Thursday, January 10, 2008

Words and PhrasesThat Bug Us And, Apparently, Others

Even though language isn't our biggest concern this election year, this was an article we couldn't miss, either reading it or passing along to other I.U members and anyone else who happens by our blog. As we, the I.U.s who must read and pass on info to others, we find ourselves becoming irritated to the brink by a few words and phrases ourselves.

Anyone else, out there in cyber-world, being driven to distraction every time, for example, the president uses the word "interesting?" "Interesting" it seems has become a word one uses when one either does not want to use a more specific adjective or one is such a freakin' cluck, one has no clue as to how to describe something or perhaps one has simply been bored and not listening, but feels, for some reason, the need to comment.

For one of the most incurious men I have ever known or to whom I have been subjected for much longer than I would have liked, he sure finds many things interesting. He has interesting meetings, interesting conversations, finds most things Democrats say and or do interesting, but never the Republicans, unless Prezori has just had a meeting with a group of them.


(Hey, somebody out there! Please do me a favor, in between primaries, the MSM imploding with Fox leading the way, and the latest missing person or mass murder, do a search of Bush's words. See how often he uses "interesting" in a speech or news conference.)

Of course, the preznit is not the only one guilty of this irritating speech habit, but he is by far the worst offender.

I once worked with a woman who, like Junior, found simply every thing "interesting." This was in California in the early to middle '80s and interesting was a very popular adjective, but no one found nearly as much to be interesting as did this co-worker of mine, we will call J. The "interesting' thing got to be such a joke in my circles, that any time any one of us use the word, another would ask if he/she meant CA. interesting or really of interest

Finally, on one of my grumpier days, after almost three months of non-stop rain, the death of my mother, a stiff neck that I had begun to believe was permanent and the headaches that attended it, plus several 12 hour days at work and the usual on and off insomnia when I could lie down for the night........

Well, it happened; Just prior to a staff meeting. Another co-worker had said something about his weekend that even he did not think was all that interesting. He was talking about the weather fer chrissake and about how his house search was going....making small talk with his office mate and long time friend, as we all waited for the chief of staff.

Yep, the cranky little devil that is always over active in me when I am tired out of my mind and stuck in an unfinished, horror of a grief process.

J, I said with exasperation dripping off every word, what is interesting about that? Nothing! As a matter of fact, it's boring as hell. Not one thing is interesting about what N. just said, is there, N?

N allowed as how that which he had said was in no way interesting. He was just killing time, waiting for the meeting to begin.

One could have heard a pin drop in that conference room. It dawned on me that that cranky little devil had just gotten me in a world of deep doo-doo.

After staff meeting, my office-mate, also my superior, shut the door to the office quietly and, instead of staring in on the lecture I thought I was going to get, proceeded to laugh her ass off. She said that she believed that just about everyone on the staff had wanted to say or do something along the same lines for months.

Still, something was bothering me, other than the fact that I had just been quite rude to a co-worker, which I endeavored not to be on a regular basis and had basically gotten away with it.

After re-composing herself, B. asked, "So, why does that annoy you so much. I've been wondering about it in myself. It's so damn grating." "Sometimes, I think that I'm just tired of hearing it every other paragraph," she said,

I wasn't so sure that "interesting fatigue" was all it was for me.But I felt duty bound to look into it. "Maybe it's just that saying that something is interesting when it clearly isn't, is disingenuous at best, or worst for us all, I am just a nit-picking, highly irritable nut-case, dangerously close to the edge. It's been a rough year."

B. wasn't convinced that I had not flipped my wig or blown a circuit under the pressure of the last 11 months, but I wasn't so sure. It was out of character for me to pop off with a humiliating confrontation with anyone, especially in front of a group of people about something that petty, or seemingly so.

Later, at lunch, I apologized for being a jackass earlier that day.My apology was more or less accepted.

By the the end of that week, I finally had it all figured out. This co-worker, I found, would say the same damn thing to patients when they were describing symptoms they were having. she did not always follow through by charting what the patient had said. Sometimes she would bring up the subject of the patient's symptoms, as related to the disease, casually, with a co-worker, all of whom knew more about the condition we treated than she did, but she rarely ever told anyone that the symptoms belonged to one of our patients, until she could present the case in staff meeting having, seemingly, diagnosed the problem and had treatment suggestions in hand. She was usually right on the mark, by that time. Good thing our patients were not, or rarely were, acute. ICU we weren't

I began realizing this habit of J's as I spent extra time going through the charts, open and closed out, putting pieces together, connecting dots. Back then I was blessed with a phenomenal memory.

