Pet peeves

One pet peeve of mine is the expression “one of the two or three most.” That’s what you say when you want to sound more specific than “one of the most,” but without being specific specific!  When I see the expression “one of the most” I assume it’s in the top three anyway, rather than fourth or fifth.

Another one is the American expression “left-liberal.” While “the conservative right” is redundant, “the liberal left” is an oxymoron.

Another is the misuse of the adverb “literally.” It’s supposed to mean, “This sounds like hyperbole, but it’s straightforward.” But people add it to hyperbole just to give it emphasis, as in “Kim Kardashian was literally drowning in silk!” No, she wasn’t.

I also dislike redundancy.  Some years back the Chile correspondent for The New York Times insisted that the nation before Pinochet seized power was “a backward banana republic.”  Not only is this a wrongheaded analysis—Chile before 1973 was one of Latin America’s more liberal, stable societies—it’s redundant! (How can a banana republic not be backward?) This is a case of rhetorical redundancy, better suited to The New York Post.

I found another example in The New Yorker.  That magazine used to have high standards, but it slipped badly after Tina Brown took over as editor.  I remember one article mentioning that a presidential candidate was “soundly thumped.” Can you be thumped unsoundly?  This is the sort of redundancy that the old magazine would have caught!  But it’s more a case of “trying too hard” redundancy.

Other pet peeves of mine are movie cliches.  Like when a character learns important information by eavesdropping from the other side of a closed window. (Have you ever tried to listen to a conversation through a pane of glass?  Near-impossible!) Or when one character starts saying “Let me explain…” but the other character cuts him off with “I’m not listening!”  In real life you should just launch into your explanation right away and not give anyone the chance to refuse to listen….  And of course there’s the young woman who’s being pressured into doing something she doesn’t want to do (usually involving sex), but she’s too weak to say no!

I hate TV cliches even more.  Like “the forgotten breakup.” Two characters breaking up can be a nice dramatic way to end an individual episode.  But the show’s structure may require them to stay together, and reconciliation is a lot harder to write.  So what the writers do is wait a couple of episodes and then have the two of them back together with no explanation!  In other words, they forget that there’s been a breakup… (I’ve seen that one in even the best shows.) Or an episode where one character has a promising opportunity that’ll mean leaving town and no longer being part of the group.  Unless the character’s really being written out, however, he’ll end up staying after all, often for reasons that aren’t very convincing.  Another is one is having a character behave like a bigger jerk than he usually is, to the point of being out of character, all so he can suffer comeuppance later on…

I also dislike movies and TV shows where the foreign dialogue isn’t subtitled and you have to try to guess what they’re saying!  I liked the original miniseries of Shogun back in 1980, but I would have liked it more with subtitles for all the Japanese talk.  Unfortunately, movie studios and TV networks assume that the mass audience hate to read more than they hate confusion…

And I can’t omit micromanagers from any list of my pet peeves!  But I mustn’t continue all day.

Life in the fast lane

 Life in the Fast Lane

Life in the fast lane is something I know little about.  I was going to write about the Kardashian family, whose “reality TV” show—I’d rather call it “unreality TV”—is titled Keeping up With the Kardashians, with the implication that they live life in the fast lane.  But I haven’t actually watched the show, so I can only talk about what I’ve heard.

The Kardashians reflect the success of relentless, shameless self-promotion in the age of inattentiveness. (Like fellow reality TV star Donald Trump…) I saw this photo of the family blowing kisses on the red carpet once, and what got to me isn’t that they don’t know if they look ridiculous, it’s that they presumably don’t care if they do!

Some people particularly despise the Kardashian mother Kris Jenner:  they feel that she’s pimped her daughters! (She reportedly suggested that Kim redo her notorious sex tape with better lighting.) But they say she has a serious drinking problem, so we shouldn’t envy her.  When you have a problem like that, good fortune in other respects may not count for much.

The thing about the Kardashians is, if you say anything about them, you’re just encouraging them…

So I’d rather talk about the 20th century, which arguably started in 1914 with the Great War, and ended in 2020 with the Covid epidemic.  Remember Charles Dickens’ opening passage in A Tale of Two Cities? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This is what I’d say about the 20th century:

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

It was the age of crimes against humanity; it was the age of human rights.  

It was the age of ecological disasters; it was the age of environmentalism.  

It was the age of world wars; it was the age of peacekeeping.  

It was the age of epidemics; it was the age of vaccination.  

It was the age of the refugee; it was the age of the immigrant.

It was the age of communism; it was the age of social democracy.  

It was the age of overpopulation; it was the age of birth control.  

It was the age of corporations; it was the age of trade unions.  

It was the age of Ronald Reagan; it was the age of Jimmy Carter.  

It was the age of sexism; it was the age of women’s rights.  

It was the age of movies and TV; it was the age of mass literacy.  

It was the age of superpowers; it was the age of newly independent nations.  

It was the age of Pius XII; it was the age of John XXIII.  

It was the age of homophobia; it was the age of gay rights.  

It was the age of oppression; it was the age of liberation.  It was the age of racism; it was the age of civil rights.  

It was the age of the SUV; it was the age of the ambulance.  

It was the age of conformism; it was the age of individualism.  

It was the age of preventive detention; it was the age of civil liberties.  

It was the age of fear; it was the age of hope.

It was the Age of the Fast Lane.