That Said

What's with all the unnecessary gibberish syllables people are increasingly attaching to their utterances? For example the phrase "that said," after making some point. First of all, this is obvious if the listener/reader has been paying attention at all. Second, it usually suggests a prelude to presenting another perspective, which could more meaningfully be conveyed with the word "however" or meaningfully and briefly with "but."

Or how about "It is what it is"? Gee! Really?

How does "in and of itself" differ from "in itself"?

Some forms of "to be able to" seem increasingly to replace "can" or "could." Or to appear for no reason at all, as in "When Gallileo looked through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter and at the motions of the other planets, he was able to conclude that Copernicus was right about the turn of the earth." This could more economically be put like this: ". . . he concluded that . . . ."

In his essay "Politics and the English Language" Orwell called these "verbal false limbs" and warned that exposure to blather like these (and some other forms - see his essay) threatens collectively to make our minds lazy. This is already happening.

These are just a few examples. Here are some more.

Kurt Vonnegut

From Armageddon in Retrospect:

We don't fear death, and neither should you. You know what Socrates said about death, in Greek. of course? "Death is just one more night."

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which would never have given us A-bombs.

I love science, not only because it has given us the means to trash the planet, and I don't like it here. It has found the answer to one of the biggest questions: How did the Universe begin, and how did we and all the other animals get the wonderful bodies we have, with eyes and brains and kidneys and so on?

OK. So Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once. Can you imagine that? You can't, because there isn't even nothing to imagine.

But then there was this great big BANG! And that's where all this crap came from.

This is a blast

I was kind of like the inciter guy in this short after I survived brain surgery. I think people at work thought I was stealing stuff.