own class ... she was renowned for her charity ... it had to do with the great secret of Mrs. Poulteney's life. It was a very simple secret. She believed in hell. ... As she lay in her bedroom she reflected on the terrible mathematical doubt that increasingly haunted her: whether the Lord calculated charity by what one had given, or by what one could have afforded to give"

1970s anecdote Once I was a witness as someone accidently dropped something and then angrily spelled out the curse: "H-E-doublehockeysticks!". He felt -I guess- that if he said the word he might end up at the place.

back to the presentWhat does this all mean? ..Heck if I know.