language – Hank Kalet

An amazing list with ginormous importance

You read a list like this and you have to wonder why the creators stopped at 10. There are plenty of over-used, useless words out there, most of them being uttered by politicians (today Newt Gingrich talked about the “real problems of real people”), TV political analysts, corporate America and sportscasters.

My favorite word from the list, with its nominating comment:

SHARED SACRIFICE

“Usually used by a politician who wants other people to share in the sacrifice so he/she doesn’t have to.” Scott Urbanowski, Kentwood, Michigan

Of course.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Language police

I ran out of coffee yesterday so I stopped by Target this afternoon to grab a bag of beans from Starbucks (I had planned to get a pound at Small World yesterday, but ran into some friends and then realized the meter had run out — which meant that I had to, as well). When I handed the coffee to the kid behind the counter — and incredibly helpful and conscientious kid, by the way — he let me know that I had a free cup of the coffee of the day coming.

“Would you like a free complimentary cup of coffee?”

Of course, but don’t complimentary and free mean the same thing?

The end of the malaprop administration

I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama’s decision to have a poet read at his inaugural — about what it means for language and the nation (and not so much about the poet, Elizabeth Alexander, whose work I unfortunately have not read) but was having some difficulty putting it into words. I think this comment from Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, in The New York Times sums it up best:

“After eight years of mangled and manipulated language, and the palpable effects of that in the real world, it seems like any gesture toward clarity of expression and dignity of life is welcome,” Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, said in an e-mail message.

“In a way, the poem itself is not the point,” Mr. Wiman added. “I would guess that a president-elect decides to have an inaugural poem in the first place not in the hope of commissioning some eternal work of art, but in order to acknowledge that there is an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture’s language and its political life. That Obama wants to make such a gesture seems to me a pure good — for poetry, yes, but also for the country.”