Pronoun Police

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

― John Fowles

Goodly readers on occasion complain that my old-school use of pronouns and impatience with pronouns of choice reveal insensitivity and bias.

Under the hot lights of these pronoun police, I'll admit, I'd probably cop a plea.

But for the moment suffice it to say my one true bias is a bias for brevity.

Brevity speeds communication; and life's too short to stuff a mushroom.

But, incisive as it is, brevity almost always ruffles feathers. 

By fostering favoritism, brevity can't help but trigger the aggrieved.

• Men at work. 
• Boys will be boys. 
• Drama queen.
• All men are created equal.

We could easily enough scrub favoritism from these phrases, but what value would we really add?

• Proletariats laboring up ahead.
• Youths will behave as they frequently do.
• Histrionic person.
• All human beings either are created equal or turn out that way due to randomized instances of syngamy.

I wish I could be as cheery about our current obsession with wokish circumlocution as the linguist John McWhorter, who recently applauded this sentence:

• The boy wants to see a picture of herself.

"There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet," he wrote in The New York Times. "They get through it."

And if they don't, the pronoun police will be there to assist.

My Motto for 2022

People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Easy does it" is a core principle of the recovery movement. 

It's also my motto for the new year.

It means, according to Alchoholics Anonymous, that whenever you’re flustered, slow down and chill; good ideas will emerge in their own time.

The author of Alcoholics Anonymous borrowed the slogan from the Oxford Group, a Christian fellowship that owed much to Jesus' advice in the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself."

Jesus' advice was also central to the teachings of Emmet Fox, a Depression-era leader of the New Thought Movement and an AA guru. Fox interpreted Jesus' advice as follows:

"Try not to be tense or hurried. 

"If you try to unlock a door hurriedly, the key is apt to stick, whereas, if you do it slowly, it seldom does. 

"If the key sticks, stop pressing. To push hard with will power can only jam the lock completely.

"So it is with mental working. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength."

In other words, easy does it.

Happy New Year!

You've Got Omicron!

Symptomatic dolts are stampeding Atlanta's hospitals and Covid-19 testing sites, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. 

According to local healthcare workers, 94% are unvaccinated. 

Georgia's governor has called in the National Guard to restore order.

Too bad the Guard can't restore sanity.

These chowderheads have had nine months and more to get their shots, but haven't.

And now they're panicky.

A former HHS employee has told me that to expect all Americans to become vaccinated is unrealistic.

Through the entire history of medicine, at best 85% of the population accepts the need to be vaccinated and complies.

A steady 15% of the population remains vaccine-resistant.

This figure corresponds precisely to the portion of Americans classified as "idiots, imbeciles and morons" by the medical establishment.

Coincidence?

No way. 

So I guess we shouldn't judge the people lining up for tests in Atlanta.

They can't help it.

They're buffoons.

Love, Work and Bullshit

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanity.

— Sigmund Freud

In 2017, I predicted the "gig economy" would soon enforce downshifting and make a universal guaranteed income mandatory.

But Mother Nature had other plans. 

She used a pandemic to enforce downshifting and PPP to guarantee income.

The pandemic has also unpredictably spurred a popular uprising known as the Antiwork Movement. 

Marxist in nature, the Antiwork Movement calls for an end to slavish, fear-based jobs in favor of "idling" and finds voice within industries like high tech, hospitality, and healthcare—the same sectors leading the Great Resignation.

Whether Covid-disruption or the Antiwork Movement have lasting traction is anyone's guess. 

My money says they don't. 

Covid will soon morph into a common cold, and there will remain plenty of workers eager to step into jobs abandoned by "idlers" (we call those eager beavers "immigrants").

What Covid and the Antiwork Movement have done is cast a bright light on "bullshit jobs." 

Bullshit jobs are those make-work occupations first described in 2013 by anthropologist David Graeber: stupid jobs such as concierge, bailiff, closet organizer, medical coder, tax attorney, Instagram marketer, and human resources executive; demeaning jobs so pointless they represent, in Graber's words, a "scar across our collective soul."

As 2022 progresses, I predict, we will see Covid-19 and the Antiwork Movement run out of steam and be replaced by an Antibullshit Movement.

We'll see more and more workers move from meaningless, dead-end jobs into jobs that combine Freud's cornerstones, work and love. Jobs like school teaching, woodworking, art conservation, investigative journalism, firefighting, farming, fundraising, truck driving, and hospice working.

