Seen at the ghetto coffee…

Observations

Seen at the ghetto coffee shop down the block: A magazine from 1968 with an article entitled “COMPUTER DATA BANKS: Do they know too much about you?”

Some congressman had started a committee to investigate the all of these “data banks” with airlines and hotels and so forth and discover how nothing was stopping anyone from connecting them all with phone lines and making all of that information easy to retrieve…Interesting enough.

CM reacts, “What makes more sense the word databank or database, personally I would say databank.”

So it seems we have a new (dead) word on our hands that must be used. Database, henceforth you shall only answer to “databank”!

It’s that time of year…

Observations

It’s that time of year again. Yes boys and girls, It’s time to remind everyone that I will not be using the ever more popular “Happy Holidays!” or “Have a great Holiday!” greetings. No sir, you may rest easy tonight as I’ll be using the tried and true “Merry Christmas!” again this year.

Pet peeves: 1. “[blank]-esque” This…

Observations

Pet peeves:

1. “[blank]-esque” This is a disturbing trend. It started with music reviewers writing “Beatle-esque” (wouldn’t it be “The Beatles-esque” anyway?) and now you can regularly hear a baseball broadcaster bellow “Barry Bonds-esque” or a political pundit proffer “Bill Clinton-esque”.

2. “the whole [blank] thing” Yet another of the wearisome phrases we use to give the lazy automatic rythym to our speech. Recently, this one has achieved ubiquity. Example: “I don’t do the whole coffee thing”.

Your word for today is…

Fun

Your word for today is “vituperate”. It means “To rebuke or criticize harshly or abusively; berate.”

E.g, “If I ever meet the man who designed the PeopleSoft Enterprise One Software (formerly known as JDEdwards OneWorld), I shall bury him in a snow of vituperation.”

On a related note, I’m sure Enterprise One is an outstanding value, especially to manufacturing organisations. But programming it is painful. Hence, I’ve come up with a new nickname for the software, “Number One” (as in, “do you have to go number one or number two?”)

Here’s something interesting. I…

Observations

Here’s something interesting. I visited a website (to remain nameless) that offers movie reviews with a Christian world view in mind and from a parent’s perspective. The reviews do their job in that they shed some light on subject matter that interests me. If I was writing these reviews, I’d write them differently, but it’s not my web site is it? Anyway, we were going to talk about something interesting weren’t we…

Well, in these reviews, you’ll often find a comment on profanity. In one review, the author recapped a few uses of “d— and h—“. It occured to me that Christians often will strike out those words in print or say “the d word”, even though damn and Hell have very specific meanings to the Christian that are important to remember.

The point (in my humbly submitted opinion) is that by deprecating these words — instead of deprecating the misuse of them — we paint them simply as “bad words” rather than as words that have meanings and are good words when used properly. Then, we lose the real meaning of those words. We surrender more of our beautiful language. In the end, we execute a rote search for right and wrong that cannot detect real insidiousnesses.

I may illustrate it this way:

1. Regardless of context, if I say “execrated” or “confounded” you will not take notice. If I say “damned” you will be shocked and tell me to “clean it up”.

2. “Jackass” and “ass” are disagreeable insults in 2004, but “donkey” is not.

Words mean things. We should be aware of those meanings and use the right words. My advice to the movie review web site — spell out damn and Hell and perhaps explain why it’s wrong to use them flippantly.

Went to see The Incredibles…

Opuses

Went to see The Incredibles on Saturday. Go see it. Don’t take your children.

And this statement is worthy of repetition: Pixar have proven again that they can do no wrong. The Incredibles is yet another blow from the Pixar wrecking ball to the tired, grey monolith of story-telling mediocrities.