Comments on: They talk funny.

By: LAMary

LAMary — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:22:54 +0000

Rainbow Girls, wow. I was one of those.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:13:32 +0000

That’s what drives me nuts about so many of my media colleagues. The job is to gather the news and then to report it in English; far too many gather it and then just regurgitate the jargon, which most people don’t understand and so subsequently ignore.

By: Jolene

Jolene — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:44:09 +0000

Jargon crops up in politics even faster than in business, I think, perhaps because the mass media play a bigger role in disseminating it. Am listening to pundits on NPR talk about yesterday’s elections as I write and, at the same time groaning about hearing again all the phrases I’ve been hearing the past few months.

Guess that, if I want to stay sane, I need to follow Nancy’s advice to focus on the middle distance and let the small stuff pass.

By: brian stouder

brian stouder — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:43:29 +0000

i plan to steal that line

It’s all yers! I’ve stolen…errr…internalized any number of nn.c’isms over the years (talking points about newspapers and movies and Detroit and ‘sensible shoes’; and New Orleans and breasts and hurricanes; and juveniles and threat assessments and administrators*, and universities and medical bureaucracy, and….)

*developing

By: Jolene

Jolene — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:31:14 +0000

I grew up in a family that probably didn’t talk about sexuality as much as it should have, but, still, it seems like a “purity ball” would necessarily involve a more explicit and intense focus on sex than any conversation I’d have wanted to have with my dad. And I had a pretty cool if not terrifically communicative dad.

By: Danny

Danny — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:01:08 +0000

Jeff, if you write it without attribution … well, let’s just say that Nancy has been known to find these sort of things out.

By: Jeff (the mild-mannered one)

Jeff (the mild-mannered one) — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:57:06 +0000

OES teaches fearlessness in the face of butter, lard, and refined sugar, along with some symbolic gestures towards the Divine.

Hence, they cook like angels. Angels who are not approved by the American Heart Association . . .

Brian — i plan to steal that line about the purity of parents’ hands at my earliest opportunity. Don’t tell Nancy.

By: Jen

Jen — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:13:15 +0000

I just read up on some of the clubs that Jeff mentioned. Very…interesting. There are a number of those clubs around here, but I’ve never been privy to any of their ceremonies.

At our county fair, the local chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star makes the BEST doughnuts in the entire universe. I am not exaggerating – people don’t blink an eye at lining up three or four blocks to buy them. My out-of-town friends (who have never heard of the Eastern Star) agreed that they are incredible, but they now refer to them as “cult doughnuts.”

By: brian stouder

brian stouder — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:08:31 +0000

Well, a corollary to Woody Allen’s ‘90% of life is just showing up’ might be ‘90% of parenting is being present’, or ‘90% of parental influence exists at the dinner table’.

I cannot claim to be father-of-the-year material, but I think I’ve learned that major ‘parenting inputs’ (other than, say, dental care) cannot be accomplished in scheduled 90 minute events. What these bizarre events really look like is a make-good for parents who realize (along with the rest of us) they’re not ‘parents-of-the-year’ material, but who wanna be!

It seems as if the real ‘purity’ that is being sought, is the cleanliness of the parents’ hands

By: john c

john c — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:57:42 +0000

Wait a sec. I was in the Key Club … at an all boys high school. Hmmm.

Like Nancy, I’m sort of fascinated by jargon as well. I see a lot of it as the spouse of a business honcho. The wife often has to approve press releases, announcements and such. And she’ll frequently ask me to run it through my typewriter. What gets me is that some of it is ridiculously bad, while some of it is extremely good.

To me the most heinous offenses are in mission statements. The whole idea of them is to concisely express the purpose of the organization. Yet they are mostly filled with the crap that every committee charged with writing something comes up with.

Years a go a company I know well came up with a long and winding mission statement that reflected the changing marketing environment and the variety of skill sets that need to be activated, blah, blah, blah. The mission statement it replaced, written back when the company was run by one man: “To make the best advertising in the world, bar none.”