Language Follies 3

We start off today with a major award: the George Orwell Euphemism Prize.

It goes to the university where I spent a third of the 20th century teaching: New Jersey City University.

Although I’m sure that cause-and-effect is not at play here, the fact remains that in the two decades since I retired, the school has plunged into massive debt (even taking into account that my monstrous salary was taken off the books). So, the school has announced that action will be taken to stabilize the ship: it will be “rightsizing.” 

That is, NJCU will be firing staff. 

And what can be wrong when you are doing “right”?

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Now for some food shopping.

Can you imagine a more delicious way to expire than to munch some Tombstone Pizza?

Want some deli? Super Fresh supermarket offers this MOTO (Master of the Obvious) aviso in its weekly circular:

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Are you “everybody”? Don’t you just love those ads that claim that “everybody” is buying this or that? Here’s a variation:

The Canned Tuna Every Family Is Switching To

Now, if ever I was blessed (or is it cursed?) to be a member of the management team for the advancement of this particular brand of canned tuna, I would raise my hand at the next meeting and venture to suggest that the company could save money by not advertising the product. After all, if “Every Family” is switching to our fish, all we’d have to do is wait and we’d have the market to ourselves without the need to spend even a dime more. History is on our side! 

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What’s in your mailbox? Mine is filled six days a week with appeals from charitable organizations for some of my hoard of gelt. What most of the envelopes contain is something like this:

An offer for a “free gift.” Which qualifies as this post’s Tautology Award.

Aren't gifts by definition “free”? Would you spring for an "unfree gift"?

Anyway, I am a sucker for good deeds and have responded with a check to many of the appeals: environmental, medical, humanitarian. And as a result, I have accumulated a load of “free gifts.”

                                                            

                                             Don't forget the hats!

Amazing, though, how many hundreds of dollars these “free gifts” have cost me.

 

Blondie

Today we salute Goldilocks. Yes, I know she had the nasty habit of breaking into the homes of others—but she was, perhaps, the foremost empiricist among all the fairy tale characters.

She is worthy in a way that too many business moguls and politicians and pundits of a certain bent are not. Ideologues to the nth degree, they offer tautologies as counsel, question-begging as wisdom. “The government must not over-regulate the (fill in the blank) industry,” they spout—and to the unwary such a proclamation might pass as astute political advice. But as the philosopher Julian Baggini, points out, “An adviser can always be right yet not much use.” He goes on to offer a few examples of advice that is right but not of much use: “never buy anything that is too expensive”; “do not marry the wrong person.”

Something that is “too expensive” is beyond a reasonable valuation, and thus just as un-right as “wrong” is, by definition. Baggini slaps the wrists of the Greek wise men who supposedly came up with the injunction on the Temple at Delphi—“Nothing to Excess.” Their advice comes close to being “vacuous,” he says. The difficulty in life is in knowing “how much is too much, not that too much is bad.”

But as Goldilocks showed us, excess lies off to both sides of the ideal. There’s too hard, but also too soft; too hot, but also too cold. In testing the chairs, the bowls of porridge, and the beds, she was eventually able to discover the right level of comfort for sitting and sleeping and the right temperature for ingestion.

Our anti-regulation ideologues, in their proclamations, have no minds for testing. If they did, they would acknowledge that while something “over” is (by definition) bad, so is something “under” (consider plants that are over-watered and those that are under-watered). Under-regulation is just as bad a policy as over-regulation; the issue—as the question-beggers do not wish the public to recognize—is how much regulation is not too much, or not too little—but just right.

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See: Julian Baggini, Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover?: 100 Fresh Takes on Familiar Sayings and Quotations