And we'll see fewer and fewer workers becoming dog washers, pizza deliverymen, telemarketers, community organizers, diversity trainers, celebrity chefs, and professional shoppers.

Idling, too, will fall from grace.

After all, there's no money in it.

Grandpa Niall

People who mess with me should beware: they're their messing with a royal.

My 23andMe test shows I'm directly descended from a High King of Ireland, Niall Noigiallach—best known to the ages as Niall of the Nine Hostages.

Niall had a lot of kids, including 14 sons. Geneticists today estimate that a full 8% of the world's Irishmen and 2% of the Irishmen from Greater New York carry his genetic signature. 

The latter include the likes of Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly, and me.

Operating from atop the Hill of Tara, Niall ruled from 445 to 453 CE. His kingdom encompassed nine vast provinces in Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, and France. Niall earned his nickname from a fondness for kidnapping members of opposing royal families, the most famous of whom was the wealthy Englishman who'd later become Saint Patrick.

Abandoned by his queenly mother, Niall was raised by a poet, who saw in this son of a king future greatness. 

When the young Niall on a dare kissed a witch in the forest, legend has it, she granted him the High Kingship of Ireland, and promised his clan would rule for 26 generations.

As it turned out, the witch was right on target: Niall's dynasty lasted 500 years.

Niall was a badass, pure and simple; so bad, he beat back not only the the Saxons, Britons and Franks, but the Roman legions.

But, bad as he was, he couldn't escape death. Niall was killed in France by an archer, near the River Loire. His troops brought his body back to Faughan Hill, in the heart of his kingdom, for burial in 453.

In 2006, Trinity College professor Dan Bradley showed through DNA analysis that Niall, the "early-medieval progenitor to the most powerful and enduring Irish dynasty," has three million living descendants, nearly on par with Genghis Khan.

In 2015, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates showed through DNA testing that two of Niall's descendants are Bill Maher and Bill O’Reilly.

You can learn more about Niall of the Nine Hostages here.

Prisoners of Progress

For all the badmouthing I do about gross materialism, I am simply apeshit about all of the amazing crap we humans have made via the Industrial Revolution!

— Nick Offerman

An antique engraving graces our family-room. It's one of my favorite possessions.

The engraving depicts the birthplace of George Stephenson, the English engineer who, according to the engraving's caption, "devoted his powerful mind to the construction of the locomotive." A Victorian family gathers in front of the lowly cottage, there to celebrate "the commencement and development of the mighty railway system."

Stephenson was a hero to the Victorians, an innovator akin to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs today. His 1813 invention "induced the most wonderful effects, not only for this country, but for the world," the engraving says.

Railroads made it possible in the 19th century for people, products and raw materials to move overland great distances, and to do so cheaply and rapidly. 

We're so callous in our time, we complain when Amazon's free delivery service runs a day late. How absurd is that?

'Tis the season for mass consumption: for mornings, noons and nights at the mall; towers of empty boxes at the curbside; trashcans overstuffed with trees and wreathes and plastic packaging; trips to southern beaches; gifts for people you don't even like.

Can this way of life possibly be sustainable?

Whether it is or isn't, one thing's for sure: we're all prisoners of progress.

By that I mean to say what the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger said so well in his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology."

Heidegger believed the Industrial Revolution marked a radically new age for the human race: a time in history when nature has come to mean resources; and to be to mean to be consumable.

The absolute power of technology, Heidegger said, swamps the human being, because technology reveals all existence—the universe—to be no more than "raw material." 

Everything is inventory, stuff, crap. Crap to be extracted; crap to be requisitioned; crap to be assembled, packaged, shipped, opened, exchanged, consumed; crap to be discarded.

Technology "attacks everything that is," Heidegger said, "nature, history, humans, and divinities.”

And just as the railroad shrinks distance, technology shrinks mankind. 

It boxes us in and makes us pygmies, constricting our experiences to "brand experiences" and denying us connections to things as they once seemed: sources of wonder.

Today, we no longer wonder. We only want and want and want.

What a paltry fate.

Note: You can read more about Heidegger's thoughts on technology in my essay here. I also recommend Nick Offerman's fun new book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.

Above: The Birth-Place of the Locomotive. Published 1862 by Henry Graves & Co., Publishers to the Queen, London.

Know-It-Alls

No one wants advice, only corroboration.

— John Steinbeck

My vice is advice. 

I give it freely—often unsolicited.

