'Jiggery-Pokery' Sparks #scalia4kids, Breaks The Internet

Last night, I invented a hashtag and Twitter took off and ran with it. Here are some of the best.

If you weren’t hovering around Twitter Thursday night, you missed out on the frantic, spontaneous, and amazing comedy of the early hours of #scalia4kids. The tweets have started to slow from those heady early times, but the premise is still attracting some top-notch jokes. This is why they invented Twitter!

It all started yesterday morning, shortly after the King v. Burwell announcement, when I sent around my quick take on the decision with the tagline:

Nino and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for conservatives.

As the day progressed, the social media fascination with Justice Scalia’s use of “jiggery-pokery” kept building steam. Literally everyone was getting in on the action:

Then, fate stepped in. Responding to Professor Rick Hasen (a future guest on Thinking Like A Lawyer, stay tuned), L.A. Times Op-Ed editor Juliet Lapidos made the following quip:

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As they say, alcohol is the mother of invention, and I stabbed “Retweet” attaching my earlier faux children’s book title, slapped on the hashtag “#scalia4kids,” and dared the Twittersphere to come up with alternative children’s book titles if penned by Justice Antonin Scalia. For the first hour, it was mostly an in-joke with Kathryn joining in and swapping proposed titles with me.

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After this, Staci showed up and then the floodgates opened. Some 3,000 tweets later — and still going — and with visits from Justice Don Willett, Judge Stephen Dillard, the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson, Dealbreaker’s newest editor Thornton McEnery, and avowed hashtag war fan Popehat, the readers racked up some pretty impressive gags. It is impossible to catalog all the great ideas that ran through my Twitter feed last night and this morning, but here are some of the finest (and more are catalogued at Storify pages like this one):

And on and on and on it went into the wee hours of the morning. And it continues, even sparking a spinoff hashtag “#fortunes4scalia” based on Justice Scalia’s “fortune cookie” jab in this morning’s dissent.

This was epic fun. Keep being fantastic, readers.

Best of the #Scalia4kids Books [Storify]

Earlier: Justice Scalia Is A Sad, Sad Man