This post is just a fun one -- nothing serious. I am over in Japan right now, up at a really, really early hour from jet lag and had a humorous exchange I want to share.

A Time Magazine friend of mine suggested we meet up for drinks and catch up. Just fyi, he wrote this great piece on a barbecue he went to at Mark Foley's. . .

My colleague at the New America Foundation Sameer Lalwani tried to line up dates and times for drinks -- but he called it "putting hurt on the corn".

I really thought in this era of Foleyisms that he had just sent a prominent Time journalist an inappropriate and potentially pornographic message.

But I was wrong it seems, my friend Barry Lynn -- author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation and this interesting piece, "Breaking the Chain: The Anti-Trust Case Against Wal-Mart" in Harpers seems to be good with re-crafting words and launching them to start new catch phrases.

Here is how Sameer defines Barry Lynn's "Putting Hurt on the Corn":

Steve:

It's a barry lynn phrase --

"putting hurt" -- to deal with soundly and effectively

"On" -- a preposition, difficult to define

"The corn" -- going out on a limb here but a -- dare I say -- southern expression for grain alcohol, perhaps distilled by rubes on their local premises

I'm beginning to understand a bit of how cockney developed now.

More later from Tokyo.

-- Steve Clemons