"Just Sayin'" is Just Awful

My least favorite phrase in current pop parlance is “just sayin’.” Oh, okay. Is that all you’re doing? Just saying? Not thinking or meaning? Just saying? Got it.

 The phrase’s most common invocation is when its author has run into the butt end of his own argument and cannot complete his own thought. “If you allow gay marriage you might as well allow polygamy, incest and bestiality you know, just sayin’…” It is lazy, surrendering language that lets the listener know the speaker doesn’t care what he himself thinks and it is therefore unlikely he cares what the listener thinks.

Just sayin’ has insinuated itself into daily speech as well as Internet communication, more in Facebook posts than in Twitter Tweets, as when properly punctuated, “just sayin’” eats up 11 precious characters, though I’m sure the apostrophe is optional and an even more austere abbreviation is somewhere in the Twitter ether.

My initial strategy in ridding the American conversation of this conversational cheap shot was to carry a knife everywhere I go and when someone says, “Just sayin’,” to stab them repeatedly in the chest. Then as the blood is flying around the room and the life is ebbing away from the eyes of the offender, when he says, “Why are you stabbing me?” I say, “Just stabbin’. No big, just stabbin’.” I haven’t actually done it because that would be extreme.

As a humble student of the adjoined crafts of good writing and speaking, the implications of “just sayin’” are offensive to me.  The chief attribute that distinguishes man from animals is language. Only man among all living things can write poetry, codify society through law and express emotion in exacting detail with words. “Just sayin’” cedes the one thing about humans that make them more compelling than a really good cat.

The word “just” is a reductive qualifier in the phrase “just sayin’,” one that impugns human expression through its most capable tool, language. It is a placeholder for “only” or “merely,” or a number of other self-prostrating adverbs, but with more cowardly and apologetic undertones than any of them. To apologize for expressing an opinion in the same sentence that expresses it indicates that perhaps the opinion should be kept to oneself in the first place, or at least until it takes shape more clearly.

“Just sayin’” is a passive-aggressive linguistic back door through which people can slink when their own self-loathing is too great for them to back up their own statements. It is also sometimes used to deflect blame for any hurt the speaker has caused the listener. “Just sayin’” is the less responsible cousin of “no offense, but...” though what it has morphed into has lost all of the initial scant bravura of its origins.

Had the English language’s greatest orators fallen prey to its coddling allure, would we still feel the same way about the immortal words of Doctor Martin Luther King? “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. Just sayin’.” Or Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just sayin’.” Or William Wallace: “And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our freedom! Just sayin’!!!"

Imagine yourself on trial for a murder you didn’t commit, and the one man who can corroborate your alibi takes the stand. The clerk has him put his right hand on the Bible and says, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” You do not want the man to respond with “Just sayin’.”

The speaker of this flaccid phrase “just sayin’” is in my mind’s eye as I write, blushing, his eyes cast downward, kicking the side of one shoe with the toe of the other, hands clasped behind the back and deep down believing that he is a worthless pile of crocodile crap whose frail and puny observations are so trite, paraphrased, and redundant to even the most rudimentary levels of conventional wisdom that they barely deserve consideration.

I do not mean to present myself as some kind of pinched-nose school marm with John Lennon glasses and a face like a rumpled Kleenex, sneering over a book report and ready to break a child’s knuckles with a ruler over a dangling preposition or split infinitive. Though in truth, I am one. In this essay I am focusing on popular usage of a particular phrase whose continued use effects a slow and insidious nullification of all that I hold dear.

But please, feel free to continue to use “just sayin’.” The primary reason it awakens within the deepest reaches of my soul a hundred flocks of bloody-eyed demons that feed upon the hopeful hearts of young girls and drink the tears of infants is that I one day found it to be among my own arsenal of verbal ticks. It is in a song I wrote. I had said it easily ten times before I realized the stultifying anti-intellectualism I was implicitly condoning with each utterance.

The last time I said it is a moment I will never forget. I can see it so clearly, like it was yesterday. I was with friends, my book club was meeting outside and the sun was shining. It was a Tuesday, definitely a Tuesday. I was taking the devil’s advocacy position in a discussion of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in arguing that the gulls that participated in society were happier than Jonathan, and that’s when I said it. Following a particularly ineloquent and half-hearted expostulation of the case for conformity, I said, “Just sayin’.”

The words tasted like tainted oysters sliding off of my tongue and they hung in the air in front of my book club alongside a stupid grin and maybe even a shoulder shrug, obliterating any chance I may have had for inspiring lit-worship from the rest of the class. I’m not sure about the shoulder shrug. I have tried to block out as many details as I can.

To those few “just sayin’” users and enthusiasts who have continued to read this far, please understand that I am among the guilty. I am one of you, but I have learned, and you can too. For the love of all that is holy, at least think about it. Before you say “just sayin’,” before you blurt it out for the whole world to hear, ask yourself if that is the best way you can express how you feel and what you mean. Then if you still want to say “just sayin’,” go right ahead. Hopefully no one within earshot will be “just stabbin’.”

