Tag Archives: #a-good-word

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.

“Yankee, go home”

Someone had just informed me a week ago that the Yankee season was going badly.

This apropos my husband not wanting to be a Yankee fan “’cause they never lose.”

The Yankee – Red Sox matchup was on our set for less than a minute when we were greeted by a grand slam. [All numbers are approximate as I wasn’t fully attending.]

The Yankees had a 4-run lead quicker than you could say Jackie Robinson.

Any further information about the Yankees (or my husband’s Mets) will be gleaned from encounters on our street. I don’t expect to be following games or the fate of our home teams.

Pros/Cons

Here at All The Best, this is a positive lifestyle spot, so the pros will be of the “all in favor” variety. The “cons” will not be akin to those who offer us fraudulent claims to entice us to part with our money.

Simply put, Pros stand for yes and Cons for no.

So, you ask, what are we voting for?

Well, let’s see what we can say about immigrants that meets my positive take.

The fact remains that mass migration and nativist backlash have stalked one another for more than a century.

Idrees Kahloon, Economists Love Immigration. Why Do So Many Americans Hate It? in the New Yorker

Full disclosure is warranted: I was 6 when I arrived in Jackson Heights. My parents applied for political asylum when I was nine.

My expectation of growing up in the land of my birth was replaced by my life as an alien in America.

Oh, of course, I adapted to my new home, sporting a Queens accent with ease. For many years under all that Americanization, I still felt like a foreigner.

Pros, aka all in favor say Aye

The plus side of immigration coming from inside the immigrant experience is the opportunity it offers to those of us “yearning to breathe free.”

It may sound like propaganda, but we of the alien persuasion tend to be extreme in our patriotism. We are filled with the desire to make sure America meets all of its promises.

Patriotism, like all things in the great divide that America has become, is a fraught subject.

Let us stipulate that the grateful immigrant is a good citizen. We work hard as a rule. We pay taxes. We act in accordance to our civic obligations.

I’ve listed four reasons to honor the contributions immigrants make.

They also often pick up the slack jobs that the second or third or tenth generation won’t work.

CONS, or I say nay

Jingoist considerations are the first things that come to mind. You know, retorts like “they are different” qualify.

There’s reason one through twenty to turn immigrants away.

Folktales

Recently, I started wondering whence those picturesque expressions we’ve all heard originated.

Well, of course, something like madder than a wet hen has to have country roots. We city dwellers wouldn’t know a wet hen from a dry one. We also wouldn’t have any idea how angry being wet would make her.

These little bits of the vernacular can make your speech more colorful and colorful language makes conversation more entertaining.

I have favorite colloquialisms, of course, but I’ll be gobsmacked if I understand where they came from.

Some are just cute as a button. Others are cumbersome. As? What? I don’t know a slangy comparison for that one.

Unwieldy as a tractor on a mountain top? Is a tractor that uncomfortable with heights?

Familiarity with animal husbandry or just animal psychology does enter into some of these choices. You’re as hungry as a bear. Then there’s “as cunning as a fox.” How about ‘as persnickety as a porcupine’?

The argument or assumption that this flavorful language has a Southern connection may stem from too many episodes of Designing Women. Idioms come from all over.

Sometimes, the really clever raconteur adds another component, doubling up on the metaphoric. The analogy can become more specific if s/he says, “as cunning as a fox with a PhD.”

Why can’t word-play be more urban than rural? “She’s as twisty as Columbus Circle” may not be sheer poetry, but it’s my start. “He’s tracking farther than the A train?”

“He wears so many hats that he’s Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday.”

I have to admit I am on the fence about most of the little similes I just built.

I wish I could say my linguistic alterations made me feel as cozy as two peas in a pod

This’n and that’n

Things I learned from Nat Geo and CNN Science newsletters this week

Aging pandas

Talking plants

Yolk-based paints

Stressed lizards

Mexico is home to a 33-year-old panda named Xin-Xin, who was born by artificial insemination.

It appears that plants respond to life events by making sounds. There is no evidence that they have actually developed a language.

The egg yolk found in your da Vinci is not accidental. Painters seemed to have used it to “stretch” the life of expensive paints.

Living near a noisy military base has made these lizards nervous.

Passing on knowledge gives, I think information an added value!

New “things”

It’s become a thing to go out in punlic in our p.j.s- not just our sweats.

ET may well have to phone home but only if a UFO hasn’t blocked his signal.

Speaking of UFOs, the “cartoonist” in me envisions this: an alien real estate agent guides a group of alien clients through the earth’s atmosphere. “As you can see it’s a fixer-upper. The last owners really trashed the place.”

It’s World Hippo Day. Congrats to the hippopotamuses out there. Call me on Rhinoceros day (credit: Mr. Ionesco).

Article 6

There’s a guarantee built into the Constitution of the United States that the newly constituted federation will pay any debts it had incurred before the founding of the Republic.

This clause brings to question why paying our duly acquired debts has become a near-yearly drama.

As Benny (Joseph Buloff) from Somebody Up There Likes Me says “pay the check.”