DIARY
There’s
a lot of B.S. going around
by
Robert LaFrance
Buy green, buy green, buy green. I
keep hearing that, but just last week I took some green ham out of the fridge
and it smelled like the south end of a northbound horse.
There’s a lot of such nonsense loose
in the world – not that it’s nonsense to want to buy “green” products. I’m
talking about all the companies that are leaping on the “green” bandwagon
because that’s a good way to sell their products. However, when I am told that
a certain company is selling “green” or “ergonomic” chainsaws or snow scoops, I
have to step back and take a look.
One such ad appeared on my TV last
evening. The commercial was selling a certain snow scoop that was so much more
efficient and easy to use than anything since Caesar’s mule. The next morning,
after Mother Nature had dropped about 20 centimetres of heavy snow on this
mountain and particularly on our driveway, my wife went out to try out the new
scoop. (I had a soft tissue injury where I had fallen off the couch.) “How’s it
going?” I said after I had hobbled to the doorway.
“Trouble is, the snow’s not
ergonomic,” she muttered. “I think those ads are a bunch of Male Cow Manure,”
she added, and went back to work. Only she didn’t exactly say Male Cow Manure.
In my pain, I settled back down in my easy chair with some medicine and
resolved to speak to her about her language.
****************************
It was quite amusing during the past
holiday season to see the number of people on Facebook and elsewhere as they
battled for the right to use the terms “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year”
in the face of all that pressure to say simply “Happy Holidays”.
The funny thing, I didn’t see anyone
trying to take away that right.
Maybe there were Anabaptists and
Druids or possibly Martians who objected to the politically correct deletion of
‘Christmas’ but I didn’t meet any at the post office or at the Irving.
Generally people said “Merry Christmas” the same as they always did and I
didn’t see any police officers tasering them for it. Those who watched Facebook
though, could see postings (as comments are called) like this: “I’m going to
say Merry Christmas and that’s that. No one is going to force me to say “Happy
Holidays”!”
Yeah, okay. It all brought to mind
that old saying from Proverbs: “The guilty fleeth when no man pursueth.”
****************************
A question: What is so super about
superstition? I could see if it were called STUPIDstition. We all know it’s
stupid – except our own – so where and when did it become super? It reminds me
of the phrase ‘The Great Depression’ or even ‘The Great War’ which we now call
World War I. From every book I’ve ever read about the depression and that war,
I can safely guess that neither was great.
While on the subject of jobs, I just
heard today on the radio news that several big Canadian companies will soon be
cutting thousands of jobs because the shareholders haven’t been satisfied with
their returns. Many companies demand a 3% profit margin and if a certain store
– especially one in a rural area – only has a 2.89% margin, then it will close
or its staff will be cut enough to ensure a 2.5% margin next time they measure
it. Then it will be closed.
Please note that if there is a layoff
that the only ones who will get laid off will be those who do the actual work
while the ones who merely know how to “work the system” will sleaze away like a
July python in a Fort McMurray holding pond.
Some other points to ponder (as they
say in Reader’s Digest):
I could do this the easy way – go to
Google or the dictionary – but I would like the reader to let me know what the
word “smithereens” means. Each week I smash the English language to it, yet I
don’t know what it means.
We are rained on every day by clouds
of redundancies. People routinely say “first started” or “hot water heater”. A
few days ago I heard someone refer to a certain athlete as “more unique” and
only an hour after that I heard the phrase “all-pervasive” as if “pervasive”
weren’t pervasive enough. Now I listen to my radio tell me that two companies
were going to be made into “a single entity”. An entity is an entity; that’s
all she wrote, and the word “vital” means just that. Saying “Vitally important”
doesn’t make it more vital or more important.
-end-
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