Whatever you do, don’t file your request with the Etymology Department on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. You’re bound to be disappointed. As we all know, the bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Etymology are a hard-drinking bunch who arrive bleary-eyed on Monday and race out the door on Fridays at 2:30 p.m. sharpish. All day on Thursdays, our national wordsmiths are giving 110%, assigning names like yellow crested songster and lilac breasted roller to the birds and passion or mango to the fruits. On Friday afternoon, though, they phone it in. “This bird? Blue. That bird? Black. That flower over is a violet. Are we done yet? Happy hour just started.” “No, we still need a name for this fruit.” “That’s an orange.” “Hey, don’t forget this pepper.” “Green. Done. Time to party.” Even worse than the slapdash effort on Friday afternoon, the bureaucrats who come up with these names are demons on Monday mornings, when everyone shows up with a hangover and intense hatred for the week ahead. You know what got named on a Monday? Kumquats, that’s what. Also platypus, cucumber, squash and vacuum. If you find a word that has at least five letters, plus “U,” it’s a Monday word. They’re ubiquitous. These decisions have real-life impact, even if it’s invisible to most people. Imagine the embarrassment at all those networking events in the animal kingdom. “I’m a Madagascar flying orbital squirrel. What kind are you?” “Gray.” Frankly, it’s a wonder that some animals get any dates at all. You wanna know a word that got its name on a Tuesday? Buzz. Great word. Easy to spell. Sounds like its meaning. Yeah, it has a “U” in it, but it’s less than six letters, like hum, which should really be humm, but why quibble with near perfection? The worst offenders are the college interns, all those library science majors who want to make an impression by inventing creative spellings. They’re the eager beavers who come up with all those words that have extra letters, like the silent “H” in khaki and rhyme and ghost and gherkin and rhubarb. Honestly, it’s exhausting. At least we’ve escaped the Brits’ insufferable insistence on adding extraneous letters to colour, humour, flavour, and labour. If you ever wondered about the decline of the British Empire, look no further. In the States, we fixed all those pretentious spellings and productivity soared, while the Brits got Spotted Dick and Brexit. That doesn’t mean we get off without at least a slap on the rist in the States. While we don’t have a Royal Etymologist to screw things up, we do quite nicely with our free-market coinage. The Big Apple, Motor City, Big Easy, and Lost Wages are all Tuesday words. On Friday at 3:30 p.m., we got Frisco, Big D and Chitown. It’s the same situation with euphemisms, which are quaint inventions that let us call someone a *$%^*)*&%$# without actually needing to say *$%^*)*&%$#. During the middle of the week, we get terms like downsizing, vertically challenged and negative earnings, but on Fridays they don’t even bother to think about it before heading to the tavern. “Just call this the A-word. This will be the J-word. That’s the Z-word. Enough of this!! It’s five o’clock somewhere.” How can we repair some of the damage that’s already been done and avoid future catastrophes? As always, I am looking to Millennials to bail us out. Yes, I’m talking about the same people who gave us emojis, but hear me out on this. Besides adding a picture of poop to all their texts and abbreviating everything nmhotwopi*, Millennials also have a powerful disregard for traditional spelling. I estimate it will be less than three years before tomorrow is tmoro and neighbor is nabr and we’re all texting the deets to our frenz. All the abbreviations will reduce our need for paper, ink, data farms, and electricity. Global warming will reverse itself and the shorter words and sentences will free up an extra hour or two each day for sharing fraudulent memes. Clearly, it’s time for the Millennials to take charge of this whole wordy thing and for the Feds to “rightsize” the Etymology Department. It’s too late for the platypus, of course, but perhaps there is still hope for tmoro’s anmls. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to pour myself a brown and chow down on some purples. All this writing can drain my taupe. Wasn’t it clever of us to explain the asterisked item (nmhotwopi*= no matter how obscure the word or phrase is) in the same place where we beg you to subscribe? Don’t you think this kind of ingenuity deserves a click on this link and signing up for our weekly rants? Uh huh.
3 Comments
The true test of friendship, a double standard for sympathy, and our gassy Founding Fathers are all featured in this week’s observations, written specifically for you…
Did I mention flatulence? There was a time when you could put yourself through college by selling subscriptions door to door, but those days are long gone. Today, even the most valuable of subscriptions can be obtained online, such as the absolutely free portal presented by this link. No, the link just before this sentence. If you’re clicking here, you’ve gone too far. Now that we’ve avoided a visit from the Census Bureau’s enforcers, let’s consider the questions our government should be asking, but isn’t, about life in the USA. As you’ll recall from last week’s musings, Jill and I received an invitation to take part in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an hours-long dive into the most intimate details of our lives. To be more accurate, “invitation” is a euphemism. In fact, the materials came with a warning that we could be liable for penalties if we didn’t respond and they might be forced to send people to our condo to, um, obtain the responses they needed. So we complied with their “request,” answering questions about whether we have indoor plumbing, the age of our building, whether we had gotten married or divorced in the past year, and how we pay for our internet service. The survey covered a wide swath of basic information that might prove useful for government spending decisions, but none of it is going to answer the most pressing questions facing us as a nation. Never fear, dear readers. The public spirited team at dadwrites will right that wrong today by presenting the questions America needs to answer, a list that should be added immediately to the 2020 Census. Our inquiring minds want to know: 1. Did you look in the mirror before you decided to leave the house like that? 2. Ginger or Mary Ann? 3. What percentage of your income is derived from delivering other people’s food, clothes, or vaping supplies? 4. How many hours did you spend working in an office last week? a. How much of that time did you spend on Instagram, Fortnite or Googling your ex? b. How many hours did it take to fill in your March Madness brackets? 5. How many hours did you spend working outside your office last week? a. Were you at home or at Starbucks? b. Did you actually get anything done? c. Were you still in your jammies? 