-
You’ve Been Infiltrated by The Right
September 21, 2022
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. -
Crutch phrases have a tendency to take over your vernacular like weeds in a garden, when you don’t take the time daily to grab them by the roots and remove them from interfering with the fruits of your labor.
Just as a farmer, or gardener would protect its crops for the good of the final product, communicators, broadcasters, jocks and podcasters should be protecting their habits of speech in the same manner.
- (the vernacular)
the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region:
"he wrote in the vernacular to reach a larger audience"
synonyms:
everyday language · spoken language · colloquial speech
ver·nac·u·lar
[vərˈnakyələr]
NOUNTen years ago, the phrase ‘just saying,’ had reached critical mass -- being used by everyone from comedians to major market broadcast talents to put an exclamation mark at the end of a point they were attempting to make. The problem with that phrase is it was an easy way out of any discussion, break or point, as opposed to finding the most effective way out, just saying.
Terms like ‘just saying,’ typically aren’t adding to our bad habits of speech, but simply are replacing a more obvious one, as in this case, the same statements that were ending with Just Saying, could have easily ended with a pause, followed by…”but anyways…”
Getting a C+ on a report card is not ‘awesome,’ but you wouldn’t know it by hearing the discussion in many homes in many places throughout our still great land. “Johnny, a C+, that’s awesome!”
Awesome was once a word describing a position of tremendous power, one that should have created in our soul’s fear and trembling. Awesome was once used exclusively by Born Again Christians to describe the awe and insurmountable greatness of a God that would bestow such a great love upon mankind that when we deserved to be snuffed out because of our actions, he’d instead show us mercy by not inflicting the pains we’d so deserved by our actions.
Half Shells From Hell
But soon, we were infiltrated by turtles who would do heroic things while fueling their bodies with DiGiorno’s Rising Crust pizzas, and while one could argue that a turtle eating pizza is, in fact, awesome, we can start to see how using the word, habitually out of context can create a future of using it in a way it was never intended.
- extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear:
"the awesome power of the atomic bomb"
awe·some
[ˈôsəm]
ADJECTIVEAnd now comes the most horrific habit of speech to infiltrate your daily dialogue since the word ain’t attempted to be accepted in the dictionary as a real word, and that is the word, right, but always used as an open-ended question even though it’s not really a question but just a lazy ‘just saying’ type of attempt to end a statement without doing the real work to explain a point, right??
The word ‘right’ has been used in sales techniques since the beginning of time, but most notably by Encyclopedia salesmen knocking on doors in the early 1970’s. And as they procreated and bore more salesmen, those children of the devil would take jobs hawking products as elusive as timeshare or graveyard plots, using a manipulative practice to get the unsuspecting, but now hypnotized customer to bob their heads yes, and that practice was a simple suggestive word.
To say right with a question mark at the end of a sentence is to draw the person you’re dialoguing with into a place of belonging, or a place where they don’t feel stupid, if they don’t answer yes after it. “Let’s say you die tomorrow and your kids who haven’t learned how to wipe themselves yet are left to plan your funeral. You’d want this process to be as easy on them as possible, right??”
And just like that you are now the proud owner of two plots in a cemetery somewhere you hope your kids will find in a filing cabinet after the cement truck changes everything in a millisecond, right?
Know Your Rights
Listen with a critical ear now to interviews on podcasts, radio and TV during sports broadcasts, or pre-game shows or talk shows. Listen to how this ONE word has found its way into the speech of society and then, get even more critical to begin hearing it in your own daily discussions.
Just like high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oils had infiltrated your foods without your knowledge, the word ‘right,’ has taken over like Bermuda grass in your lawn even though you hadn’t planted it there.
The first steps to healthier dialogue, which you have a right to, are awareness and then admission. From there, identify your rights, isolate your rights and lastly and most importantly, stop exercising your rights, especially in public where everyone will know how easily influenced you are. You don’t want that kind of humiliation, right?
- (the vernacular)
-
-