We’ve moved on, right? We’re not still lying in bed at night trying to figure out ways to get in with the cool kids, right? Peer pressure is just an unpleasant memory from the past. Now, we can teach our kids to avoid the riptides under popular currents and to do their own thing. Right? If this is all true, then can someone please tell me what a “guilty pleasure” is? [Read more →]
Our metaphorist-in-chief, Barack Obama, has apparently been getting a lot of “mileage” out of his latest metaphor, in which he likens the state of the economy to an automobile.
The first time President Barack Obama used the metaphor at a Democratic fundraiser in April, he spent exactly four sentences on it: “And yet, after driving our economy into the ditch, they decided to stand on the side of the road and watch us while we pulled it out of the ditch,” Obama said at the Los Angeles event for Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. “They asked, ‘Why haven’t you pulled it out fast enough?’ ‘I noticed there’s, like, a little scratch there in the fender. Why didn’t you do something about that?'”
That is a great metaphor. You can see why he makes the big bucks. Enough that his wife can afford to go on great trips to Spain (do you think she ate any paella while she was there? I love paella). It’s easily equal to his other great metaphor, the one about the medical care bill being like planting seeds in a garden, only we don’t know what kind of seeds we planted, so we need to wait and see what comes up.
Actually, it’s a better metaphor, since it reminds people of “Cash for Clunkers,” arguably the president’s greatest accomplishment. [Read more →]
Sometimes, I wonder what it takes to make the move to the big city, and earn the big bucks as a marketing VP for a major corporation. Do I have what it takes?
Maybe not.
[Read more →]
Perhaps up until this point I might have said nothing would surprise me. I mean, hell, we live in a crazy world where wild animals are at war with us, earthquakes are moving the Earth’s axis and God can speak to us through the Billboard top 100 chart. But then, on Sunday night what is commonly called Obamacare passed the US House of Representatives.
Currently I’m in Germany. I’m here on business and will be leaving soon. So I found it an apropos setting to write this missive. Being in Germany, you might think I am relatively removed from the fervor (good or bad) over the “historic” moment. Not so. [Read more →]
I’m interested in the recent flap between Chief Justice John Roberts and the White House over comments that President Obama made at the State of the Union address. In the speech, you’ll recall, Obama criticized the Court’s decision in Citizens United to roll back campaign finance restrictions. Then, last week, a tape was released in which Roberts characterized Obama’s open criticism as indecorous. The New York Times has a roundup of the argument, along with the jabs of several writers who have weighed in — the word “crybaby” comes up frequently.
By now, you know that Indiana Senator Evan Bayh is retiring because of excess partisanship, or legislative gridlock, or because he’s “an executive at heart,” or something.
Less noted, but of infinitely greater importance, is the retirement of juvenile uses of Evan Bayh’s surname by poor journalists, tacky aggregators, nattering twits, and everyone else who doesn’t know how to resist an impulse.
In the belief that the end of the year is best celebrated by staring into the implacable face of death, here’s a roundup of 2009’s most egregious overstatements and lame eulogies written about people whose latest error in life was to pass away.
Every morning, the first post on my blog is titled “Thought for the day.” It is simply a quote I find interesting from a writer (usually, it’s a writer) born on that date. Recently, the one I chose was by Italo Svevo, author of The Confessions of Zeno: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
This struck me as a magical turn of phrase. [Read more →]
The following 10 words and phrases can be added to the previous list of 10. Both lists can be printed out, kept in wallets and purses, taped to the bathroom mirror, and given away as gifts. I like all of my friends and family and would hate to lose anyone. [Read more →]
Greetings! I’ll be covering online hyperbole for WFTC — what it looks like, how it works, how it might be refashioned into more artful statements or smoother arguments. In a medium prone to unending tantrum, some focus on minimalism might counterbalance the tendency to write as if starved for attention. And what better way to begin than with a wee exaggeration about a big hyperbole? Today, Andrew Sullivan wrote a brief post entitled “What Paul Krugman Cannot Say.”
This piece of hackery is most often heard in business settings, but I’m afraid it has even crept into the hallowed halls of academe, where one is as likely to hear Latin freakery such as sui generis.* [Read more →]
This New York Times story caught my eye today because of the the linguistic choices in the headline — “US Agrees to $3 Billion Deal in Indian Trust Suit” — as well as many within the story’s body. Some examples of the latter:
The tentative agreement, reached late Monday between Obama administration negotiators and lawyers for some 300,000 individual American Indians[…]
“This is an historic, positive development for Indian country[…]” said Ken Salazar, the Interior Department secretary[….]
