Linguistic Annoyances

“Perfect.”

I’m hearing that a lot lately. If I tell a waiter or waitress my menu selection (s)he’ll say, “Perfect.” Talking to a with a technical support person or medical professional, I’ll identify myself by phone number or birthdate and hear: “Perfect.” How can my name or birthdate be perfect?

And then there’s “Yeah, no” to begin a response to a statement or a question. The first few times I heard “Yeah, no” I was thinking the respondent is confused or ambivalent, but after hearing them again and again I’m thinking maybe they’re a kind of preface designed to avoid giving offense to the interrogator — a way to keep one’s foot in the door so as to be able to backtrack if necessary and declaring from the start that you could go either way on the question.

Another trendy phrase is “having said that” or “that said,” which seems to be a signal that what follows builds upon whatever has been expressed. It leaves me thinking: “I know you just said that; I heard it.” Maybe it’s a clue that the speaker is about to go off in a different direction. Maybe it’s just superfluous, or a way to collect one’s thoughts before going on — a substitute for “ahhh…” which might sound foolish if repeated too many times. Or, that said, maybe the speaker thinks the phrase makes him sound cool and intelligent because he’s heard it used by others he considers cool and intelligent.

For years now I’ve been hearing “He signed off on it,” to mean “He approved it,” but the juxtaposition of opposite prepositions feels incongruous. “On” follows immediately after “Off” and disturbs my linguistic instincts. One can “sign on” to something, meaning to join with it, but to “sign off” would mean to quit. Those meanings are extant and have been for most of my lifetime so to hear “sign off on” for so long now is bothersome — almost as bad as beginning a response with “Yeah, no.”

And, lately “nuance” is being overused, especially when employed to describe a person when it was formerly limited to things like artistic performances or physical works of art. A synonym would be “subtle.” Now it’s used by progressives to disparage the president, as in: “Trump lacks nuance,” a condescending strategy to portray him as thick-headed and unable to recognize subtle shades of meaning that progressives and their ilk all perceive.

The tired expression “thinking outside the box” is finally in decline whereas “thrown under the bus” is still is wide use. I complained about the latter in a 2011 column in which I tried in vain to figure out where it originated. I’m learning to tolerate it though because it’s clearly not going away. I’ve stopped wondering: why a bus? Why not under a subway car or a truck? And, no more do I try to imagine what throwing someone under a bus would actually look like.

Many of us are careful to be fashionable in what we wear, drive, listen to, and say. There was a time I adhered to fashion trends like these but it was brief and long ago. As verification that I don’t any longer, one of my daughters sent me a Fathers’ Day card last year with a caricature of a geeky-looking man under which was written:

“Dad, your refusal to care who thinks you’re cool used to puzzle me.” (open card) “Now it inspires me!” 

At Whole Foods in Portland, Maine last week were men in various combinations of skinny jeans, man buns, facial metal, skin graffiti, and other trappings of millennial progressivism. They considered those accoutrements vital to their identities and I felt sorry for them, especially the older ones who hadn’t grown beyond all that. I like the multi-grain sandwich bread the store bakes on site every day, and it’s the only thing I buy there so I was in and out quickly. Had I stayed longer I might have heard samples of leftist language trends currently in fashion. 

For example, progressives have assigned new connotations to the familiar word “woke.” So far I’ve only encountered it in writing but were I to hang out at left-wing gathering places like Whole Foods I would probably hear it spoken. The new meaning has only figurative reference to sleeping or waking up; contextual clues indicate it’s a gauge of political consciousness. Merriamwebster.com confirms that, declaring: “‘Woke’ is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness… a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE).”

Also included was a caution from a New York Times writer that use of the word by white people would invoke charges of cultural appropriation — a definite linguistic/fashion/PC faux pas.

Noticing Things

I know I’m getting old when I remember multiple incarnations of a fashion trend. High, up-to-the-knee leather boots on women are popular again for the third time. My sisters and most other women wore them in the sixties. They were ubiquitous again in the eighties and nineties - way back in the 20th century. Now in winter, 2014, I’m seeing them again. They've never gone out of fashion in the sado-masochist community, I learned while doing research for this column. Evidently leather and arousal go together for a lot of people. Now I'll have to add that to the long list of the things I've never understood.

Staying in Lovell full-time, I didn’t notice fashion trends much. Clothing items in a rural area with harsh winters tend toward the utilitarian. I own two pairs of leather construction boots that I treat with waterproofing several times a year. One goes just above my ankles for walking in woods and fields as well as muddy or sandy areas or in light snow. The other pair goes halfway up my calf and those are good for deep snow or walking through heavy brush. My wife almost never wears boots. She might own a pair, but maybe not. She prefers sneakers and she doesn’t accompany me when I’m in the brush or deep snow. Nobody does, now that I think about it, but I digress.

