Best Not Noticed Among Friends

"If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times: don't exaggerate!"

That isn't what this post is about, except that is has to do with the way we use language, or how language reveals how we think. What has been intriguing me lately is the growing habit of saying everything twice, or repeating the same idea with different words. For example: "When the barrage comes, it comes in bunches." I rather imagine. A barrage of one is such a lonely thing, by itself.

Here is a list of recent examples:

"for each respective team"
"both teams have only one timeout, each"
"there is this sort of, like. . ."
"retweet it out"
"but lying about the same, exact. . ."
"then elevate up"
"He's very good at parceing these arguments apart"
"and lied, over and over and over again"

And then there are just curiosities:

"A man who, everything he touches, turns to gold."
(I suppose that is something like, "a man who turns everything he touches into gold.")
"They are a freshman because they have to learn." (How to be a freshman. Or many.)
"We can make this house, literally, into a cat's meow."
(There seems to be a trend to make "literally" mean . . . what? Just an emphasis? I have always wanted to live in a cat carrier.)
"It's gotta be somewhat indisputable." (Or maybe beyond dispute.)
"It's hard to understate how bad this is."
"wrap you head around . . ." (Why learning is hard to do.)
"At this moment in time" (Do you mean, now?"

One of my other favorites is, "I have to be honest!" (There is a person who has seriously considered not being honest!)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog