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.

Aliens Are Not Immigrants

Were you to draw a picture of the United States, it would show the familiar outline of our borders with Maine sticking out at the top right, Florida on the bottom right, Texas in the south, and so on. But what’s a border? It’s a boundary within which people declare, uphold, and adhere to a set of principles. People outside it don’t. Principles within are outlined in two founding documents: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It’s those principles that have made the United States the strongest, most prosperous, and greatest country the world has ever seen. Without them and the borders within which they’re enforced, the United States would not exist.

People outside the boundaries have seen and heard how good it is here and they want to come in. There’s a process for that called immigration, and most of us are descended from people who followed it. During the first half of the 20th century, about 12,000,000 did. None got any welfare because it didn’t exist. After the Roosevelt and Johnson Administrations there were some welfare programs, but immigrants weren’t eligible until they became citizens.

Early immigrants didn’t come here for freebies. The opportunity to work and build a new life in a free country is what drew them. Over the past 25 years or so, however, another 12,000,000 or so snuck in here without going through the immigration process and cannot properly be called immigrants at all. They’re illegal aliens. There are many more government welfare benefits available now and in most states they’ve been given to illegals. As word gets around, more illegals are drawn here. Why are we surprised? For more and more illegals, their reasons for coming here are different from those of our ancestors. They’re not as interested in building as they are in taking. They’re a net drain on the nation.

People dependent on government are the base of the Democrat Party. That’s why Democrats push amnesty so hard, but they don’t call it amnesty because they want to change the terminology. They call it “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” as if immigration laws needed reform. They don’t. What they need is enforcement, but President Obama the his party don’t want to enforce them. They don’t like borders and they don’t like to obey the Constitution either.

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) went to the Texas/Mexico border last week to say, “We are all Americans, north and south in this hemisphere,” as if our borders didn’t exist.” Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) handed out lollipops. Republican congressman Joel Bridenstine, however, was barred from seeing illegal alien children being housed in his own district at Fort Sill. The Obama Administration isn’t allowing media to see the aliens either and threatens reporters with arrest. American medical staff is threatened for talking to media about appalling medical problems illegal aliens have in Lackland Air Force Base in Texas where they’re being held. “There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps,” said one, “but the agents made it clear we would be arrested. We were under orders not to say anything,” reported a psychiatric counselor quoted by Fox News. Their cell phones were taken away. “They’re [the latest illegals] going to crush the system,” a nurse told Fox. “We can’t sustain this. They are overwhelming the system and I think it’s a travesty.”

The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration has bussed over 290,000 illegals from the border to locations all across the United States in recent months, sparking protests in communities where they’re being dumped. The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers issued a statement saying, “This is not a humanitarian crisis. It is a predictable, orchestrated and contrived assault on the compassionate side of Americans by her political leaders that knowingly puts minor illegal alien children at risk for purely political purposes.”

Meanwhile, Maine Governor LaPage has cut off the 90% state share of welfare costs cities and towns pay to Maine’s illegal aliens. Democrats in Portland and other cities are in high dudgeon. Why? Because they’ll gladly funnel other people’s tax money to illegal aliens, but they’re very reluctant to give their own.

Also, the Obama Administration instructed ICE officials (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to stop referring to the flood of young illegals as UACs or “Unaccompanied Alien Children” even though virtually all our case law on immigration uses the term alien. Now they’re officially just “Unaccompanied Children” and if you’re against bringing busloads of them into your town, you’re obviously a racist hardass.

And speaking of language and immigration, the Obama Administration is suing a private Wisconsin business for requiring that it’s employees be able to speak English, calling it discrimination based on national origin!

After fed-up citizens in Murrieta, California blocked busses full of illegal aliens ICE agents wanted to dump in their town last week, local police say federal agents will come next time with riot gear and shields to push the crowd back. How will local citizens deal with that? Will ordinary Americans put up with this all over the country? I don’t think so.

Like Whatever

The expression “thrown under the bus” puzzles me. It’s understood to mean putting blame on someone else for something you might have been responsible for, but how did it originate? I’ve been hearing it for years and it irks me. It was a cliche in 2008 when David Segal wrote in the Washington Post “Hardly a week goes by without someone reviving the cliche of the 2008 campaign -- that a former ally of a candidate has been thrown under a bus.”People knew what it meant, but no one I asked could tell me where it came from. Wikipedia offers this: “In Septuagenarian Stew (The Life of a Bum), published in 1990, the Charles Bukowski character Harry pushed his friend Monk in front of a bus, and then stole Monk's wallet while Monk lay unconscious and probably dying in the street.” I have trouble with this explanation because Harry pushed Monk in front of a bus, which is different from throwing him under it. Also, the act seems like pure selfishness. There’s no blame put on Monk; he’s a victim of assault.Charles Bukowski

What bugs me about it, I guess, is that people use it because it’s shallow and trendy. What’s wrong with “thrown to the wolves” or “made a scapegoat”? Those phrases mean the same thing and each has a history. Each can be visualized. People have been thrown to the wolves, and according to Dictionary.com “scapegoat” originated with “a goat let loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur after the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head. Lev. 16:8,10,26.” Has anyone ever been thrown under a bus? No. So let’s all stop saying it okay?Words and phrases become faddish as if they were clothing or hairstyles. Stephanie Rosenbloom wrote a piece in The New York Times last week, for example, about overuse of the word “authentic.” As an example, she quoted Anderson Cooper’s comments about his new show: “In everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to just be authentic and real.”

That's oxymoronic. We don't try to be authentic. If you have to try, you failed. If you have to tell people you’re authentic, you probably aren’t. The best we can say about Cooper’s comments is that he’s tempted to be phony and is struggling to resist.

Also quoted by Rosenbloom was Naomi S. Baron, author of “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World.” Baron says the word “awesome” is so overused it has become devoid of meaning: “Technically it should be used to describe an awe-inspiring sight like the fjords in Norway, but these days ‘awesome’ is a perfectly acceptable response to something as mundane as ‘I can meet you for lunch at noon.’”

Almost every day I hear about how someone has “signed off on” something or other. Growing up, I’d hear a radio or TV personality say he was “signing off” as his program was ending. I’d hear friends say they’d “signed on” to a four-year hitch in the Marines. So, to say one has “signed off on” something seems confusing at least if not contradictory. Let’s avoid it and just say approved or endorsed okay?

And then there’s “moving forward.” That’s tiresome too. At dull meetings, it’s used either at the beginning or at the end of proposals for change, like: “Moving forward, we’re going to do it this way,” or “This is the protocol moving forward” - as if any other method would be moving backward. Sometimes it’s just a filler, like “ahh” or a prolonged “aannnnndd . . . ” all of which which President Obama uses when he’s forced to speak without his teleprompter and needs time to figure out what he’s going to say next. I hear “moving forward” most often from people who call themselves “progressive,” as if a different perspective must be regressive.

“Have this conversation” is another tiresome phrase, as in “He and I are going to have this conversation.” If you have a script for how a conversation is going to go, it’s not really a conversation is it? To converse requires give and take, a sharing of ideas to see what emerges. Saying you’re going to have a conversation is a veiled threat, a weak attempt to talk tough. If a boss has to give instructions, he or she should just deliver them directly and avoid the pretense of being open to alternatives.

One of the benefits of being a retired public school teacher is that I haven’t heard anyone say “Whatever!” or “I’m like, ‘Oh my God’!” or “I’m like, so ‘Oh my God’!” for almost three months now.

And that’s been nice.