"I am as troubled by the use of the word 'woman' to describe the 18-year-old object, briefly, of a 53-year-old’s affections..."

"... as I am by the use of the word 'lover' to describe my 18-year-old self, in the context of that relationship."

Writes the 59-year-old Joyce Maynard on the occasion of a documentary movie about the now-dead J.D. Salinger.

IN THE COMMENTS: T J Sawyer said:

"His was a seduction played out with words and ideas..."

Sounds like Maynard is making a strong case for withdrawing the voting privilege from 18-year-olds. Or at least the distaff portion.

(Do I need to explicitly mention 2008 and 2012?)

"Who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke (i.e., WWI romantic jingoism) or Emily Dickinson? Answer: Emily Dickinson."

In the comments to this morning's post about J.D. Salinger, Richard Lawrence Cohen (my ex-husband) paraphrases something Salinger once said.

That got me looking for Emily Dickinson's war poems, but I got distracted thinking about something else I read this morning, the obituary for the actress Julie Harris. She played the part of Emily Dickenson in a 1977 play called "The Belle of Amherst." A quick search on YouTube turned up a fine print of the entire 90-minute play. It probably shouldn't be there, and I won't embed it, but here it is.

J.D. Salinger "instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books..."

"... some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015."

One collection, to be called “The Family Glass,” would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family....

Another would include a retooled version of a publicly known but unpublished tale, “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” which is to be collected with new stories and existing work about the fictional Caulfields, including “Catcher in the Rye.” The new works are said to include a story-filled “manual” of the Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved; a novel set during World War II and based on his first marriage; and a novella modeled on his own war experiences....

The revelation comes in the new book "Salinger," and here's a clue (from the book) about why Salinger left off publishing (but not writing) all those years:

[A]fter [WWII], Mr. Salinger met a 14-year-old girl, Jean Miller, at a beach resort in Florida. For years, they exchanged letters, spent time together in New York and eventually had a brief physical relationship. (She said, in an interview in the film and book, that Mr. Salinger dumped her the day after their first sexual encounter.)

For years... How many years? I'm trying to do the math.

For the birds.

The phrase "for the birds" — originally, "strictly for the birds" (I guess the strictures broke down over time) — is defined by the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary to mean "trivial, worthless; appealing only to gullible people." This isn't such an old expression, according to the OED, which finds its first print appearance in  J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," published in 1951: "‘Since 1888 we have been moulding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds."

But the 1957 book "American Speech" tells us about its use in speech, which goes back to 1942:

In 1942, when I entered the U.S. Army..the disparaging term that's for the birds was in common use among officers and enlisted men... The metaphor alludes to birds eating droppings from horses and cattle.

So "for the birds" is a way of saying "shit"!

This is especially amazing to me this morning as I'm pursuing a bird theme this morning, but I'd gone off-theme in the previous post to talk about Maureen Dowd's column and encountered the expression "sad sack" and learned for the first time that it's a short version of the WWII military slang "sad sack of shit."

How many more common expressions have a hidden shit theme dating back to World War II? If I encounter another one this morning by accident, it's going to feel cosmic. And don't tell me "cosmic" WWII slang for Coincidence Of Shit Metaphors In Combat.