People say it's due to my "executive personality," and always add their own advice—also unsolicited—about what I can do with it.

The English word advice, meaning a "worthy opinion," dates to the late 14th-century and was borrowed from the Latin visum, meaning "viewpoint."

Advice is simply another's viewpoint.

But no one welcomes advice.

No one.

The reason it is so detested, I believe, is explained by a remark of the late painter Malcolm Morley: "Any artist who asks advice is already a failure."

No one welcomes advice, because to do so is to admit to incompetence. 

And no one wants to admit to incompetence, even secretly.

Psychologists say that dispensers of advice are often "alpha personalities," know-it-alls who are assured of their views and assured of their right to dispense them.

Know-it-alls are also highly compulsive.

"If you know any unsolicited advice-givers," says psychologist Seth Meyers, "you know they can’t stop themselves from giving advice. At root, they are compelled to give it."

Advice-giving is a compulsion among alpha personalities—always anxious to solve everyone's problems.

They rarely, if ever, consider whether solutions are sought after. 

When they offer advice and are met with hostility, they're constantly surprised; even startled. What's the big deal?

Psychologists think that know-it-alls, at bottom, are power-mad.

Studies published in 2018 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

proved that people who dispense advice, whether welcomed or not, feel a strong sense of dominance and control afterwards. They give no thought to appearing a stuffed shirt know-it-all.

At the risk of appearing once again a know-it-all, let me offer advice to the recipients of unsolicited advice: Be patient with know-it-alls; they don't know they're annoying.

Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich said it best: "Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth."

Adorable

"Sharing photos of adorable animals is a great way to skyrocket engagement," according to lead-generation provider OptinMonster.

To prove the point, I asked Ron to pose for Goodly. Talk about adorable!

Ron, an adoptee from Delaware SPCA, wants you to know that his rate is highly competitive, should you need a professional male model for your next photo shoot. He can be hired through his agent, Pawsitively Famous Talent.

Photo credit: Ann Ramsey

Making Merry

An English Christmas in the Middle Ages would begin before dawn with a mass that marked the end of Advent and the start of the holiday.

The Christmas feast was an EOE affair.

Commoners made sure at least to serve ham and bacon. 

One memoirist of the period described his family's Christmas feast also to include sausages, pasties, black pudding, roast beef, fish, fowl, custards, tarts, nuts, and sweetmeats.

Royalty took things up a notch. In addition to the above goodies, King Henry III added salmon, eel, venison, and boar to his table; King Henry V, crayfish and porpoise.

Royalty also drank heartedly on Christmas. 

Wine was served, not by the bottle, but—literally—by the ton (a ton equaling 1,272 bottles). 

Henry III served 60 tons of wine on Christmas. That's more than 76,000 bottles! 

What will appear on your table?

Above. The Only by Ans Debije. Oil on panel. 6 x 6 inches.

Now on Vitalcy

I'm pleased to announce that Goodly posts will now appear each week on Vitalcy, an online magazine that targets "peak stage" adults.

A gutsy new alternative to AARP, Vitalcy is "your hub to discover what’s next and navigate through and expand the potential of this stage of life," the publisher says.

Goodly posts will also be syndicated beginning 2022.

You can become a member of Vitalcy at no cost here.

HAT TIP: My thanks go to Dan Cole for introducing me to the publisher. Thanks, Dan!

Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

Biologism

We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.

— Heinrich Himmler

The belief that links all white supremacists worldwide and throughout time is the belief in biologism.

Biologism insists that genes determine destiny; that nurture holds no sway; and that race, gender, sexuality, and ability are all natural endowments.

The Nazis gave biologism a bad name. But it's still with us, like a bad pfennig.

Biologism rears its ugly head at rallies like the one in Charlottesville in 2017 and the one on Capitol Hill in January, where members of the master race gathered to wreak havoc and reinstate their churlish champion of biologism, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—normal people who know nurture trumps nature every time—shake our heads and wonder: what's wrong with these loons? Didn't they get the memo?

Biologism's roots are old: Aristotle believed in it in the 4th century BCE; so did Linneaus in the 18th century and, to a degree, Darwin in the 19th.

But as a result of its "practical application" in the 20th century by the likes of Madison Grant and Adolph Hitler, biologism crescendoed. Its decline after 1945 was a rapid and irreversible.

Only misfits believe in it today.

The Man Who Would Be Scrooge

I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off until the master passion, gain, engrosses you.

