Words: Rare, Medium and Overdone

Trends, fads, fashions—they can be seen in so many aspects of our lives. Not just hair and clothing, but we see trends in architecture, landscaping, foods, cars and speech. Yes. Speech.


Words come and go, and we’ve recognized that before here at FITNY. (No, that does not stand for Fitness-New York! Think about it!) But now I am not referring to the new additions to our dictionaries that are announced annually. I’m just talking about usage. Well, no—I’m talking about OVER-usage.

Since I tend to use this space as a forum for complaining and kvetching about things that irk me, I’ve tried to hold back on this topic, as it could be viewed as petty. Well, petty or not, here I go.

In the Rumsfeld days, the overused phrase of the day was “connect the dots.” You could not listen to a sound bite of a single politician or public leader without them connecting the dots on one issue or another. Previously, we all reached conclusions, but that became passe’ as we learned to connect the dots. That expression is still with us, but its use seems to have abated somewhat.

The first time I think I noticed this was in the 1970s when Richard Nixon used his “let me say this about that” and “let me make one thing perfectly clear.” Well, actually, I think those expressions became overused more as a way to mock Nixon than anything else, but still…

Recently we’ve adopted “at the end of the day” as the expression du jour. I don’t know who started it, but again—you can’t sit through a newscast (remember: I am the Uber-Nerd, I still watch tv news) without hearing this numerous times. People used to say things like “when all is said and done”, or “in the final analysis”, but no more! Now at the end of the day you’ve heard at the end of the day a zillion times. It’s boring.

My current peeve has been over the extreme overuse of “iconic”. No one calls anything ‘characteristic’, well-known or ‘representative’ any more. I think Brian Williams used “iconic” forty-seven times in last night’s broadcast alone. Well, not really. But he thinks everything is iconic apparently, and since he does at least one story a night about dogs, the dog lovers are iconic, the shrimpers on the Louisiana gulf coast are iconic, their boats are iconic, the storm damage is iconic, the Joplin hospital is “now iconic”, and the rescue shelters are iconic. Really.

But the real reason I bring up this topic at all is that I’m here to predict the next highly overused expression in our society. Ready? Here it is: full stop.

What?

Yep, in England the period at the end of a sentence is called a full stop. It’s cute, it’s quaint (to me), and I like it when I hear a Brit use it.

But Sunday I heard David Gregory use it on Meet the Press. (There’s my nerdiness showing again.) David is not a Brit, hence it was not cute. The very next day I heard an American pundit use it on the radio. I’ve heard it twice since. I foresee a spate of “full stop” usage that’s going to grate on my nerves. I expect it will become epidemic within a short time.

I’m going to have to put on my eyeshades and armbands, whip out an adding machine (yes, I’m that old) and start tallying up the usage. It’s about to explode, and I’m just saying you heard it here first.

Don’t thank me. All I did was connect the dots.

Don't Leave Us, Skype!

So Microsoft wants to buy Skype. I guess they’ll call it MicroSkype.


Help me understand this: Skype is not exactly profitable. Its current owners paid $2 billion for Skype a few years ago. Now Bill Gates is paying those guys $8.5 billion. That’s a tidy little profit, according to my in-depth analysis. (See preceding paragraph.) Wish I had something Bill Gates wanted to buy…

Anyhoo, it sounds like they’ll start charging us for something we’ve been using for free for a long time. That’s going to p-, p--, perturb people off. But after all, they have to do something to recoup their $8.5 billion, I suppose.

Or perhaps they could just throw some ads on it, as so many of the popular websites have done. Isn’t that how we still manage to get online news from so many sources without actually paying for it? (Except for you, New York Times—you’ve dumped on us again.)

I mean, when my daughter connects with us through Skype, maybe she could hold up a can of tuna fish, or a tube of toothpaste, and it would be like product placement in the movies and tv. You know, like when you’re watching Modern Family and there’s a gallon of Minute Maid orange juice on the counter. You get the subtle message to buy Minute Maid, without anyone actually saying it.

When the grandkids come on to video-chat with us, they can show us their current favorite toys and books, and in this way, Lego, Toy Story 3, and Leap Frog get their own commercials, too. Yes, we’re a small audience, but we are the easy marks for those fresh-faced, adorable little kids who call us “Grandma” and “Grandpa”. That ought to be worth something.

If Zachary’s wearing a Nike tee shirt, or Kaitlyn’s in Izod, bingo! –instant ad!

