You Can't Handle Nuance!!!

Think words don’t matter all that much? Substitute overlord for employer and underling for employee for the rest of 2016. See, didn’t I just make the personnel department’s handbook for underlings more amusing? Oh, right, human resource department.

“So, who’s your overlord?”

“I’m an underling with Boeing.” 

Fun stuff.

One of my favorite minor exchanges in a Shakespearean play is when Brutus asks of Antony and Octavius, “Words before blows. Is it so, countrymen?” Octavius responds, “Not that we love words better, as you do”.  What better a scene than enemies having a parley to exchange verbal barbs before the physical assault? And the wittier, the better.

Could have gone with opponents or foes or adversaries.

As for the wrangling over describing the folks out in Oregon making the news, I am using armed individuals. Note, some may be unarmed, which is different than being disarmed. Which is not to say anything about their personalities, disarming or otherwise.

The Economist recently noted the words disappeared from the SAT tests—advertised as an attempt to use words more likely found in academic disciplines and the workplace. Exegesis? Echelon form? A little late to the wake, but I did admire the magazine’s effort to use as many SAT words as they could in the piece.

I mourn the deletion of lugubrious. It breaks my heart in two. It tears at my soul to no longer expect that I may form such a word in my mouth for future ears that will not hear with understanding. Lugubrious. Oh, so wretched that I may retch. Too much?

Maybe radicalized ranchers.

May as well confess that I like the sounds of words—reading them out loud to a captive audience for 31 years may be the cause. Simply put, stop stops when you pop that ‘p’, and go may go on a length with the ending vowel.

Insurgents?

Students, colleagues, friends have fussed a bit—only a little--about my word choices, which I consider not all that. I know writers and editors—E.B. White, for one—call for the simpler word. Agreed. Mostly.

I do flinch when I hear or read super excited. Ecstatic? Ebullient? Exuberant? Reacting to a new cat, for instance. Or an ‘A’ on a test. Or the birth of a child? A new car. A nice fish on the hook. Multi-million-dollar-lottery win. Super happy, no doubt.

Lunatic fringe? (Surrey optional)

Now here’s what gets me really interested: Do I have a different experience when I describe my reaction as one of ecstasy rather than ebullience? Or if I were to be ecstatic over the birth of a child and you were to be super thrilled, would the describing words describe the difference in our experiences? Or maybe it's all a matter of individuals perceiving, thinking, or feeling differently, language be hanged. (Not literally)

I don’t know.

And now, dear reader, you are super relieved this post is at an—sound it out—end.