We were on our way to town the other day - we needed beer and wanted papayas - listening to that venerable radio news source, NPR. They're professional. They're knowledgeable. Master journalists. The two anchors talked about the exploits of a firm owned by Blackwater, the company doing work in Iraq. I'll admit I tuned out for a moment, mentally that is, my mind somewhere far away. As I stared through the window, the woman's voice faded, to become vague and distant, obscured by the whir of passing trucks with over-sized mud tires. Then, a single word wrangled my attention away from the buzz of traffic, the passing foliage, the dashboard squeaks.
"Did she just say, 'subsiderary?'" I asked.
"Yes, I think she did," Ron said.
"Un-f#$@%^ believable," I said. I didn't say that out loud of course, because that would be crude and classless, but I thought it. OK maybe I said it. The male voice followed, using the same word, but pronouncing it properly. "Subsidiary." He stretched it out, for her benefit as well as ours, enunciating with unnatural crispness. "Sub-SID-ee-air-y."
"Thank you," I said to the radio.
Ron listens to blathering noggins on cable financial news channels all morning, five days a week. It's his job, he tells me. Gotta keep up with the latest business news, he insists. The other day I walked past his office and caught a statement, admittedly out of context, that made me pause. A man's voice said, "In any case, that's a really very rare trend." Hmmmm.... Ignoring the really and very (adverbs that are really very much overused for lack of substance in the words surrounding them), I focused on rare trend. Now, if something's a trend, then it's not rare, is it? And if something's rare, it's not a trend. So which is it? If you're deciding whether or not to buy a stock, it matters. Sheesh!
If I never again hear the expression, "Wrap my head around it," it will be a happy miracle. I can't help but envision someone's cranium bent and draped like the clocks in a Salvador Dali painting.
"It was just so complicated, I had a hard time wrapping my head around it."
"Even the politicians who wrote it are having trouble wrapping their heads around the proposed policy."
Ugh!
It's a mad world, I tell ya, a cliche riddled, pronunciation mutilating, mad mad mad mad world.
A hui hou. Aloha!
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