But it's only words… they're just fucking words

I have interesting taste in music. I’ll listen to my Pandora work, and my boss lovingly refers to my station as ‘guy’ music. Pandora also thinks I’m a guy, because I get advertisements for Trojan Magnums, hot local females in the Silver Spring area and whiskey. I’m not saying these are all things girls don’t like, but they are typically more related to males. So what if my station is heavy with Nirvana, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Blink 182and the Rolling Stones—it’s my station! I just consider myself to have supreme taste in music, and this often makes me popular at karaoke nights with other males.

I’ve been getting into the Foo Fighters lately after their release of Walk. I asked my sister about her thoughts on the Foo Fighters and she commented via IM “good, but fairly repetitive. Re: THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST OF YOU”. She does have a point. The Foo Fighters do like to shout their point until it would normally give you a migraine but then you remember how awesome Dave Grohl is. I even hooked up with a guy some months ago who looked like Dave Grohl and I felt like Kate Hudson’s character from Almost Famous. Minus the overdose and all that. Oh, spoiler alert.

true story--jesus stole dave grohl's look.

The comment of my guy music also came on the same day of another language discovery. I referred to a situation as ‘awkward’ at work, and then I realized, no, it wasn’t awkward. It was inconvenient, it was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t fully awkward. I realized that my generation overuses the word ‘awkward’, as well as ‘sketchy’ and ‘random’. I think at this point, they can be used almost interchangeably, especially if you’re describing the awkward act of picking up randoms at the sketchy Quarry House Tavern.

Think about it—how often have you referred to an area as a ‘sketchy neighborhood’, filled with ‘random people’, and some homeless guy stared you down and it became ‘awkward’? We use these words daily and so often, that they’ve lost their power. If everything was as awkward as we said it was, I’d probably be agoraphobic out of the shame my actions would inevitably bring me. I’d probably carry a handgun for all the sketchy areas of Silver Spring I encounter, and believe me, it’s a lot.

I used to want to be an etymologist when I was in college and work for the Oxford English Dictionary (not to be confused with my desire to study bugs as an entomologist or my self-proclaimed role as an Entenmannsologist, one who studies overpriced coffee cake and donughtnuts).  I even wrote a 4 page paper my senior year tracing the etymology of the word ‘hook-up’—spoiler alert: it didn’t mean casual sexual activity in our grandparents time the way it does now.

Like most people who had hopes and dreams, I got jaded by the state of the world and how awful people are. Mostly, I saw how no one cares about words. Why use one word when there is a catch-all that will do? Why say someone is depraved when saying 'they really suck' will do just fine. I’m angry at how lazy our dialogue is. Our dictionary has more words than almost any other volume but we use a fraction of them with our lazy tongues and poorly informed minds. I shudder when I remember Syme’s quote from the book 1984, “Beautiful thing, the destruction of words”. Their shrinking Newspeak dictionary is a point of pride in the novel, but like everything Orwell pens, it is a chilling prediction of the inevitable in reality.

Larger words seemed only pressing in times of SATs and term papers. Now, as long as the crux of your point is understood, then all is acceptable. And that’s why I can’t study words anymore; they are a dying breed. For goodness sake, Scrabble in the UK changed their rules to accept proper nouns in game play. Are there not enough words in the regular Scrabble dictionary for people to use? Have we really forgotten our verbs so much that we can start playing words like Panera? For shame!

I am challenging all of you to take a pledge of verbosity. Use a new word instead of taking a shortcut. You’ll sound more erudite and strangers are more likely to take you seriously because they probably won’t comprehend what you’ve told them. You might even become more credible than Salmon Rushdie. Don’t let Dave Grohl and his sexy goatee fool you—they’re more than just fucking words. They are the true essence of your thoughts and feelings. If you allow them to become trite and hackneyed, then you become as dull as the dictionary gathering dust in your library. You’re all smart people, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog. Next time I see you, I want to be dazzled with your lexicon!

And just for the record, I’m not advocating randoms from the Quarry House. That never, ever, results in a good ending.