That J was far less experienced and knowledgeable in addiction treatment, not to mention the other pathologies that often accompanied it,was not a secret on the unit. We all knew that she had never worked in the field before and would have been happy to answer questions or spend lunch or break time helping her get up to speed.

J. was probably just as aware that we never would have hired her had we not needed two nurses for the unit if we were going to detox patients there, according to state regs. There wasn't much for nurses to do on our unit until they were fairly well versed in addiction and recovery from it, except help the Docs admit patients, follow medication orders for Detox, which lasted for about 5 days, and then, pass out vitamins.

But instead of reaching out for help in a field that's tough on the best of us, she was more concerned about how she looked to the chief of staff than the patients welfare.

The other nurse and I, one of two therapists, had begun to notice that J. still didn't know basics all that well. She got conned a lot, by some of the best cons on earth. and then, I imagine, felt foolish when other staff members caught it. We had all gotten conned at one time or another. Everyone who works in the field does. No reason for anger or shame. It was a good opportunity to learn what the books can't teach.

I would see her huddled with a patient in the hallway, she would put on a serious expression, wrinkled brow and all, as if listening intently, nod and say, "gee, isn't that interesting?" But she failed to chart the incident or consult with a other staff members. (She desperately wanted to be a therapist, the one thing she didn't have the first clue about.)

I can see doing that if one doesn't want to look like an idiot in front of the patient, but I always found that simply admitting ignorance, with a promise to look into it and find, for the patient, answers or get them in to see a Doc, stat. was the best way to handle questions I couldn't answer or to handle symptoms that didn't make any sense, to me. I was well aware that no one could con a con, nor should they try, when that con is in, actuality, a very sick human being.

But one should never do what J. did and then, consistently, drop the ball when it came to charting or consulting with other staff members. Whatever the patient had to say was interesting, but not enough to share with other staff.

No one knows everything, even in their own specialty. People who know everything scare me, and they should scare you.

One night I received a call to get to the hospital fast. I beeped the on-call physician and zoomed out the door, praying there would be cop-free zone between my apartment and the medical center. The patient I was called to see was in crisis due to liver failure. We had been trying to get him onto a medical floor as we were not equipped to handle the degree of acuity his lab work indicated on our unit, an addiction unit, all patients ambulatory.

I grabbed his chart. Nothing I saw there would lead anyone to suspect liver failure any minute, but that was sure the picture I saw as I walked into his room. That was mainly because she had not charted every thing she knew.

The on-call and I threw a fit big enough, after stabilizing the patient ,as best we could, to over-ride the criminal insurance company that kept refusing to pay for treatment on a medical floor.

We were an addiction unit, totally unequipped to deal with a man at deaths door. .

Still, the man died, two days later. He didn't have to die. We would have picked up the problem quickly, had she only made a note of what she had heard about his behavior from other patients or told someone else on staff.

There was one thing we had all learned about J. even before the liver failure horror. That one thing was that she hated being wrong, much less corrected. Her fear of being wrong was pathological in its intensity.

In this case everything was "interesting,' but the patient died, needlessly.

No wonder I hate that word, especially when overly used by someone who wouldn't know Liver failure from a hang nail.

I admit to wondering who is about to die when Junior says he just had an "interesting" conversation with Ehud Olmert

January 9, 2008

Some Words That Bug Me

By Hilton Obenzinger


As the new year begins, I think of words. I teach college students writing, so I get a lot of words tossed at me. This is my chance to toss them back.

Hate to be a language/grammar Nazi ('coz' we hate them), but would the above sentence not be better if it read: As the new year begins, I think of words. I teach writing (creative writing, whatever) to college students (or at the college level). As a result, I get many words tossed at me.......?

Could be that I am too tired to be typing, let alone policing a professors writing skills, the result of a recent URI, turned to bronchitis and several 12 hour days in a row, but I had to read the paragraph a couple of times before I got it. Maybe, I'm just too old for late night website reading. It's for damn sure, after the last 7 years and several goofy elections, presided over by corporate news media pundits, I'm too cranky.

