Well, so, like ...

Well, so, like ...

So, this is, like, a bad idea, slamming people’s use of words. Guilty: friends, neighbors, and the Man in the Mirror. But it’s, like, very, very early, and, like, if I decide to scrap, retrench and start over, there’s, like, time. To write about Jeremiah.

Well, I dunno. What changed my avenue? 

Well, reading articles on line before getting down to work. This morning’s delanceyplace piece on Thucydides’ obnoxious use of difficult prose. Jeffrey Brown doing a PBS interview of White House Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco, in which both, noticeably Lisa, began nearly every response with well. It’s abcdefghing obnoxious, 

careless,

stinks of linguistic incompetence

and a limited intellect.

Several words are offensively, obnoxiously, overbearingly used in conversation:

Well, to begin a response to a question. 

So, to begin a conversation. This was only cute when Harry Golden talked about it as a yiddishism in his book So What Else Is New?

Like, signs irrefutably that the speaker is still mentally a teenager, probably smacking gum. I mean, like, know what I'm sayin'?

Very, the most overused word in the English language. As a mentor for new clergy, I have told preachers-in-training to remove every use of the word very from their sermon draft, because it trivializes the message and also because they can cut the sermon length ten percent. Very is bad, very, very is very bad indeed. 

W

P.S. For anyone coming to our Wednesday 11:30 Noon Healing Eucharist with Lunch and Bible Study, we have moved the Lunch with Bible Study back into Battin Hall.