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  • When Good Sayings Go Bad Ver. 1.0…

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    I’m calling this Version 1.0 because I have a sneaking suspicion that as my brainpan continues to leak, I am going to remember something else that fits this title and will need to use it again.

    You know how it is… The leakage simply can’t be rushed any more than it can be contained. Believe me, I’ve tried. All the earplugs and cotton balls in the world won’t stop it. I’ve avoided having the little Dutch boy stick his fingers in my ears for the obvious reason – that being I don’t want any paint in my ear canal, of course… And, yeah, E K offered to plug my ears for me, but something told me I might not survive whatever she had in mind, so I declined. The point here being, the leak trickles on and what drips from the old brainpan doesn’t always happen in chronological order.

    So, on with this little ditty…

    Now, I want to point out that no matter what you read here, I am not in any way purporting, nor am I denying, the existence of “God”. Be it, ummm, he… uhhh… She?… I think we’ll stick with it… Be it the “one true God” as some would have you believe, or one out of an entire pantheon. My particular religious beliefs are my own, and yours are yours. In the interest of avoiding overt ridiculousity we should keep it that way.

    God speaks

    However, there are  sayings that many of us use in our everyday lives that invoke this “God”, whoever he, she, or it may be. (BTW, if you ask Evil Kat she will tell you that God is in not only a she, but that She is She… However, she prefers to be addressed as “Oh High Exalted Queen Bitch of the Entire F*cking Universe”… Except in informal situations when you can just call her Mistress. She says “God” as a moniker is simply too passe.)

    So, anyway, there are all these various sayings that invoke God, one of which is a bit of an exclamation I heard people use when I was growing up in the Southern U.S. –

    “You don’t have the sense that God gave a goose!”

    Fortunately, I don’t recall anyone saying this directly to me, but I definitely remember hearing it spouted at other folks who, in all honesty, didn’t have the common sense of a rock, so it wasn’t exactly a slanderous statement by any stretch of the imagination.

    GOOSE But, be that as it may, this very saying is what spawned the IBGG Local 747.

    At this point I suspect you are wondering just what the hell the IBGG Local 747 is. Well, obviously it is a union. To my knowledge there have only been 3 members in the past 25 years – moi being one of them. None of us have ever paid union dues, but by the same token the union has never done anything for us either, so I guess we’re even.

    BUT MURV! WHAT THE HELL IS THE IBGG?

    Chill out. You don’t have to yell at me. Sheesh…

    You see, to make a long story even more complex…

    Well, no… I won’t do that. Let me see if I can simplify it instead… You see, I had this acquaintance who had a tendency to get tongue tied with every single sentence he spoke. Unless he was yelling at someone, but that’s a different story. Anyway, whenever he got frustrated and was trying to NOT yell, his tongue became so entwined in his eye teeth that he would go blind and you never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. One day such an instance occurred when he was trying to explain something extremely simply to someone, and said someone just wasn’t getting it. All of a sudden, we’ll call him Gary because that’s his name, shook his head, looked at this person with disgust and spouted –

    “Dammit. You don’t have the sense to give God a goose, do ya?”

    I dunno. It was pretty damn funny at the time. Maybe you just had to be there. At any rate, the IBGGInternational Brotherhood of Goose Givers – was born. Our motto was, of course, “Go give God a goose.”

    You are perfectly welcome to take that however you want.

    VODKA Since I have God’s ear on a regular basis these days, I asked E K recently if she would like a goose. She slapped me, of course. Hard enough to rattle my brainpan and incite more leakage in fact. After she was through being a vengeful Goddess, she told me she could go for a Grey Goose and Tonic. I wasn’t surprised by this as she usually enjoys a drink or two after handing out a severe beating.

    So… That’s all for now. I have to limp into the kitchen and mix a drink so I can go give God… Umm, I mean “Oh High Exalted Queen Bitch of the Entire F*cking Universe” a goose.

    And as we know I’m all thumbs…

    I wonder if this would be a good time to pay my union dues and look into their insurance options?

    More to come…

    Murv

  • I Do Not Think It Means…

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    What You Think It Means.

    Yeah… Another Princess Bride reference, and I’m not even talking about “Mahwage”. How cool is that? After all, Inigo Montoya was one of the best parts of that whole film and the aforementioned snippet of dialogue has become even more appropriate today than when the movie was made.

    Allow me to explain what I mean…

    If you are reading this blog, you probably already know that I make my living with words. If you don’t know this, then let me set the record straight –

    I make my living with words.