My kids and I often exchange reading suggestions, and end up reading a lot of the same books. Maybe we could line up some of our favorite volumes on our desks when we Skype. So many possibilities…


I’m not sure how any of this would benefit Microsoft, but I have time to work that out. I’ll get back to you on that.

Since all those predictions of videophones that were so prevalent in the ‘60s never came true, and Skype came along to fulfill that empty promise, we’ve come to rely on the technology to allow us to see our loved ones, no matter how far away they are. The fact that it started out as a free service was totally unbelievable. If that now changes, it’s going to really upset a lot of the 170 million Skype users.

We’re likely to cause an uproar. We might even label it Gates-Gate.

But in the meantime, Mr. Gates, you wanna buy a blog?

Welcome to Nerdville

I’ve told you many times before that my husband, the Center of the Universe (CoTU) and I are nerds. And while I don’t like to brag—we’re world-class nerds. I mean, other nerds are embarrassed to know us. That’s just how ultra-nerdy we are.


Here’s what I’m saying.

We can’t just replace our dishwasher when it dies. We research it to death. Other people watch the ads in the newspaper (see? –non-nerds don’t even get a newspaper) to see where they can get the brand they like, get the best price, or free delivery. Us? No, we start with Consumer Reports (yep! –we have an online membership) and from there we move on to online chats, forums, even Amazon’s website to read user reviews. Nerdville.

Same thing with a cleaning service to do a “move-out” deep cleaning of my in-laws’ condo. Don’t just get a name from a neighbor—no, we go to Angie’s List, comb through their ratings and reviews, make the phone calls, ask the questions, and make an informed decision.

Last week it was the same thing when our freezer bit the dust. Research, research, research. Look at the ratings, the dimensions, the wattage, the energy efficiency, the reliability—have I left anything out? No. Then I scour the websites of the big local and national retailers to find the best deal on the make and model we identify as what we want.

So. Do you think I’m gloating about what a great job we do? Not even close.

1. Dishwasher: The compartment for the drying agent leaked from day one. Hello, repairman! Our glasses don’t fit well in the upper racks, so loading it is not pleasant to this day.

2. The cleaning service that was supposed to take four hours to clean the condo took EIGHT! And they didn’t even touch the oven! What? I hesitate to tell you that they turned off the refrigerator—a big no-no in a vacant condo.

3. Freezer: Can’t turn it off. The instruction book says to press the electronic pad’s ‘down’ button till you get to ‘0’. Sorry—it goes down to ‘1’ and no further. Repairman’s scheduled for Thursday. [I was turning it off to wash down the interior, per the book’s instructions, before loading it.]

Moral of the story? Quit the investigation, bag the inquiries and the research, and pick one you like the looks of.

At least you won’t feel cursed by the universe and doomed to make the wrong decision. Not to mention the time you’ll save.

Weaving Friendship

I have a friend who’s fortunate enough to spend the winter months with her husband in Naples, Florida. Wait—that came out wrong. They live together all year, it’s just that they travel to the warm and sunny gulf coast of Florida to escape the relatively harsh winters we have here. You know, they’re called ‘Snowbirds’.


Anyway, because my friend is witty and clever, she refers to this sojourn as “Adult Winter Camp”. They rent a condo, and have made friends with many other couples who reside there. There is a clubhouse, and there are activities sufficient to keep anyone from even thinking of becoming bored.

When my friend posted on Facebook that she was at Adult Winter Camp, I asked her to make me a lanyard. That is what I think of as a good camp activity. I suppose I could have asked her to make me an ashtray, but I’m pretty certain that ashtrays are completely passe.

Ashtrays and lanyards are all I know about summer camp, and I couldn’t think of any correlated winter equivalents. So I stuck with the lanyard.

I remember trying to weave those doggone strips of plastic into a cohesive length of consistent proportions during a summer of playground ‘day camp’ at our local school. I believe I was about seven years old. I failed miserably. Starting the thing was tough, but making it smooth and even was even tougher. My red and white pieces were so discombobulated I was afraid that the outcome would be pink. I hated pink. I hated failing. No lanyard resulted.

Meanwhile, my brother made a fine lanyard. Was he nearly three years older than I? Yep, but that did not assuage my feelings of total inadequacy. If they’d been grading at the playground, they’d have given me a D-, just to keep me from having to repeat Lanyard 101. My brother? I’d say he’d have gotten an A. Okay, more like an A+. Not that I’m bitter.

