All men are created equal, which certainly doesn’t give the
human race much to look forward to.
All men are created equal, which certainly doesn’t give the human race much to look forward to. However, egalitarian society though we may be, at least at the moment all men are created – starting right after that, it’s all about the money – it is still worthwhile to have standards, so that we can have something against which to measure our decline.
Take for instance our form of verbal communication, a particularly curmudgeonly peeve of mine, the quality of which is dropping like the careers of the Dixie Chicks. It’s a scandal: the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich of our noble language is being cheapened and degraded by the off-brand mayonnaise of our accursed slang, and soon the Spago English of our forefathers will be reduced to leftovers on a Woolworth lunch counter. If Shakespeare were alive today he’d die, silently.
Of special annoyance is our habit, which is growing even as we speak (badly), of latching onto a trendy word or phrase and employing it over and over again like the average guy’s favorite T-shirt until “threadbare” is just a distant memory. Remember “empower” and its evil offspring empowerment and empowering? For several years no pundit or social activist could complete a sentence without empowering somebody until I, for one, broke out in a rash.
These days we have long-past-dead-but-won’t go-away terms like “cutting-edge” which has hacked and hewed its way through so many descriptions that its blade is duller than radio coverage of synchronized swimming, and “24/7,” which contains more syllables and thus takes longer to say than “all the time,” but people insist on saying it anyway.
High on my list of please-stop-hurting-my-ears phrases is “bringing (something or other) to the table.” Clever at first usage, cute the second, slightly irritating the third, illuminating what various people bring to various tables has run amok for way too long; we have turned into a nation of waitresses.
Come on, people; can’t we just say “contributing” and leave the tables to the busboys?
But of course most deserving of a stake through its miserable heart is the Bush administration’s favorite shibboleth, “weapons of mass destruction,” which appropriately enough is gibberish. Anyone who remembers high school physics knows the Universal Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, which says that matter (of which mass is an attribute) and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, although they can switch back and forth in accordance with Einstein’s equation E=mc squared. Therefore, “mass destruction” is impossible; one could with some accuracy characterize a nuclear device as a “weapon of mass conversion,” but that admittedly lacks the pizzazz to frighten folks into the kind of ebullient bellicosity you really need for a pre-emptive war.
Non-nuclear armaments should really be called something like “weapons of mass still being there but changing form in an excessively enthusiastic way that could hurt a lot of people” but you can just imagine how that would slow down the average Colin Powell lecture to the Security Council of the United Lesser Nations.
But I digress – back to the main point. There oughtta be a law: once a buzzword or catch-phrase has appeared on any broadcast media five or more times in a single day, everyone, be they pundit, politician, sportscaster, talk-show host, or private citizen, has three weeks of freedom to overuse the term until their gums bleed. Then it has to be buried at sea and a new fad term found. Anyone violating this law will have their mass converted.