— Charles Dickens

Just as real people inspired the creators of Sherlock Holmes, Jean Valjean, Dean Moriarity and Norman Bates, an actual man inspired Dickens' Scrooge.

John Elwes was a notorious Parliamentarian whose miserly antics entertained Londoners seven decades before Dickens lampooned him in A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843.

Elwes learned skinflintery from his mother, who died of starvation despite having inherited £12 million, and a maternal uncle whose fortune exceeded twice that amount.

Elwes inherited both his mother's and uncle's money upon their deaths and, to Londoners' delight, set about hoarding it.

Elwes' stinginess was the stuff of legends. 

Too cheap to pay for a coach, he walked everywhere, even in the rain and snow. When he traveled to London from his country estate, he always took the long way, to avoid turnpike tolls. He routinely ate moldy bread, rancid meat, and rotted gleanings from the harvest; refused to see doctors when he was ill; and, despite being a Member of Parliament, wore a single, ragged suit and a ratty wig he'd found in a gutter. (His fellow Members of Parliament observed that, since Elwes only had one suit, they could never accuse him of being a turncoat.)

Elwes would spend his evenings sitting beside a woodfire in his kitchen, to save on candles and coal; and would find his way to bed in the dark. He let his several townhomes fall into ruin, rather than pay for their upkeep, and relocated each time one became uninhabitable, which they all did. He quit Parliament after only 12 years, because he thought it too costly to remain a Member.

When he died in 1789, Elwes' net worth exceeded £38 million. His obit said his name would become "proverbial in the annals of avarice." But it didn't. 

Instead, the name Scrooge did.

Dickens took that name from a grave in Scotland.

During a visit to Edinburgh in 1841, the novelist spotted a headstone with "Ebenezer Scroggie" carved on it, and took mental note of the odd-sounding name.

Although the real Ebenezer Scroggie wasn't a miser—quite the opposite—Dickens made him one.

The Future

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

— George Orwell

Justice Sonia Sotomayor told her Trump-appointed colleagues on the bench last month that the Supreme Court wouldn't "survive the stench" of overturning Roe v. Wade.

She meant that, if the Court caved to right-wing Catholics and Evangelicals on Roe, it would lose its authority as the nonpartisan expounder of the Constitution.

Chief Justice John Marshall established that authority in Marbury v. Madison. 

The 1803 decision has remained, with few exceptions, unquestioned ever since.

But the Trump-appointed justices don't care. They'll readily sacrifice Marbury for the sake of unborn fetuses—and to consecrate their definition of civil and personal rights: namely, that there are none.

Trump's favorite president, the demagogue Andrew Jackson, also readily sacrificed Marbury.

In 1832, the Court decided in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokees in Georgia had a legal right to their land, by virtue of a federal treaty. 

But Jackson disagreed and in 1838 used the military to remove the Cherokees to concentration camps in Oklahoma.

Rather than use his power to carry out Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson violated the Court’s decision, signaling that he, not the Court, is the unquestioned authority in matters of Constitutional rights.

So, if the Court overturns Roe, you can expect its legitimacy to fall into question and fade.

And, if re-elected, you can fully expect Trump to use the military to quash citizen's rights.

Kai Hogan, Craftbuster

Two Seattle artists face federal charges for falsely representing themselves as Native Americans, according to Hyperallegic.

The story inspires me to pitch a TV series, Kai Hogan, Craftbuster.

As a kid, I loved watching reruns of Racket Squad, "real-life stories taken from the files of police racket and bunco squads." The show's gritty portrayal of cops and confidence men captivated me.

My series, set in 2050 in a dystopian Seattle (the city is largely underwater), follows the adventures of Special Agent Kai Hogan, an undercover investigator who works for the Indian Arts & Crafts Board, an agency of the Interior Department.

Agent Hogan's job is to chase down fraudsters in the Native American crafts industry. He carries a molecular scanner in an antique leather holster that, when inserted into a suspect's mouth, instantly detects the suspect's ancestry. Whenever he uses the device, Hogan snarkily says to the suspect, "23 and bite me.”

Meanwhile, Kai harbors a dark, personal secret: by purposely scanning himself one day, he has learned that he's less than 1% Native American, which means he's lied to the government to qualify for his job.

It's Blade Runner meets Racket Squad.

Hollywood, I hope you're listening.

But there's nothing funny about this kind of fraud. 

