Language – All The Best

Doubling down

On Am I right¿

Why do I find the rhetorical phrase “Am I right” so… I don’t know, uninspired?

In the context of my comment on Minnesota in that blog, I get that a focus on am I right was frivolous. My apology is sincere.

Using serious and traumatic events, as in the ICE invasion into an American city, to bash a linguistic tic is a tactical error. It’s the kind of mashup that doesn’t serve us.

Here, I am going to shower all my attention on this dumb and self-congratulatory expression. In any other context, Am I right deserves a pass. Comics use it to keep their audience engaged. Am I guilty of that as well?

Penning, a guideline

Searching for honesty. Integrity not just honesty. This goes under notes for writing.

Searching for honesty, integrity and a mots justes, which simply translates to the right words. It is so much more!

Language please

In every transaction, we humans have created specific languages. The vocabularies of business are a case in point. The language of love is another [and very, very different] one.

Let’s address the business model first. I worked in marketing, to be exact, direct mail marketing. The language was one that addressed [see the pun and move on] the needs of our industry.

We were busy targeting audiences and anticipating percentages of response. It’s been ages, so I have lost mastery of what all we were on about.

Your banker and realtor have business vocabularies linked to returns. It’s likely that you’ll always be intetested in % in any biz.

Lawyers no doubt understand tort and litigation as I, for one, do not.

My doctor had better have some knowledge of arcana not easily accessible to me.

All of this is conducted in English, by the way. [If you’re Catholic, your priest may be reverting to Latin, although it’s as likely not.] So, under an umbrella of English, we have little pools of business dialects. As it were.

Just sharing the obvious for you to elaborate.

r-e-s-pectfully

Not everyone treats the months with as much reverence as we do.

In Spanish, for instance, there are no caps introducing their names. September is just an ordinary noun (except if it starts the sentence). Nothing exalted about septiembre.

It’s interesting because some languages put lots of regular words on pedestals. German is an example along with our own germanic tongue.