Lately I’m spending a couple of days a week in the Portland area. There I can perceive style trends seldom apparent in Lovell. The other day I cut through Macy’s on my way to the Apple Store in the Maine Mall because it was raining. That took me through the men’s clothing department and I noticed the mannequins were wearing shirts with the collars up. Back in the 1980s, my fashion-addicted students always wore them that way. The mannequins were dressed in two layers of shirts and both collars were up. Perhaps this was fashionable during some other period of my lifetime and I didn’t notice. My wife says I don’t notice a lot of things going on around me and she’s probably right because some things just don't interest me. I won’t be conforming to this latest fad though. All my collars are the button-down type. I like those because I wear a string on my glasses that goes around my neck and it gets caught on collars that aren’t buttoned down.

Several times this winter I put my collar up and didn’t even know I looked cool. It’s not likely that anyone noticed though because it was when I was snow-blowing my driveway in a strong wind or going out for a run on a cold morning. Sometimes shelter from the elements and fashion coincide, but not very often.

Women are more fashion-conscious than men - or straight men at least. Always have been. Studying history, I notice relatively wild swings in the way women clothed themselves during the 20th century, which is the period I taught for many years. Men, by contrast, don’t look very different at all except for the presence or absence of whiskers. Business suits or just jacket-and-tie hasn’t varied much and that’s good for my wallet. I don’t own a suit anymore but I do have several jackets, ties and two pairs of dress pants - the flimsy kind that cling to my legs with static electricity during winter. I hate that, and they don’t keep out the wind either. I don’t like wearing them and seldom have to except to weddings and funerals. Unfortunately there have been several of the latter recently.

Wearing shirts outside one’s pants instead of tucked into them has been stylish the past few years I’ve noticed. It was considered sloppy when I was a kid though. My mother was constantly ordering me to tuck my shirt in and it seldom stayed that way for long. So there’s a fad I can endorse heartily - at least until I’m outside in a cold wind.

Cultural Clues

As American culture gets more strange, people’s ideas about what is attractive get more and more strange too. A couple of hours at the Maine Mall last week depressed me as I looked around at people and mannequins. Sloppy is popular. People go to great pains to look unkempt. They put enormous time, money, and effort into trying to appear as though they don’t care how they look. It’s oxymoronic. Jeans and hats look worn out, but they’re for sale. Trendy stores sell clothing that would be rejected at the Salvation Army or Goodwill thrift stores, but they’re expensive at the GAP.

Mannequins I saw there appeared unfinished. It was as if clerks started to put clothing on them but got called away before they had time to button the shirt or tie the laces. The jeans had patches in them - crudely sewn at that. It’s fashionable to look like you don’t care how you look, but yet it’s obvious that the mall rats who dressed just like the mannequins cared very much about trying to look that way. They were posing just as the mannequins were too. The mall rats moved around, but might otherwise be mistaken for the headless plastic models.

Hairstyles followed similar themes. Men, if one could call them that, stood around with affected carelessness. It seemed their intention was to look like they didn’t have time to comb their hair after getting out of bed. They had put some kind of stuff in it to make parts stand out perpendicular to their scalp, while other parts stuck out at different angles. Many kept their pants down below their butts as well. I’d hoped that trend would have died out by now, but no. On it goes.

Dye-jobs, tattoos and metal stuck in faces abounded. I wrote about this in a column called “Skin Graffiti” last year. It annoyed the pierced and tattooed around the world for months as one can read in the comments that followed. If you’re seeing this in a newspaper, they can be found here: . I described people who stretched out their ear lobes by painfully inserting ever-larger discs into them. Others stretched out their lower lips in the same way and I wondered what they were going to do when such things went out of fashion as they inevitably will. They’ll likely search for a plastic surgeon to fix them. There are specialists who repair cleft upper lips on newborn children so I guess they could repair stretched-out lower lips on crazy people just as well.

Speaking of which, there have been some bizarre stories of botched plastic surgeries in the news lately. A woman in Miami impersonated a plastic surgeon and was arrested after she had injected “fix-a-flat” substance into the face of another woman. You know that substance you can buy in a pressure can for $5.00 at the auto parts store that will plug the hole in a flat tire and inflate it as well? That’s the stuff. The “patient” ended up with bubbles in her cheeks. The “doctor” had also injected fix-a-flat mixed with cement into her own butt, presumably to make herself look attractive. How did she look? Just as if she’d injected tire inflator into her butt, that’s how. She must have thought “buns of cement” would be a less strenuous alternative to “buns of steel.” The arrest photo showed her dressed in stretch pants and a stretchy pullover - items she’s going to have to stock up on in her wardrobe from now on.

A young man in New Jersey had silicone injected into his penis by a woman in New Jersey who was also pretending to be a doctor. He later died of a blood clot and the woman was arrested for manslaughter. It’s hard to believe someone would be dumb enough to seek out that kind of service. Thinking about it though, it’s a relatively short step from getting pierced or getting dye injected for tattoos. I’ve heard that many have had these things done to intimate parts of their bodies. To a narcissist, silicone breast implants to silicone penis injections would seem a short step too.

All this makes me think I’m fortunate to have been born before the 1960s. Though I lived through them and their aftermath, I can still remember what it was like before that awful decade, and can hold out hope that someday we’ll overcome the insanity it catalyzed.