Quick! What does “peruse” mean? I’ve always thought it meant to skim, to read over quickly. While looking up another word, I came across peruse in the “American Heritage Dictionary,” which says most language experts maintain that to peruse something is to read it closely.
What does “take out” mean? You can take out a girl on a date, and, if things go well, you can take out a marriage license and on your honeymoon, if things don’t go all that well, you can take out your frustrations by pounding your head against the wall.
I heard a CBS News correspondent say take out at least twice when talking about the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen. Should reporters get caught up in slang or military jargon? Without getting into the legality or morality of the action taken by the U.S. Government against one of its citizens, shouldn’t reporters keep it simple and play it straight down the middle? Al-Awlaki was killed. The U.S. Military may like to describe it as a take out, but that strikes me as perhaps sanitizing what we really did – we killed him.
The Pentagon keeps records on KIAs, the number of service personnel Killed In Action. They don’t, as far as I know, have a separate list for TOIAs, Taken Out In Action. Killed is a harsh word, and I think it’s best if reporters don’t soften it, for whatever reason, into something else.
I’ve seen or heard a lot of strange language in the past week. There’s a shop near where I live with a sign in the window advertising “ear candling.” I had never heard of that and neither had Irene, the house expert on all things linguistic, so I went to dictionary.com. Sure enough it has to do with letting someone stick a candle in your ear. The end shoved into the ear isn’t lit, the other end is. This apparently is how some folks try to get rid of ear wax. Is there a sudden shortage of paper clips or Q-tips? That’s what I’ve used for years when it was time for my own version of ear candling.
At lunch this week a man at the bar with two other men kept telling a story and about every 30 seconds threw in, “to make a long story short.” He was, in fact, doing just the opposite, making a short (and not very interesting story) long.
As someone who had prostate cancer, I’m usually interested in anything I hear or read about it. Usually. In the locker room at the swimming pool, one regular blamed President Barack Obama for a government panel’s recommendation that healthy men don’t really need to have routine P.S.A. tests. He said Obama wanted to stop Medicare from paying for all sorts of things. I don’t know this guy nor was he talking to me, but I thought his allegation and the language he was using was so ridiculous that I had to speak up.
“Obama had nothing to do with that,” I said.
He didn’t get knocked off course but kept going on about the recommendation and how Obama’s trying to take medical coverage away from everyone he can. He did add a zinger apparently aimed at me. “Those who voted for Obama deserve what they get.”
When I was a kid, BO meant body odor. These days it seems to mean blame Obama. Some people blame him for almost everything. It’s his fault that:
The Yankees got knocked out of the first playoff round.
The Red Sox didn’t even make the playoffs because some of them were more interested in drinking and playing video games than baseball.
Larry and Irene McCoy got a parking ticket a few weeks ago outside the restaurant where the guy at the bar was making a short story long.
The check engine light on our Volvo goes on one day and then off the next. (It must have been programmed by a liberal Democrat or otherwise it wouldn’t take so long to make up its mind what it wants to do.)
And a new word was spotted this week - “midiam.” The store where I go every morning to buy a copy of Newsday and a lottery ticket also sells coffee. I had never noticed until the other day that a sign by the coffee machine offers a choice of small, midiam or large. I buy my coffee at a deli around the corner, but one of these days I might order a midiam just for the fun of saying it.
I’m obviously getting old. There was a time when I would have had harsh views about that sign and the person who wrote it, maybe even gone overboard and bellowed that they both should be taken out. Now, I’m such a social marshmallow I’m thinking of having a midiam coffee and chatting up the young man who may have written the sign.
(Posted October 14, 2011)
After I posted this, a friend in New Orleans said his coffee shop sells "bagel's." A friend in Australia suggested that I should have referred to myself as a "social marsh-mellow."