The Surprising Etymology of "Diagnosis"

I have a pretty astute readership, so I’m sure many of you are already aware of the unusual history and etymology of the word, “diagnosis.” It sounds Latin on the front end, but a little Greek in the caboose. So which is it? A more specific description would be that it is borrowed second-hand from the Anglo-Saxon.

“Docga næsgristle” is a two-word phrase that by Middle English had been collapsed to the single word, “Dognoste.” The word “docga” is a weak masculine noun that around 500 A.D. in what is now England and Southern Scotland would have referred to a dog. “Naegristle” identified the cartilage at the end of a dog’s nose.

Ever since the domestication of canines, the state of a dog’s nose has been man’s best indicator of its health. If the “dog’s nose is” warm and dry, the dog is probably sick. If the “dog’s nose is” cold and wet, the dog is probably healthy. The phrase “dog’s nose is” grew out of the word “dognoste,” and through voluminous repeating eventually whittled itself down to “diagnosis,” which as Middle English and the development of modern English prosody began to coalesce around 1200 A.D., came to mean the identification of an illness.

So the word “diagnosis” is neither Greek nor Latin per se. It is a conflation of the words “dog’s nose is,” originally derived from the Anglo Saxon as a metaphor for human health via the muzzle of man’s best friend. This is one of the many reasons why I am so in love with words. (Please note, this was originally posted on April 1, 2016).

I Do Not Like Orgasm as a Verb

For me, the word “orgasm” has always felt best as a noun. As potentially earth-shaking a noun as it is though, there are challenges in expressing it with appropriate connotation. “Having” an orgasm is a little grabby, “experiencing” an orgasm too distant, and “achieving” an orgasm seems well, self-congratulatory. Other usages can invoke anything from the pornographic through the cloying to the gynecological. As plentiful as these ejaculations are, none of them seem to be wholly satisfying.

In my opinion, we must nonetheless continue to strive, always in search of the right tone, the right bed of verbs and adjectives upon which to present our orgasms so they are received with the romance, lust, piety or combination of the three we intend. And we must do this is as a means of fighting the recent rise of the word “orgasm” as a verb: I orgasmed here, I orgasmed there ... it’s just terrible. It is present in all dictionaries as a verb, and I don’t like it. Never have. There are a few bright spots in the use of “orgasm” as a verb, notably the future perfect, which states that one will have orgasmed. And who could think of a more perfect future than that? Moreover though, there is a great inelegance to my ear in the verb usage of “orgasm.” 

It takes a word that describes the quintessential expression of humanity, and that even in its comparatively benign noun form does so already hobbled by a certain clinical sheen that at the outset handicaps its possibilities for romantic expression. The last thing it needs is to be set into motion, indiscriminate seeds cast helter-skelter with no vision of a higher mind, a view only to procreation rather than civilization; indeed, in verb form, "orgasming" seems naked of any beauty its noun usage might have had.

If we could drive orgasm’s verb form out of common usage if not out of our dictionaries, that would give me indescribable pleasure. 

There is No Such Thing as a Woman Lawyer

I have recently been hearing professional broadcasters on radio and television using phrases like, “woman lawyer” and “woman athlete.” It must stop. The word “woman” is a noun and it may not be used to modify another noun. The common adjective you would use here is of course “female.”

De-emphasizing gender in society is a coming and welcome trend, and referencing gender in any kind of qualifying context is very last year. You see it in retail, you see it in product design and in a lot of marketing, and I enthusiastically recommend adapting to rather than fighting this trend. 

My interdictions against the creep of poor usage are a fool's errand, but I believe them to be worth a try. Moderate preservationists like me get twenty fingers or toes in the dike at a time, and still plenty slips through, much of which I consider fine. But some of these leaks I don’t much care for at all. And this is one. Woman lawyer. It's not okay.

So really, we’ve covered two items here, and in the interest of full disclosure, its source was first the grammar part, and then my fiancé clued me in on the sexist component of the usage in general. Slicing through flesh and bone and directly into my nervous system, the adjectival use of “woman” ran me up a wall with a teeth-chattering, mind-numbing electric shock. And later on, the sexist nature of gratuitously applying an irrelevant qualifier was impressed upon me by my fiancé. 

For instance, stop saying "female attorney." She's your attorney.

No, Islam Doesn't Hate the West

The Grammar Dance could make a daily go of diagramming Donald Trump’s fractured syntax, but it would make me literally ill to spend that much time with the Tyrannosaurus Rump. This past week he aimed his bile again at Islam, but in such a way that compels me to straighten out a rudimentary usage gaffe that he has since repeated numerous times.