6. Have you ever snorted Tide pods or condoms or dumped a bucket of ice on yourself? a. If yes, did you do this as part of a charity challenge or just because it sounded like a fun idea? b. Did you post a video online? (No need to respond. We know you did.) 7. How many trips did you take last week in an Uber, Lyft or other ride-share vehicle? a. For how many of those trips were you the driver? b. Could you find any of the locations without GPS? 8. Do you have any money saved for retirement? a. If so, how many days do you expect it to last? b. Do your adult children have a spare bedroom that you can use? c. Are your adult children currently living in your spare bedroom? 9. Did you ever finish reading that Stephen Hawking book about time? a. Did you actually understand it? b. Really? 10. Have you ever changed somebody’s mind on Facebook? 11. Has anyone ever changed your mind on Facebook? 12. Couldn’t you be doing something better with your time? 13. In the past year, have you suffered irreparable harm from: a. Asbestos? b. Uninsured motorists? c. Hernia mesh? d. Ads from law firms? 14. In the past month, have you: a. Taken an online quiz to find out which Disney princess you are? b. Suddenly realized the quiz was just a ruse to collect more personal information for advertisers? c. Retaken the quiz to get a better princess? 15. In the past week, have you: a. Spent more time complaining about traffic than you actually spent in it? b. Reposted a meme you knew to be false, because you agreed with the politics? c. Stolen Marla’s lunch from the office refrigerator? i. If yes, did you also take Edgar’s Snapple? ii. You fiend!! 16. In the past hour, have you: a. Checked your phone more than 30 times? b. Posted two or more story updates? c. Ordered some Thai for lunch? 17. Would you like to avoid future surveys by just giving us permission to get whatever information we want from Google? What other questions should we add to our list? If you had the opportunity to ask whatever you wanted and the authority to require an answer of every person in this country, what would you want to know? Add your questions to our comments section and we’ll all be much wiser for your contribution. Just remember to keep it civil and that this site is a politics-free zone. The most important question for everyone in America is, “Why haven’t you subscribed to dadwrites.com yet?” Answer that question with a resounding, “Yes, I am a subscriber,” by clicking this link and signing up. This might be the best decision you make this week, although it would be pretty sad if that really turned out to be the case. Every few days, the Commerce Department threatens to send armed thugs to my apartment to torture me, unless I give in to their demands for my most intimate secrets. Okay, they didn’t say “armed thugs” exactly, but you know how those jackbooted government agents get, um, overly enthusiastic in their missions. It will all start out nice and friendly, but then I’ll hesitate just a bit too long when they ask about my outhouse and…bam. In the latest installment of our charmed lives, the Census Bureau selected Jill and me to take part in the American Community Survey, a seriously intrusive census given only to the elitest of the elite. Technically, it is our apartment that is the real honoree and we are just “the resident of,” but why quibble when the fickle finger beckons you to determine the future of the nation? While the decennial census gets all the hype, the people who fill out the ACS are the real power brokers in the US of A. The regular census next year will ask a few basic questions, but the ACS does all the heavy lifting, including:
The questions kept coming for more than a dozen pages, although my confidence in the entire process took a nosedive at question four, where they asked me for both my date of birth and my age. If they cannot figure out my age from my birth date, the Census Bureau needs a more powerful computer, or a pocket calculator. Still, we trudged on, describing our condo fees and our internet service and whether we had gotten married or divorced, or both, in the past twelve months. As we worked our way through the labrynthe, though, the reasoning behind the questions got curiouser and curiouser. Why do they bother to ask if we have indoor plumbing when they already know that 99.5% of households are so equipped? Why do they ask if we can both make and receive a phone call in our apartment? Perhaps there are phones that only receive calls but cannot make them, or vice versa. Why do they ask about babies born to women aged 15-50, but ignore births to females outside that range? By the time we finished this hours-long exercise, I couldn’t help but think there’s a better way to collect this information. Perhaps, for example, they might buy all of it (and more!!!!) from Facebook or Google—if only they could convince those companies to make our private info available to outsiders. Worse, I can’t believe these are the most meaningful questions for identifying status and trends across the nation. Many questions seemed to be continuations of past inquiries, but newer shifts appear to be unaddressed. For example, the survey includes a ton of questions about commuting, including the time people leave for work, how many people are in the vehicle and how long the commute takes, but they don’t ask about ride-share usage or Divvy bikes or whether people have changed jobs or moved in order to reduce their commuting time. Similarly, we’re bombarded by various stories about the growth and size of the gig economy, but the ACS doesn’t delve into that topic. I didn’t find, for example, a question about whether I have more than one job. Ditto for the kind of business where I work. While we live in a service economy, the boxes for “type of business” include manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade and “other.” I can’t help but wonder if 70% of us aren’t in the “other” box. Jill and I trudged through the pages, but I became increasingly convinced that the project included too many vague questions and too much guesswork to be definitive. As I struggled to recall whether I worked for money last month or the month before, a visit from those armed thugs started looking better and better. Still, we persevered and completed the assignment, because that’s what true patriotic Americans do. And, on the upside, this whole process made our income tax forms look much simpler than they did before. Even better, my self-esteem grew dramatically as I realized I could come up with a more relevant series of questions than all the people at the Census Bureau. Stay tuned for a preview in next week’s post. All of America is on tenterhooks, wondering “What Would Dadwrites Ask?” if we were running the Census Bureau. Be sure to receive your update, along with all our incredibly wise and beneficent screeds, by subscribing to dadwrites.com. Just click HERE (No, not here. Back there.) |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
January 2024
Categories
All
|