Under the settlement agreement, the government would pay $1.4 billion to compensate the Indians[…]
Oh great. It wasn’t bad enough that every hack headline writer forced to slap a four-word précis on an article they didn’t understand has been using this bromide to bludgeon creativity into a senseless mess for years, now some kind of institution that claims to have expertise about language has elevated this linguistic turd by declaring it the one-millionth word in the English language. [Read more →]
Dude, dude, DUDE, dood, duude…
It sounds ridiculous but the word “dude” is a significant part of my social identity. Dude defines me by generation, possibly social class, and almost certainly my suburban upbringing. [Read more →]
Sunday I am in the TKTS line on Broadway for half price tickets and a young man is hawking Blithe Spirit starring “the legendary Angela Lansbury.” He seems like a nice young man and Angela Lansbury is a famous actress, but she is not legendary. Now, if the Gryphon or the Pushmi-Pullyu were in the play, then the word “legendary” would be appropriate.
Come to think of it, I would enjoy seeing the Pushmi-Pullyu in the Angela Lansbury role.
1. Fled on foot
Example Usage: After ditching the car, the suspect fled on foot across a crowded playground.
Complaint: He didn’t flee in a hot air balloon, it was on his feet!
Annoyance Value: 5
2. Literally
Example Usage: When JumJums died, I literally cried for three weeks, my heart broke in two, literally, broke in two.
Complaint: Everyone knows someone who abuses this word in every story and description. Stop! I’m not alone on this one.
AV: 9
3. Apropos
Example Usage: I see you’re eating a Jeno’s frozen pizza. That’s very apropos considering March is National Frozen Food Month.
Complaint: What, you’re too good for the word appropriate? Apropos’ silent s isn’t nearly as cool as the silent g in paradigm, even if March is Frozen Food Month or National Peanut Month or whatever.
AV: 8 [Read more →]
Words are sounds, and as such may mean something besides what they denote. Azure, indigo, ultramarine are more than blue. They echo, somehow, the sound of the infinite.
Not surprisingly, those who are fond of poetry — and poets themselves, of course — seem peculiarly sensitive to words as sounds. One Saturday night, when I was in my early teens, I read all of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. During the night I found myself waking up with snatches of his poems still running through my head, and the next morning there were some I just couldn’t get out of my mind — the way it is when you keep hearing a tune over and over.
This was especially true of “Romance.” Certain phrases from it — “a painted paroquet … eternal condor years … trembled with the strings” — just wouldn’t go away. And it was the sound of them, not the sense — after all, what exactly are “eternal condor years”? — that enthralled me. Earlier, nursery rhymes had had the same effect. “Hey, diddle, the cat and the fiddle …” — I could repeat that one to myself endlessly. There is a phrase from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” — “O for a draught of vintage!” — that from the first time I read it to this very day casts a magic spell over me, transporting me simply by its melody and rhythm to a sunny day in a sunny clime in a time of romance.
W.H. Auden says somewhere that certain lines of poetry transcend language, that you don’t have to know the language or what the words mean in order to know immediately that they are poetry. [Read more →]
I came across this post and had to share. PunIntended.com has a list up of seven towns with bizarre names. My big question — would you move to a place called Boogertown? Some of my favorites:
1. Ding Dong, Texas
2. Boogertown, North Carolina
3. Conception Junction, Missouri
4. Satan’s Kingdom, Vermont
There is one road in my town called Stoner Avenue. I’d rather my kids grow up on the next block, assuming the house of my dreams isn’t over on Stoner.
Ever come across any strange streets or town names? Would love to hear them.
Let’s begin with what may well be the most awkward line of supposedly realistic written dialogue, ever, in any published book from any legitimate publisher:
“The lecture I had from my boss sure tightened my sphincters!”
I’m not going to name the book or the author because it wouldn’t be kind: The book in question is a practical guide to pain relief, not a novel or work of literary non-fiction, and the author is a compassionate professional healer, not a battle-hardened professional writer.
So why cite this bizarre bit of dialogue, which sounds like it was badly translated from Hungarian into Esperanto into Turkish into English, at all? Because it’s one of a series of equally ponderous “common expressions,” along the lines of “I’m experiencing such unusually high levels of stress these days it could very well be that my head is likely to explode!”, that the book lists as examples of how our words and our thoughts not only express, but actually affect, how we feel physically.
(Incidentally, I say “along the lines of” because I didn’t actually buy the book, and the only line I jotted down verbatim, as I sat in a Barnes & Noble flipping through it, was the one about “sphincters,” and then only because it was so unintentionally funny. I mention this — and, specifically, the fact that I was sitting rather than standing — for reasons that will become clear in a moment.)
In any event, according to the book, if we say “she’s a pain in the neck” often enough, sure enough we’ll soon get a pain in the neck, which in turn will lead to chronic headaches.
But how this theory applies to chronic knee pain, for example — to the best of my knowledge, there any no common expressions to the effect of, “the busy traffic flow in this morning’s rush hour is really causing my kneecaps to ache” — isn’t at all clear. [Read more →]
Here, taken verbatim from an obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times, is the amazing story of a woman who succumbed in old age to a terrible disease, then by some mysterious agency was given a second chance at life, and took full advantage of it by enjoying another 79 years:
“Born June 18, 1929 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, departed this life on Saturday, November 7, 2008.”
Good karma? Nah, bad comma.