“Islam hates the West,” he says. That’s like saying Christianity loves Lima beans or Judaism is curious about the company you keep. Islam is a religion, not an individual or group of individuals. It is a set of beliefs rather than a description of the individuals who subscribe to those beliefs.

He might permissibly have said, “Muslims hate the West” or “Islam preaches hatred toward the West,” but he may not say, “Islam hates the West.” This usage is an anthropomorphization of a religion, an ascription of human attributes to a non-human entity. He sounds stupid when he says it. He is stupid when he says it.

The Etymology of "Batshit Crazy"

I rather like the term “batshit crazy.” It has a fantastic ring to it and telegraphs very well the notion that the individual, group or entity being described is indeed not your common or garden crazy, but rather a level beyond madness’ ordinary limits.

Alas, its etymology does not point where I had hoped it would point. I was praying that a particular form of insanity descended upon spelunkers due to repeated inhalation of bat guano, but there appear only to be anecdotal citations in that direction, perhaps others who likewise wished it were so. It seemed the Occum’s razor for me, as in my native New England, the phrase, “crazier than a shit house rat” enjoys some popularity and indeed owes its etymology to the syndrome of rats who haunt poorly maintained outhouses being afflicted with violent and unpredictable personalities.

The term “batshit” began to appear as an equivalent to “bullshit” in military jargon of the 1950s, even showing up in that context in some printed material. Its attachment to “crazy” was not seen at that time, but it bears mentioning, as that coining of "batshit" as a single word appears to be its first, and documentation on it is solid.

An old expression for madness was “bats in the belfry,” the belfry of a church representing the head of a person, with the idea being that one’s mind was full of blind, winged night rodents, a metaphor of madness that carries with it the charm of grotesquerie, like a story by Poe or a drawing by Edward Gorey. The best guess then at the evolution of “batshit crazy” seems to be a gradual profaning of "bats in the belfry" via the incorporation of the previously familiar term “batshit” from its 1950s military usage.  And in this way, the expression as we know it stumbled to its feet.

There is a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove named Colonel “Bat” Guano (1964), an obvious reference to “batshit,” and Hunter S. Thompson used the phrase “batshit insane” in the Fear and Loathing books in the early 1970s. Between those two high-profile cultural usages, “batshit,” “batshit crazy,” and “batshit insane” came into common parlance, and have had waxing and waning popularity since, but thanks in no small part to the 2016 presidential race, all three are back and ready for action.

You Say ISIS, I Say ISIL, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

A rose by any other name is still a rose, but is the same true of the terror world’s latest scourge, ISIS? Or ISIL? Or ISI? Or IS? Or DAESH? What’s in a name?

The winning appellation thus far has been ISIS, an acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (which is popularly understood by Americans to be Syria). Its predecessor, which called itself ISI (Islamic State of Iraq) grew from an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Mujahedeen in Iraq, and a fun bunch of guys called Soldiers of the Prophet’s Companions.

By 2010, Jabhat Al-Nusra, a large Syrian opposition militia group, collapsed into ISI and the “S” was added for al-Sham. For Westerners, the last “S” in ISIS stands for Syria just fine with our usage and understanding. The more austere and stately IS stands for Islamic State, and while it sounds like the place where the B-student terrorists go to college, it is as acceptable in usage as ISIS, but for eyeball-grabbin’ newsertainment, ISIS has been the popular expression.

So why does President Obama insist on using ISIL in his addresses? ISIL is an acronym for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The Levant refers to all of the countries that border the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, which would additionally include Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Jordan, and in the administration’s view, more accurately reflects the ambitions of Al-Baghdadi’s militia, as well as the nations that are most immediately vulnerable to its threat. Some component of the pundit class sees the president’s use of ISIL as unnecessarily obtuse.

Your final option is DAESH, which I understand is a real stinker as far as DAESH members are concerned. Secretary of State John Kerry prefers calling it DAESH, as it carries with it a very nasty dig. It too is an acronym, but for an Arabic phrase that is pronounced “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa ash-Sham.” The actual meaning of the words are, “The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham,” which is fine on paper, but when spoken, apparently DAESH sounds like the words that mean “the sowers of discord (Dahes),” or "one who crushes underfoot (Daes).”

A sower of discord can include a thief, an adulterer, or worst of all, an apostate, and apparently it drives these indiscriminate murderers wild with hatred and rage, but hey, what doesn’t? A DAESH spokesperson communicated through the AP in 2014 that they would, "cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym DAESH.”

So take your pick. Go full John Kerry-style and give a Wahaabist mullah the finger by using DAESH, or  follow the president’s lead and use the conspicuously contrarian ISIL. Perhaps you’d prefer to keep it short and sweet with IS, or stick with the popularly preferred ISIS. A rose by any other name is still a rose, and it is likewise so with deluded zealot assassins, so in my opinion, it matters not a fig.

As long as we are naming things properly, this is the real Isis.