Reading passionate music reviews by my Facebook friends for and against Bad Bunny’s performance at halftime at the Super Bowl, I felt left out—and in danger of being shut out.
Even with all the pre-game controversy, and notwithstanding my predisposition to side with the guy the Trumpers are mad about, I found myself unable to conjure a reaction to the show itself, any stronger than the bland, heart-healthy turkey chili I was slurping. I sat gaping, half dumbstruck and half daydreaming, at the on-screen spectacle, in just the way I used to as a kid, watching the elaborate numbers on The Donnie & Marie Show. I’m just not a big-production kind of guy, I’m afraid.
I know we’re all pissed off all the time, but do we ever (ever ever ever ever ever) weary of the sound of our voices speaking truth to power? And will any American ever come to the realization that Dylan Thomas did one night, droning on in his cups at the Whitehorse Tavern. “Someone is boring me,” he interrupted himself. “I think it’s me.”
Speaking of which, here’s a piece I published here in 2020, on the cultural obsolescence of the word “opinionated.” —DM
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Words come into popular usage, words go out. I try to keep the old ones around, because I am a hoarder. I still have palavers with my staff, and I tell my daughter it’s cold out, she should wear pantaloons. And that’s only two of the P words.
Usually we lose words and expressions when their cultural relevance fades, due to changes in circumstances. When someone drops a football, we don’t call them “butterfingers” anymore, because our home lives don’t involve a lot of handling of pans with butter-slathered hands.
Our shriveled agrarian roots have relegated expressions like “make hay while the sun shines” into legit head-scratchers for anyone under sixty.
And our long-forgotten common maritime experience washes the etymology and relevance away from phrases like, “We’re not having layoffs now, but I see them in the offing.” (The “offing,” of course, being the portion of the sea visible from shore, in which slowly approaching boats could sometimes be seen for days.)
But other times, words become irrelevant because what they describe is so ubiquitous that the words are no longer necessary.
I was once being squired around Phoenix, Arizona, by a young native of the place. Gazing out the car window, I asked her why the whole town seems to be a series of strip malls. She asked me, “What is a strip mall?”
Similarly, have you noticed, you don’t often hear anyone call anyone “opinionated,” anymore.
Or, for that matter, a “boor.”
