Repeat Offenders

When a word or a phrase is overused — and I mean used so often it breaks free from the dictionary, infiltrating the water supply, air filtration systems, telecommunication networks — I feel queasy and, sadly, judgmental.

 The verb to share is innocent until it’s used as a gerund, grabbing other words on its way to becoming a cliché for our overly communicative society: Thanks for sharing. A person can impart almost any kind of information, data, emotion, opinion — and when the response is Thanks for sharing, my eyes roll, and if alone, I groan or snort. Thanks for sharing — are you flipping kidding? If Dr. Anthony Fauci came to your door and told you about the dangers of the UK variant of COVID-19, you might say, Thanks for letting me know, Dr. Fauci. You should be struck down if you utter, Oh, thanks for sharing, Dr. Fauci. Not long ago, someone asked me if they could see a recent poem of mine. I sent the poem via email. The response I got: “I liked your poem. Thanks for sharing.” Perhaps I would have been less unsettled had the response been Thanks for sharing it. But on its own, Thanks for sharing has become a numbing response that makes me want to go the way of lemmings.

Sometimes perfectly reasonable words are used so often that they lose their original power. Take mindfulness. Who could argue with such an important idea? Yet I cringe when I hear the word now. It has become a brand. Like Old Navy, Tesla, Hostess Twinkies, Mindfulness. There is an athletic clothing company that sells a “Mindful Pullover.” And if you are into coloring, of course there are mindfulness coloring books … and tote bags, T-shirts, designer meditation cushions, phone apps to remind us to be mindful as we scroll through our social media feeds. And how about the Americanization of yoga? I best not go into that or my blood pressure will go up. What makes the branding and materialization of mindfulness, meditation and yoga so irritating is that the meaning and usefulness of these important ideas and practices drown under the weight of their McDonaldization. Actually, it would not surprise me to see Mindfully Happy Meals. 

Why has no one prevented instructors of hot yoga from uttering the word namaste as they start their classes of cardio/strength training? I heard someone in the grocery store the other day talking on her cell phone while inspecting plastic boxes of blueberries: Can you believe he got all namasate-ish before he left? I mean really??

I often hear the following phrase, usually at the end of a conversation: It is what it is. The problem is that it’s almost never true. Most things are different from what they seem to be. When we declare that something is what it is, we put an end to discernment, we limit imagination, we assert that we are done thinking. And so often, there is so much more to think about. Some examples:

Person A: The Capitol Insurrection was a violent expression of hatred in our history.
Person B: Yeah, we shouldn’t be surprised given the previous president. It is what it is.
Person A: Mom and Dad always favored you over me.
Person B: It didn’t seem that way to me — but, at this point, it is what it is.
Person A: Only privileged people with computers can find vaccine appointments.
Person B: Yup, this is how the damn world has always worked. It is what it is.

Two cousins to It is what it is are It’s all good and Whatever. Please tell me when is anything all good? What about the nuances of experience, the reality of ambiguity? And when did the word whatever became a full sentence? It used to be a pronoun and now it has become a shorthand way to say: What will be will be or I don’t really care. This is true of the overused adverb literally. I often hear people say something like: This is literally the best dinner party I have ever been to or Vitamin C is literally the best vitamin a person can take. Again, it’s not a bad word, but it is has been appropriated for the purpose of declaring something that is not necessarily true. And I hear it all the time. There is even a podcast called Literally!

Does anyone know if the word anyhow has undergone adverb reassignment surgery to become anyhoo? And finally, I would really like to know when we all became so insecure that we had to end declarative statements with the question, right? Such as, I know, right? Or Spring couldn’t come too soon, right? Equally annoying is hearing someone preface every declarative statement with I’m not gonna lie: I’m not gonna lie, I am sick of hearing people say I’m not gonna lie (suggesting that I lie the other times when I state an opinion).

I am sure the pandemic will spawn (if it hasn’t already) a whole lexicon of words that will find their way into our lives the way Muzak has done in elevators and airports. Unprecedented is already getting tiresome and it has been used erroneously to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. Many horrendous pandemics preceded this one, such as: the HIV/AIDS pandemic (killing 36 million people), the flu pandemic of 1958 (death toll: 2 million), and the Spanish flu of 1918 (killing 20 to 50 million people).

There are a slew of other pandemic words that are now teetering on the edge of where reasonable words and phrases go to die: unparalleled, a new normal, Zooming, super-spreader and flattening the curve. They could be saved from the way of a bromidic end if we could just let them be and not repeat them multiple times per hour. I suppose I should not be surprised that there are already businesses and websites selling vaccination hats and T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, socks, mugs and wristbands, or as they say (annoyingly), vaccination merch. This reminds me of other abbreviated monikers of easily utterable words: totes (for totally), fab (for fabulous). adorbs (for adorable), fam (for family), prob (for problem). Are we rushing around so fast that we cannot afford to spend the time uttering three or four syllables? Why must everything be so reduced?

I better calm down — so I will close with a paragraph to illustrate what I have attempted to convey:

I’m not gonna lie. Being isolated at home for a year has allowed me the gift of mindfulness and a greater awareness about how language is used. The pandemic has been hard on all of us, but it is what it is. This is literally an unprecedented time and we are all waiting to find out what our new normal will be, right? With good luck we will avoid the super-spreaders of last spring, spend less time Zooming and enjoy a fab summer. Anyhoo, remember to hug your fam when it is safe to do so. I can hear you thanking me for sharing — and I say to you in return: Namaste.