My grammar people are surely trembling with me: To say something is the “exact same” is to be redundant. We dislike that. I thought it was a new phenomenon, but here is a 10-year-old article from the Los Angeles Times. In our day, people seem short of better references and are prone to announcing that one thing or event is the same as another. Fear ensues. For most situations, “similar” is probably adequate anyway, but no. We are on the edge of sure destruction that is the exact same thing which happened in____ when _____ took over in _____. Furthermore, people considered experts can say what they want because they are experts, which seems logical but is actually circular. Reasonable people can see the same events differently.
Next, I will just say that I don’t think anyone can say what “will” happen, one way or the other. The image for our discourse is “a circus of puffins.” In this clip, two of them go about clacking their bills for the entire time. If the circus allusion has to do with their playfulness, so be it. (Learning event for the day: You know that we have a “gaggle of geese.” Or a “murder of crows.” The first printed source for this long tradition was an appendix in The Book of St Albans, written by Juliana Berners, a 15th-century Benedictine prioress from England. The purpose, besides compiling what had been written before, was to give hunters a vocabulary that they might use to set themselves apart as knowledgeable, even though the original intent was humorous. There are 164 collective nouns in the collection.”
[As long as we’re on language, and since I have been rebellious at being called a “flautist” when a “flutist” is the older, easier term, let’s look at the list of animal names here. Some time ago, I learned that a male dog is simply a “dog.” You probably know lots of other, more exotic ones beyond calf-cow-bull. Why a female gerbil is a “doe” I don’t know. The most interesting that I found today was for a young falcon, “eyas.” (Falcon is the female, tercel the male.) Here from Merriam-Webster: “In the 15th century, Middle English speakers made an incorrect assumption about the word neias, which comes from the Anglo-French niais (“fresh from the nest”). “A neias” sounded like “an eias” to their ears, so the word lost that initial “n,” eventually becoming “eyas.” (There are other words in English that were created in this same fashion; for example, “an apron” used to be “a napron.”)” Yes, “napron” was a kind of napkin.]
Getting closer to the point, I promise. On Saturday evening, I went to a talk by Steven T. Collis. He’s a national expert on the First Amendment, specifically religion. I’d met him and even interviewed him twice before. Here is one article. His topic was very narrow: the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The September 2000 text is here. It’s five pages, so you have to scroll twice which I’m sure you’ll (probably not) do. An interesting talk, but his opening was especially noteworthy. He told two stories.
When Steve was a youngster, and the style was spiked hair, he went into the bathroom and really layered on what he thought was mousse. Pleased with the result, he showed his mom who asked what he used. When she saw it, she immediately rushed his head under water to rinse off the “mousse” which was actually her Nair. He spent some of the summer with his hair falling out. (And I remember that pretty awful smell. Yes, it’s still sold.)
The Collises and their children live in Austin where the UT Law School is, and they bought a house with a pool. Everyone was working in the yard one April when the adults thought a quick kid-free lunch might be nice. The 12-year-old son strolled into the garage with his swimsuit on, a towel on one shoulder, and a long extension cord for the air pump on the other. He said, “You know that floaty that’s always losing air? I thought I’d take the pump out in the pool and just fill it up when it got low.” The parents did not, in fact, leave for lunch.
His point—and what I needed to hear—is that people often think they know what they’re doing or talking about when they really don’t. He didn’t give other examples, but I’m sure doctors who hear Google diagnoses daily or teachers who read AI-generated papers daily could share some. I can be guilty of this. What happens when I start “slapping” my beak around is that offense can occur. Opinions formed on too little data can be wrong. There can be different ways of looking at something, but you really need to know what you’re talking about first. I have no business trying to discuss the constitutionality of a particular legislative bill, my first and only example today. Perhaps you will have others.
Someone will tell me if I mess up again, which I probably will. Oh, Steve also has an MFA in creative writing and has published novels. So, there’s that, but I do know my grammar. If not how to pronounce “debacle” until 2022.