I surely can't say that the posters, commenters and submitters here at I.U aren't even worse on our language.

Again, I apologize for my cranky mood.

Some words begin to drill into my head, sometimes giving me endless joy, but too often causing me great pain. For the painful ones, I have to un-drill them or go nuts. Please bear with me as I extract a few irritating words and phrases to share with you. When they are exposed to sunlight I feel that they can wither a tiny bit. Please add the words and phrases that cause your own teeth to gnash. I’m positive that my list is thoroughly incomplete.

So here they are, in no particular order:

Intelligence: I always thought “U.S. government intelligence” was an oxymoron, like “military intelligence.” But I gained unexpected appreciation for our country’s spies when the National Security Estimate appeared to declare that Iran had stopped developing nuclear weapons years ago. The announcement took the wind out of the sails of the Bush administration’s drive to attack Iran. The neo-con maniacs in power may still launch some kind of assault, but they were quite visibly taken aback by the report, and they need to regroup. Consequently, the world got a breather. The “estimate” reminded us to hope in unexpected ways: There are sane, decent people throughout the government and the military, and someone had the guts to throw a monkey-wrench into the war drive. Ordinarily, I hate “intelligence,” but there really may be some intelligent people in the “intelligence community.” Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contain . . .

A Market-Place of Ideas: This metaphor is frequently used as a self-evident truth to defend free speech, so the intention is often admirable. But the domination of the paradigm of unbridled capitalism is so complete that we are forced to regard our knowledge as bought and sold by means of an invisible hand as if such weird notions were second nature. But do ideas need to be in a market? Do we need to buy and sell ideas? Has anyone told these people that there’s such a thing as monopoly? That the market can be rigged? Can’t there be “a potluck of ideas” or “a wild orgy of ideas” or “a cultivated garden of ideas” or “an ecosystem of ideas” or “an amusement park of ideas” or any number of other metaphors? We could even have “a crap shoot of ideas” (or is that the market-place?). I like the notion of a garden, personally. That way we can cultivate ideas that feed us while at the same time pull out the weeds that will choke us. The weeds can grow anywhere they want, except right where the tomatoes are planted. And the garden is fed with the luxuriant manure of real life and compassion. Do you believe me? If you do, you may belong to a . . .

Thanks to Old Rabid Zell Miller, I hate the word metaphor, ever since he used it on Hardball with Chris Matthews right after saying he wished he could challenge Matthews to a duel. Metaphor was pronounced "metafer" and now every time I see the word, I see it as "metafer. Perhaps, hickism is contagious.

Faith-based Organization: Once upon a time there was a thing called religion. Today it feels awkward to talk about “religious schools” or “religious charities,” so “faith-based” has become the current obfuscation of choice. For some reason, “faith” seems to eclipse or blunt the bad associations of “religion” (Spanish Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials, etc.). Faith is a warm, undifferentiated heart-felt feeling and not a doctrine. “Faith-based” may not have been invented by Bush, but he has certainly done a lot to popularize the euphemism. We’re living with the many disasters of “faith-based” politics brought to us by Bush and Company’s muscular faith. Whenever a student writes, for example, “faith-based charity,” I respond: Do you mean a religious charity? Of course, even if using the term “faith-based” were enforced through social pressure, I suspect that no one would complain that it was a form of . . .

(What it is, is a form of horse hockey; speech that means absolutely nothing. How can anything be faith based when the president promises you the money to run said organization? )

Political Correctness: This term has been around for a while, and thankfully its use is fading. I witnessed the birth of this term: how people in the New Left would joke that a particularly dogmatic activist was “politically correct,” meaning that his doctrinaire political outlook would blind him to the material world and he would be a bone-head. The rightwing enthusiastically adopted the term as a criticism of anyone advocating egalitarian politics, particularly through self-naming. So, for example, Lakotas wanting to change the sign in the national park in the Great Plains from “Custer’s Last Stand” to “Battle of Little Big Horn” or someone wanting to be called a name of their own choosing (e.g., “woman,” “African American”) are just whims of puny liberals and professional victims. And “faith-based” is absolved. Most denunciations of “political correctness” are actually coming from people who disdain the expansion of democracy to begin with. Too often it’s the White Citizens Council at a tea party. Which leads to . . .