So my friend returned from Naples a few days ago, just in time to come to the April meeting of our stellar book club, The Bookees. I was the host, and when the very tan and smiling woman in question arrived, she presented me with a lanyard! Blue and yellow, it is ten inches of sheer loveliness! I laughed so hard I almost cried—she took my joke and ran with it! Now I’ve got a cool gift from a sweet friend, and if they gave grades at Adult Winter Camp, she’d have gotten an A. Okay, an A+.

I was so touched by her thoughtfulness that I ran upstairs to get my copy of Billy Collins’ “The Trouble With Poetry”. I read his amazing and insightful poem “The Lanyard” to the assembled Bookees before we began our discussion of our featured book. I maintain that this simple work is the single best summation of the mother/child relationship in all of literature. Yes, all. Read it here, you won’t be sorry. Billy Collins is a former poet-laureate of the United States, and I recommend all of his books. Yes, all. Again.

Official thanks to my friend, the lanyard-maker. Next month the Bookees meet at her house. I’m making her an ashtray.

OMG, FYI, I'm LOL!

It’s that time of year again? --already? No, I’m not talking about the daffodils blooming and the pollen counts and the school board elections. It’s time for the announcement from those fabulous people who brought us the Oxford English Dictionary! Yippee, new words added to the book that the experts credit with keeping us civilized. Wait—did I go too far? Yeah, well at least the OED, as the grown-ups call it, is considered the ultimate source authority on the English lexicon.

Now, please don’t make the unconscionable error of confusing the OED with the ODE, the Oxford Dictionary of English. The ODE people started their publication in 1998 to spell out, if you will (and you know you will), how language is used in everyday life. Last year their additions included such words as chillax and bromance.

Some of the more highly publicized additions to the OED for 2011 are not really even words, per se, but initialisms. I refer to LOL, OMG and FYI. You are reading a blog, so I will not insult your intelligence by spelling those out for you, so to speak. They join other initialisms such as IMHO, TMI and BFF, all of which were added in recent years. This year, the acronym wag was also added, and since I didn’t know what that meant, please don’t be offended by my mentioning that it stands for women and girlfriends. Wow. How did we get along without that as an official word till now?

Anyhoo…

All of which reminds me of some lunchroom talk a coworker shared with me many years ago. We were federal employees on the Presidio in San Francisco, and our lives were filled—FILLED, I tell you—with initialisms, acronyms and total alphabet soup. We worked under a CO (Commanding Officer), wrote DFs (Disposition Forms) on the R&D (Research and Development) or QA (Quality Assurance) within the DOD (Department of Defense.) We worried about RIFs (Reductions in Force), or what we now call downsizing. Do you see what I mean?

One day over lunch, my supervisor was telling some of us that he had been unloading all his job stress on his wife the night before—telling her about a meeting with the CO about R&D, an AFSCME meeting he had attended, and the DFs he’d written for the DOD. He was exhausted. Then he asked his wife about her day. “Well,” she said, “I used the MOP on the kitchen floor, took the KIDS to school, went to the A&P for FOOD, and took an NAP after lunch!” What a woman! She became our personal hero.

Was I On the Roof?

I’m the kind of person who likes to deal with things openly and frankly. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a little softening of a big blow, as in the old joke about “Mom was on the roof.” You remember that one, don’t you?


A long-married couple is reluctant to take a vacation, because they are worried about the health of their elderly parents. The brother encourages them to go, saying, “I’ll look in on Mom and Dad, don’t worry.”

The couple goes on the trip, and when they return the brother is there to greet them. “How’s Mom?” the woman asks. “She’s dead,” says the brother, sipping his coffee.

“Whaaaaaat??? Mom’s dead, and that’s how you tell me? Couldn’t you even break it to me gently, ease me into it—you just blurt out MOM’S DEAD?”

“Well, how should I tell you?” the dolt asked.

The woman, flustered, said, “You know, if Fluffy had died while we were gone, you might say, ‘Gee, there was an awful accident… Fluffy was on the roof… He lost his balance and fell. I rushed him to the vet, but there was nothing they could do… Fluffy died.’ At least it would soften the blow!”

The brother nodded, and went on sipping his coffee. “Now,” the woman continued, “how’s Dad?”

“Dad was on the roof…” he began.

So, yes! –it’s wise to consider the feelings of the person you’re interacting with, whether face-to-face, on the phone, or by e-mail. I’m not talking about sugar-coating the truth, just a respectful and considerate regard for how your news, comments, opinions or information will be received.

