Number 46
A conversational snippet from In Passing (October 5):
"Hrm. No, let's go to McDonald's. It's more family-oriented." ~ A woman with two children, eyeing the menu at Crepes-a-Go-Go
Comment from site owner "Eve S. Dropper":
In three and a half years of active evesdropping [sic], this is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. I didn't know whether to put it under bizarre or tragic. What kind of person actually talks like a target demographic drone?
What do you suppose that woman meant, if anything, by "family-oriented"? Cheap? Some families have money. Kids are used to the food? But surely it's not good for kids (i.e., not family-oriented) to eat a lot of fast food. Maybe Crepes-a-Go-Go didn't have a kiddie playground, but that addresses the tastes of small children, not "families" per se.
Unfortunately lots of us pick up the language of marketers, politicians, sociologists, and other abusers of thought, sense, and words. I know when I was working a lot in corporate environments (i.e., in businesses), I'd catch myself saying things like . . . well, things I didn't want to hear myself saying.
Just a warning: If you find yourself "expediting" dinner, trying cooking instead.
If you find yourself using a "sleep system" instead of a mattress, wake up.
And you know that instead of "relationships", you want family ties (that bind), friendships, love affairs, marriage, contracts, and maybe even enemies.
Regarding last week's item on "What it is is that . . .", a reader notes:
I think there's a glitch in your "is is" item. There's a big distinction that seems to have been overlooked: "What it is" is a clause, which can be the subject of a sentence, so the first "is" is part of the subject, and the apparent doubling is just a coincidence. That's not true for "the reason is," in which the subject is "the reason."
For instance, there's nothing wrong (grammatically) with "What the lion eats is a subject of argument," nor "What the grade should be is a matter of opinion."
But that distinction immediately begs the key question of Responsible Writing: if it's not clear to readers, why on earth would one leave it that way?
In Elements of Style the umpteenth rule might have been, "Clarity, clarity, clarity." deBronkart's Corollary: Unless you're writing notes to yourself, then your goal as a writer is SOLELY to communicate. A paragraph of your pearls might pass a (mindless) syntax checker, but if it ain't clear (to READERS, not to YOU, you self-centered writer), why on earth would you leave it that way? What on earth are you thinking?
Perhaps P.O. could be subtitled "The Journal of Responsible Writing." (Bumper sticker slogan: "Friends don't let friends write crap.")
Another reader writes:
During the current foreign affairs crisis in the Middle East, we don't seem to be bombing as much as we did in Viet Nam. . . . Oh hell, we should all know that Army Intelligence is incongruent by now.
I remember (we remember) that during the Viet Nam war, we suddenly became aware of the ubiquity of war euphemisms such as "pacification" (which seemed to mean bombing). We're not pacifying Iraq, though I don't know how much bombing we're doing now. At least we're calling it a war, unlike the Viet Nam "police action." This alone makes our current war morally superior to that one. No one is pretending this is anything other than a war.
What I keep hearing in the war news is incoherence rather than intentional doublespeak:
Out of the mouths of people who are paid to talk to us:
A supermarket tabloid headline screams about the "Secret Life of Siegfried and Roy." I assume they mean the "private" life. There's a difference, but "secret" sounds sneakier. Everyone has a private life; it's not "secret" just because you don't bleat about it to everyone. You may, for instance, choose to trim your toenails in private, but you could be secretive about the fact that you trim them with your teeth, if you're agile enough.
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