The Jester

The Jester
Lamar Deal

My Bad

I am more than a little sick of some of the phrases that we use without thinking. Sometimes it just seems easier to use some hackneyed trope than to dig a little deeper and use truly descriptive language. The thing that most appalls me is that I use these all the time. Here are a few shopworn shibboleths that I would like to see tied up in a gunnysack and lobbed into the nearest river.

“My bad…” That’s cute coming from a child but if you’re over four years old you need to drop this from your personal lexicon right this minute. This baby talk phrase gets trotted out to cover any faux pas from spilling salt to setting off a thermonuclear bomb. “Oops, my bad!” just doesn’t cut it, Osama.

“It’s all good…” No it ain’t. This is a sorry substitute for actual thought. This is usually used to cover moral ambiguities:
“Is that legal?”
“Chill, dude, it’s all good…”
…or to stop a barroom brawl:
“I’m gone *$&^ you up, fool!”
“Hey, man, it’s all good…”
SMACK!!
“Dang, I said it was all good…”

“That affects me how?” This is one of my wife’s pet phrases, although she denies it. I’m not even sure why this bothers me. Maybe because it’s so snarky. The phrase has a built in sneer that just really gets on…(see next line)

“My last remaining nerve…” This is one of my pet phrases. I’ve been using this for at least a couple of decades. I usually preface it with “You’re tap dancing on…” and follow it up with “and you’re wearing your jackhammer shoes…” I thought that was really funny once upon a time, but now it seems as contrived as it actually was back when I first started using it. Now it’s just dumb. Stop me before I use it again. Please.

“Threw him under the bus…” The first time I heard this phrase was when Rush Limbaugh used it to attack Barack Obama for distancing himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying that Obama “threw his white grandmother under the bus”. I’m sure that the phrase goes back further than that, but just the fact that Gas Bag Boy used it pretty much ruined it for me forever.

“That bites, sucks, blows, eats it, chews it” (or other orally fixated expression) As in “That phrase just totally bites the big one.” As opposed to partially biting the big one. Or the medium one or even the small one.

“Talk to the hand…” Talk to the finger. Yeah, that finger.

“Hel-lo?” This denotes total cluelessness, as in “Hel-lo? Are you that stupid?” sometimes accompanied by a tapping on the head as in “knock wood”. If the perpetrator just pretends to “knock wood” try to ignore it. If he actually “knocks wood” on your own private, personal noggin, as far as I’m concerned you can bust him one for his own good. Someday he’ll thank you for it.

“Well, duh!” Very like “Hel-lo?”. If you are in fact as dumb as “Well, duh!” implies, odds are you won’t be offended by the use of the phrase.

“She has issues…” …only if she’s a magazine. Otherwise she has problems. Or she’s as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. A lot of people have “issues” with the word “crazy”. To me, the word is perfectly serviceable and superbly descriptive; sometimes no other word will do. Take Jeffrey Dahmer for instance. He didn’t have “food issues”. He was “crazy” or as the psychologists say, “wiggetty-wiggetty-wack”.

“Drank the Kool-aid…” Generally refers to anyone’s willing co-operation in a stupid course of action. This goes back to the Jonestown Massacre of 1978 when 918 less than stable followers of the deranged Rev. Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid in what had to be one of the worst public relations nightmares ever for the manufacturers of a children’s drink.

“You must be confusing me with someone who gives a damn…” I don’t.

“Ya think?” This belongs in the same category as “Well, duh!” and “Hel-lo?” No, I don’t think. I use trite phrases like “Ya think?” to keep from thinking. Duh.

“__________ challenged” or “________ impaired” I know this was first used with the best of intentions. The word retarded had become a pejorative; such an insult that mental health professionals coined the terms “mentally impaired” and “intellectually challenged”. Then somebody made a crack about short people being “vertically challenged” and pretty soon anybody who was different was “this challenged” or “that impaired”. Enough already. It’s no longer funny.

Well, that’s my rant for this week. Hey, it’s all good. If you’re humor impaired or have issues with my opinions, my bad. Talk to the hand. I mean hel-lo? Ya think?