So combine this viewpoint with the (nearly) universal disdain, dislike and abhorrence of the telephone answering menu. You know—“For business hours press 1, for directions press 2, for our fax number press 3, for complaints, hang up and dial our competitors.” Doesn’t everyone hate those? When I dial my doctor’s office I spend so much time listening to the announcements and the choices that I sometimes forget why I was calling. Oh yeah, it was about my short-term memory problems, but that’s not important right now.

Here’s where the two points I have been trying to make come together. I have had numerous occasions recently to help my father-in-law clarify some retirement issues. In so doing, I placed calls to his benefits office in the giant, well-known, Fortune 500 company he worked for. When I got through the first couple of menus, and reached the line for retirees’ benefits, I got this, “If you are calling to report a death, press 1.” Holy smoke, talk about a smack in the face! It took me aback, but I was really grateful that my 88-year old father-in-law wasn’t listening! I wondered how discouraging that must be if one of their retirees who might have serious health problems or be severely depressed placed that call and heard that as ‘option number 1’. I’m not all that old, and my health is good, and I frankly did not take kindly to hearing that. In fact, in the process of clearing up the questions we had, I reached the same recording several times in the course of the week, and each and every time it felt weird to hear those words said out loud.

So here’s my advice to you, if you happen to work in human resources, or public relations, and you have any influence whatsoever when it comes to scripting the phone recordings: think of how your message might sound to the caller.

Maybe you could try, “If you’re calling to report a retiree on the roof, press 1.”

The Plane to L.A.

You never know who you're going to end up sitting next to on an airplane. Countless stories have been told about the mis-matching of seatmates: someone who wants to be left alone to work, read or sleep finds that the adjacent seat is occupied by a person who wants to make a new best friend. It's frustrating and annoying and you can't do a thing about it.

Last week I was on a flight to LAX; due to a mix-up I ended up being one of the last eight people to board the plane. I knew I was going to be relegated to a middle seat.

As I reached the third row, an attractive blonde woman with1980s eyeliner and artificially inflated lips grabbed my arm and said furtively, "Do you want to sit here? No babies, no fat people-- it’s a great row!" I was a bit taken aback, and half-expected her to open her overcoat and offer to sell me a Rolex for ten bucks.

But I like to sit in the front of the plane, so I said, "Sure," and scooted in. She even offered to shove my coat into the overhead bin for me.

As we both settled into our seats, she said how glad she was to have a ‘normal’ person in the middle. Clearly, mistaking me for ‘normal’ was a key mistake on her part, but that’s not important right now.

Half an hour into our flight, Ms. Aisle Seat leaned over me and addressed Ms. Window Seat excitedly: "So what do you do-- I heard you talking about casting?” (Apparently she’d been on a phone call before I boarded.)

The startled woman in the window seat gave a simple, dignified answer. "I'm a manager, and I scout talent," she said.

Ms. Aisle Seat gushed, "I starred in _________ and _________. I'm Cindy Lou Picketfence! I used to do a lot of informercials! I sold more product than anyone else on tv in the ‘90s! I also developed a line of food supplements!"

The promo went on quite a bit longer than that, and of course that's not verbatim, but her name's not Cindy Lou Picketfence, either. These shows were like the “Friends” and “Law and Order” of the 1980s. She was not the star of these programs, but she had long-running roles, and that's certainly impressive. So while you probably wouldn’t recognize her name, you certainly know the shows.

Cindy Lou kept telling us (by this time, my book was put away) tales of her costars, and what they’re doing now. Okay, this was pretty entertaining, especially when she trashed her husband's celebrity ex-wife, but I did feel a bit like the old maid aunt chaperoning the cheerleaders’ party. I was captive, yet strangely unable to participate.

A couple of times I offered to switch seats with the actress, just to get out of their way. But she was committed to staying on the aisle because she had two tiny dogs in their carrier in front of her feet.

Amidst a lot of "Do you know so-and-so?“ and “Remember Whosits?“ these two found out that they actually grew up in the same town. I'm here to tell you, folks, that although people bemoan St. Louisans asking, "where'd you go to high school?", that is not a query limited to our burg. These women were from southern California, and they simultaneously blurted that one out! I laughed out loud, and I guess they'll never know why. They learned that they went to the same school, about ten years apart, and knew a lot of the same people.


Ye Olde High School

Small world. Smaller plane. And a teeny weenie middle seat.