(This particular phrase makes me want to burst my own ear drums, just so I will never have to hear it again. Politics rarely has anything to do with correctness. Are political dirty tricks, a la, Karl Rove and his lord and savior, Richard Nixon, in anyway correct? Nevertheless, the far right loves to label anyone to the left of Vlad the impaler as politically correct. It is an easy way, with just a couple of words, to stop conversation in its tracks, make everything the speaker has said or will say, silly and weak. It brought us Bill O'Reilly and his eternal ranting about what he calls the "war on Christmas." To say Happy Holidays or Seasons Greetings to friend or stranger, instead of Merry Christmas was so politically correct that it seemed to threaten the very heavens, themselves. Once, while entering a department store, I stopped to help a young man pick up a huge mess of papers and books he had dropped while trying to exit the crowded store. A couple of business men types passed us, almost stepping on us and the fellow's papers. "Ah, the politically correct feminist who actually does something besides burn her bra." (One must remember that this happened in the early 70s, in the deep south.) There had never been much that was politically correct about me and these too were just about to find it out the hard way. "Hey," I snapped in a tone sure to get their attention, what you just witnessed is human decency, not feminism, whatever the hell that is, and you should try it sometime. It would make the world a better place for all of us to live in, especially, if people would also not just assume they know what another person is about by viewing a snap shot of their lives." What a couple of right wing boobs, eh?

But wait! A couple of years ago, I was commenting on a well-known, liberal blog. It was back during all the Republican bribery/corruption revelations and bruhaha. The only people who had been accused of anything, at that time, were Republican males, seemingly straight, from all outer appearances. I had just finished reading the article about it all and I was furious. So, I commented that our elected officials should not receive a damn thing from anyone unless it was his morning bagel from his wife. Whoa, did I ever get blasted. Another commenter "knew already where I was coming from....wife serving him a bagel! Blah, Blah, Blah. How did I know he had a wife, even that the official was a male or that his wife served him breakfast I suppose I should have said "elected official who happened to be corrupt, straight, and eats bagels for breakfast and are married to good little stepford wives, but none of that had a damn thing to with the issue I was frothing at the mouth over. Getting the back of ones hand, verbally, is no more fun when it comes from the far left as it does when it comes from the right. Anyhoo, it seems that anyone who thinks for him/herself and doesn't mind every word they utter carefully, is a politically incorrect person and deserves to be raked over the coals verbally on a regular basis.

Empowerment: I got nothing against this word, and all of its variants (empowered, empowering, etc.). It’s a beautiful idea, whatever it is. I see students using this word often, so often that it’s become an overused vague stand-in for some kind of achievement, whatever that is. When a community learns to do something or organize a protest, that’s good; they have a better sense of their capabilities to make change; they get a whiff of change, the possibility that they can take power. But feeling good about yourself or gaining tools is not in itself the power to rule, just a step along the way. If every small improvement or achievement is “empowering,” then oppressed people around the world would have been in power a long time ago. I’d like to be more modest, and less vague. Someone who learns how to read in jail can have his mind travel far beyond the bars, but he’s still behind bars. While I’m at it, I’d also like to ditch a few of the technical terms that social science has sprinkled into everyday speech: “underserved,” “underresourced,” “underprivileged,” and others like them. Natalie Portman came to Stanford a while ago, speaking about some of the causes she supports, and she talked about “poor people.” It’s invigorating to say that someone is poor and not “underprivileged,” that a school is crappy, meaning that it doesn’t have books or its teachers get paid peanuts, rather than to say that the school is “underresourced.”

Most of the time, what’s “underresourced” is real “intelligence,” the kind that shops at the Halliburtonesque “market-place of ideas.” I know I’ll be criticized for advocating “political correctness,” but I don’t care: mouthing off at a few words is “empowering.” At this point I’m ready to seize the Winter Palace.

I've got you back, seize away!

Authors Website: www.obenzinger.com

Authors Bio: Hilton Obenzinger is the author of "American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania," among many other books of criticism, poetry and fiction, and the recipient of the American Book Award. He is a long-time Jewish American advocate of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hilton Obenzinger teaches writing and American literature at Stanford University.



(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

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