How’s that?

The Best of Stubble Mulch

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Heard a guy on TV talking about the importance of putting “gamification” into fitness.

He was a trainer in the healthification business and was suggesting we make exercise more enjoyable, like a game.  

Also, my ears perked up recently as the television ad man was selling what he called a “bathing well.”

It was a walk-in bathtub, which I assume was made for safe bathifications.

Ah, the use and the adoptification of American English.

Here are my comments about all that, with some malapropisms thrown in along the wayfind, which is an academic word for directional signs that I’ve discussed ad nauseam.

I’ve also noticed that Nissan, the car maker, is bragging about its automobile’s “zero gravity seats,” and that’s great news for those of us with gravity-induced, sagging sittifiers.

Much of what we hear and read, especially in legalese, academese, advertising and precepts written in six point type in insurance policies, are filled with unnecessary or misused words, or the invention of new ones.

As I am writing this a newscaster on CNN is talking about the shooting and resulting accidents and deaths on the Las Vegas strip. The newscaster said CNN was “efforting a reporter to the scene. ” Then we learn from him that the shooter’s car “blew through the intersection,” when we all know wind is the only thing that can cause something to blow through an intersection.

Cars speed through intersections.

Years ago in my other life at SDSU I received a memo from a colleague. One paragraph:

“The emphasis is on wellness awareness in the holistic context of the physical, emotional, spiritual and social dimensions which becomes integrated into an individual’s total lifestyle.”

Ya, you betcha!

Considerable water has gone over the bridge since my days of total lifestyle dimensions at SDSU, but ever since then I’ve searched every crook and cranny for similar examples.

Lawyers are the world champions at making a five-word sentence in to a 20-word sentence, probably nudged along by what they call hourly fees. They’ve also stuck with an ancient language, exempli gratia (for example) with words like mandamus, nulla bona and a raft of ad infinitums so the rest of us don’t know what in the heck they’re talking about.

Politicians are pretty good at confusification, too.

I remember a few years ago when they first started talking about “growing the economy.” That expression then was new to us out here on the flatlands where we grow the carrot and grow the corn, but it was one of Washington’s favorites.

Where once politicians flip-flop they now “walk back.” They like “dogs that don’t hunt,” and “work hard to level the playing field,” with that leveling always taking place at the “end of the day.”

Then there are government agencies that follow their lead. I’ve been dealing with complicated IRS matter and have discovered the IRS has warehouses packed with 20- to 30-page questionnaires on all earthly things, as well as on other assorted heavenly decrees.

Also, I managed to keep a stiff upper chin as my wife and I stuck our necks out recently and worked at our computers to obtain a copyright and International Standard Book Number (ISBN).

For several hours we grew the computers, efforting through sentences and mandamuses until the end of the day to work out the meaning of a bathing well full of words constructed, invented or misused by bureaucrats, computer nerds and our caldron of lawyers.

It became a sort of gamification for us.

Speaking of wasting words, in the late 1880s a contest asked people to write a tragic story in as few words as possible. The winner wrote:

“Man’s back, across track. Engine roars, man snores. Engine rushed, man crushed. Widow snorts, seeks courts. Lawyer weeps, jury sleeps. Judge charges heavy largess. Jury hollers. 5,000 dollars.”

It pains me to say, but that 28-word story is probably more lucid than this entire 650-word reportification.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.