Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Miscellany
I have a whole bunch of little notes that don’t amount to a whole post but why should that hold me back?
I should recognize that I’m not being a gracious conversationalist when I refuse to speak unless I’m disagreeing with something, and it doesn’t make any difference if I couch my recalcitrance in phrases like “I decline to take a position on the matter” or “I regretfully decline to disagree.” If someone said that crap to me I’d either kill him or break into tears. (Depending on who’s doing the talking.)
I saw a commercial recently in which Lou Rawls was helping to sell some damn thing or other that I didn’t want - funeral plans or life insurance or a computer literacy program or something. I got the feeling that he was pitching the pitch to a segment of the population that wasn’t very well educated - he was using little words and big hand gestures. There was a brief message flashed under his grinning visage at one point: “Lou Rawls / Compensated Endorser”. Are they trying to hide the fact that he’s getting paid by using seven syllables to convey the point? Are they hoping their target audience won’t freeze tivo to sound the phrase out phonetically and then look it up to see what it means? It would be nice if, along with the SAP button to convert spoken language into forms more familiar to certain audiences, they also had a converter for written material that would take a phrase like “Compensated Endorser” and translate it to something easy and accurate, like “Shill.”
New words I’d like everybody to start using as soon as possible:
* for food that’s a lot of work but worth it: Strenulicious
* for the sensation of being strong, effective, and virile: Compotency
* for thoughts that fall apart as soon as you try to think all the way through them and tell them to someone else: Mental Teleprosy
And finally, here’s a wry rejoinder that you can all enjoy muttering under your breath when someone messes up your jive today: “Hey, that’s okay - some of my best friends are incompetent buttwipes!”
Of course, not you, my friends. Those are hypothetical, let us say, rhetorical friends. I would never use such a phrase with regard to your contributions to my life. Now back the hell off. I have work to do.
