Language. 11/7/25

As a former copywriter, misuse of the language pisses me off. As a former art director, it turns out it pisses John off even more. Case in point, “I could care less.” If you could care less, then care less. The proper statement is, “I couldn’t care less,” as if you had no interest whatsoever. I once was in a meeting with another copywriter, whose work I was overseeing. I told her I didn’t like most of what the script was saying, but if she followed up on this one specific part of it, that would make it a better piece of communication. She replied, “Okay I’ll flush that out.” I replied, “You can flush this script down the toilet. You need to ‘flesh’ it out.” Okay, maybe that wasn't very nice, but c’mon, she was supposed to be a professional writer. There was another time when a nephew came to visit us in our beach house. He is an amazing chef. It was intimidating to cook for him, but happily, he “helped me out.” Later on I said how amazing a cook I thought he was. To which he modestly replied, “Don’t overexaggerate.” I have heard this same phrase used on tv and radio, but never in print. You can’t overexxagerate. Can you underexaggerate? Doesn't exaggeration mean overdoing it in the first place? Well, my nephew pulled out his phone and, sure enough, overexaggerate was acceptable in some online dictionary. I guess if people misuse a word often enough, it then becomes part of the language. It also means if you are too much of a language scold, you begin to piss people off and that could lead to losing your job. Thank goodness that never happened to me. Oh wait…

Our other tour de force is about aging. Or rather, fear of aging. I recently had dinner with a very close friend and the conversation found its way to heart conditions, hearing aids and absorbent underwear. I recently have had trouble hearing parts of conversations while out to dinner in a noisy restaurant with hard surfaces which makes noise bounce off the walls instead of absorbing it. Turns out the restaurants do this on purpose because when people enter it sounds like a happenin’ place, like there’s a party going on. However it takes away from the party when you can only hear every third word. Then my wife and I attended a wedding and sat very close to a huge speaker amplifying the sound of the 12 piece band that was playing 15 feet away from us. All this made me visit an audiologist who told me I’d need a hearing aid in a few years, but not necessarily now. Back to aging. While sampling a few styles of hearing aids, I was more concerned about people not being able to see the hearing aid than I was about how well the thing worked. I was the same way with glasses, which I didn’t need until I was 45. I draw the line on coloring my hair, largely due to the fact that I don’t have any hair. And this observation led John and me to think about what else would we try to avoid using. That’s when he came up with the walking stick. It’s not a cane. I’m young and fit. It’s a damn walking stick. When it comes to needing those walkers with four wheels, fuhgeddaboudit. There’s no way to disguise those babies. But hopefully that’s wayyyy down the road.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next Friday with two new ones. You can take it for granite.

Andy and John