    – There. Now we are all on the same page (LOL)… The truth is I’ve always been fascinated by words. They are what made me become an author in the first place. They are what prompted me to begin reading at an earlier than generally “normal” age. I simply cannot get enough of them.

    And, because of my fascination with words I am well aware of the mutations some of them go through because of regional dialects, changes in society, people thinking they are being “cute”, plain ignorance, or sometimes because the speaker in question can’t seem to decide which word to use.

    This is why we now have the “Urban Dictionary.” Honestly, I much prefer “sniglets” to “word urbanization.” Sniglets are funny while having a morphed meaning. The majority of urbanized words, to me at least, are completely unnecessary.

    For example, I had a friend – ha ha, very funny… Yes, I still have plenty of friends, but this particular guy moved to a different part of the country and I don’t see him anymore – Anyway, I had this friend who, whenever he thought something couldn’t be done, would say that it wasn’t “fausible” (Fah-zih-buhl) – obviously a blending of feasible and plausible.  Two words with similar, but not exactly the same, meanings. Honestly, this grated on my nerves something fierce, probably because he said it all the time, but I could see some humor in it because at least it sounded funny.

    Such is not the case with quite a few of the “urbanized words” I’ve come across. Truth is, they sound just like the original word, but look like they are misspelled. To me that does not convey a blending of two words to create a new meaning. It simply looks like the person who wrote it is either woefully uneducated, just plain lazy, or both – especially in this day and age with anything and everything having a built-in spell checker.

    Now don’t get me wrong. Typos happen. I am good for quite a few myself. But, intentional misspellings, that’s a different story. If I do that, I do it to be funny, and I offset the word with quotes or italics. But, I digress…

    As I’m sure you already guessed, I ran across a blatant incidence of this very recently. But, as you also may have guessed, this blog isn’t actually about the word in question. It’s about a different word.

    You see, I came across this particular blight on the English language via a Myspace friend request. The individual was flying an anti-Obama poster as his (or so he says) profile pic. It was the “Obama as the Joker” thing that has been going around. Now, as you all know, Obama wasn’t my choice for President, but then neither was McCain. I actually wrote in Evil Kat. Yeah… Seriously. But, that’s a whole ‘nother blog, and doesn’t apply here.  So, while I thought the pic was in poor taste, I wasn’t about to cast aspersions on the person’s political views. That’s a personal choice and everyone is welcome to their opinion. However, the point is, said Myspace person was using this as a profile pic and it had this egregious misspelling on it. I probably wouldn’t have said anything if it weren’t for the fact that the misspelling didn’t really change the meaning of the word as was intended. The “Urban Dictionary” claims this bastardization to have a blended definition but the reality is the original root word would have conveyed the supposed message much better, and it wouldn’t have looked stupid.

    So, I pointed this out when I accepted the friend request. Now, granted, I didn’t use smiley faces and LOL’s, but I wasn’t nasty about it either. I just noted that a spell checker might be a good idea. Still, I’m willing to concede that instead of rushing through my email and responding with a one liner perhaps I should have sent a longer note explaining that while I realized what was trying to be said, it might come across better a different way, LOL Smiley Happyface Grin No Offense Meant HAPPY HAPPY.

    But I didn’t. And for that transgression I received an interesting response. That reply is what this blog is actually all about:

    email

    Now, I’ll be honest. Upon reading this my initial reaction was the desire to reply with a rebuttal explaining that while to err is human, attempting to convey sentiment with gross misspellings didn’t qualify as beautiful, it actually fell under the heading of looking like an ignorant schmuck.

    However, I did not do that. I spent a few minutes ruminating over the fact that I probably could have pointed out the errors in a different way had I not been so rushed, and thought to myself, “Hey, maybe I should go apologize to this person.”

    So, I clicked the mouse a time or two and surfed on over to this person’s Myspace page. And there for everyone to see, was this:

    page

    I read the tag line. Then I read it again. Then I went back to my email and read what had been said. Then I went back to the page and re-read the tag line. I refreshed the page. I cleared my cache and refreshed the page. I rebooted my computer and cleared history, then surfed over to the page yet again. Why? Because certainly someone who had just recommended I “try humility” wouldn’t have a tag line like that, now would they?

    Just to be certain I wasn’t having a senior moment, I checked the dictionary – the real one, not the urban parody – and found this:

    humility

    No change as far as I could tell. Apparently humility still meant what I thought it meant.

    However, I do not think it means what the misspeller thinks it means. And, given the situation I really don’t find that inconceivable at all. However, I won’t keep saying it, even though it means exactly what I think it means.

    For the record, I did not send the note of apology. Obviously it wouldn’t have mattered…

    More to come…

    Murv