Lewis Rath and Jerry Van Dyke, the two real-life bunco artists, claimed they were Native Americans, although neither had tribal heritage, according to the Justice Department.

They were nabbed after US Fish & Wildlife agents made undercover purchases of jewelry and sculptures they were offering at two Seattle galleries.

Rath and Van Dyke have been charged with violating the Indian Arts & Crafts Act (IACA) of 1990, a truth-in-advertising law, and face four and two counts respectively of Misrepresentation of Indian Produced Goods & Products.

Each faces up to five years' imprisonment and $1 million in fines.

“By flooding the market with counterfeit Native American art and craftwork, these crimes cheat the consumer, undermine the economic livelihood of Native American artists, and impairs Indian culture,” a spokesperson for the US Fish & Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement told Hyperallergic.

Wasted

Life is long if you know how to use it.

— Seneca

When I'm not painting pictures or otherwise working on my business, I feel out of sorts.

That's because much of the time I spend on other things—like watching TV, napping, daydreaming, driving to appointments, shopping, keeping house, fixing others' clerical errors (never-ending), haggling with cheats, and battling with broken software—seems largely wasted.

You probably feel the same.

In 49 AD, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a letter to his father-in-law that history has enshrined as the little book On the Shortness of Life. 

Scholars believe Seneca wanted to persuade the man, then in his 70s, to retire from his government job.

Seneca tells him, "The part of life we really live is small, for all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time."

Everyone wants to save time, as product-marketers well know.

But to what purpose?

Whenever I see an app advertised as as a "time-saver" (most of them), I wonder how the perky users depicted will use their extra time.

Probably watching videos on TikTok.

That would have made Seneca bonkers.

We don't need more apps to save us time: life grants us plenty of it, Seneca said; and it has been granted "in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested."

The trouble arises from wasting time. 

"When time is squandered in luxury and carelessness and devoted to no good end," Seneca says, "we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

"So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it."

To fritter time is to act as if it were unending, the philosopher says—when in fact it's terribly finite.

"How stupid to forget our mortality," Seneca says.

I agree with him.

To waste time is not to know its value.

Above: Five of Five by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Available.

Freedom

I am my liberty.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Surrounded 24/7 by unapologetic victims, it's easy for us to forget that freedom is everyone's birthright.

For celebrants, Christmas is the season of charity and compassion—or ought to be.

But both virtues assume victims require our philanthropic gestures, when, in fact, they're free: free to resist injustice; free to work for change; free to run away; free to cheat, rob and steal, if need be; free to rebel; free to displace you, or me, or whoever oppresses them.

Journalists, priests and fundraisers prey upon our compassion at Christmas, just as retailers prey upon our guilt and greed.

They can't help themselves.

But no one preys upon our connate freedom.

It takes an Existentialist to do that; to remind us we're born free and remain free every moment of our lives; to remind us no one is born a victim—or even becomes one unwillingly. 

We choose the mantles we wear.

"Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings," the guru Ram Dass said.

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you," the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said.

Remember compassion this Christmas; but remember freedom, too.  

All Shook Up

In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud lent his name to the parapraxis—the slip of the tongue—attributing this "verbal leakage" to a failure of the ego to repress a worrisome thought.

Psychologists today acknowledge the doctor was onto something when he identified the Freudian slip.

A parapraxis could indeed represent a failure of the ego to censor our unruly unconscious.

But what about the visual parapraxis?

The slip of the eye, which, although common, has no name in psychology.

My wife's frequent slips of the eye are a daily source of mirth in our home.

I could list them here, but I'd need a month. 

On occasion, I have slips of the eye, as well.

Yesterday, for example, I misread the ad headline "Learn to paint expressively" as "Learn to paint Elvis Presley."

Misreadings aren't the same as mondegreens, mishearings of song lyrics (for example, hearing Elvis sing "A midget like a man on a fuzzy tree" instead of "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.")

Misreadings, psychologists believe, can be due to any number of causes, including stress, distraction, exhaustion, bias, and good-old Freudian ego-failure.

My theory is that misreadings are a form of dissociation, those brief out-of-body experiences we all suffer (for example, when we daydream).

Misreadings, in fact, may constitute a form of Ganser syndrome, also known as "balderdash syndrome."

Balderdash syndrome is characterized by episodes of "pseudodementia," where you show show signs of dementia—including speech and language problems—even though you don't in fact have dementia.

In other words, when you're all shook up.

What slip of the eye did you last have?

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.