I ‘m as guilty as anybody. Now and then as I write, I see that I use a seventeen dollar word that would be better expressed with a handful of two dollar words. Particularly, I see this fault in a lot of the magazines I read.
The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, (a lot of New York City folks there), the Atlantic, Harpers,
For example, they commonly have a small gang of seventeen dollar word writers on hand to produce copy that fills in around all the ads for Cadillacs, BMW’S, Mercedes Benz, Ferraris, Rolls Royce’s, Bentleys, or – in the case of the NY Review of Books – uppity eastern universities.
Even the handful of non-profit publications keep a lot of seventeen dollar wordsmiths on the payroll: The New Republic, The Nation, & Mother Jones (slightly less so).
The online alternative websites are usually better: Politico.com, Huffington Post, etcetera. But they too get pretty flowery as they work to get their own biased viewpoints out in the open – in order to seem intellectual, I guess.
I try to write simpler, but I too often in the heat of creativity get carried away. Maybe we should all be forgiven. Probably we’re all trying to say something meaningful to help readers.
I’m guessing we’re all essentially just trying to say that the world seems to have already just gone to hell in a hand basket. Well, I wonder, why don’t we just say it all plainer?
The world nowadays just seems to be completely “all f-cked up,” doesn’t it?
It does. Yes, it really does. White people these days keep shooting a good number of black folks quite dead, and getting away with it. And they keep their hand in this killing game too.
The politicians are so gagged up with nonsense words they don’t make any sense whatsoever. The newspaper and TV scribblers are clearly infatuated with their words to the point of self-imposed ecstasy.
Of course, Fox News is another matter, entirely. They just ramble on with the same old baloney that is impossible to understand, they’re so lost in their own gobbledygook.
Writers run so hard trying to out-write each other so much they make about as much sense as fundamentalist preachers, who are working so hard to get more bucks in the collection plate, it’s amazing they don’t gag on what they’re selling.
And Trump? He’s made up a jangle of vowels and sounds a fellow can’t discern (that’s a four dollar word) that aching to latch onto what is cooking inside his brain is enough to give you the hives.
I really don’t know what to say about it. Maybe there just isn’t any way to put it all into words. Grunting might do as good as trying to put together a sentence that college grammarians could make understandable.
The only hope I can see is that possibly the basic down-home common sense of the man and woman in the street will save us somehow. How about it, do you think the rest of us will be able to produce a good result – if we don’t get the virus ourselves?
I sure hope so.
Meanwhile, I got to put my mask on, go to Safeway, and buy something for supper. Good luck, brothers and sisters. Let’s don’t give up.
