I ate lunch in a cafe, and when I cleared my tray, I saw a sign on the garbage bin: “Do not put trays in the garbage. They are not disposable.”
Okay, but technically they are. I mean, you can dispose of them. If you couldn’t, then you wouldn’t need a sign.
I will be attending Free Spirit Gathering in Maryland June 15-20 as a “featured speaker” (whoo-hoo!). This is one of my favorite events. I’ve been asked to present four (many!) workshops.
So what should I do? I have a list of workshops that I offer, although it hasn’t been updated in about a year. I could choose from that list, come up with new stuff, or a combination.
What would you like to see me do? What Deborah Lipp worskshops/classes/facilitated discussions/guided experiences would excite you? I am wide open here.
When the calendar turned to 2000, people self-consciously speculated as to what we’d call this decade. My feeling was that language would emerge, not be decided upon. As the decade closes, I have seen a lot of decade-end lists, best (movie/music/television) of the aughts. Yep, it seems to be settling into “aughts.” (My own best movie list is coming soon.)
More interestingly, I heard a guy on the radio hoping that there would be fewer tragic deaths “in twenty-ten than in two-thousand-nine.” It was a perfectly natural language shift I’m sure he wasn’t even aware of, and I think it’s pretty meaningful in terms of how we’ll be speaking.
Two things I heard at Mom’s:
“My monkey is stuck.”
“If you want to turn the fan off, pull the fish.”
Advertisement on the radio for Colonial Williamsburg Resort:
Experience the 18th century, without ever leaving the 21st.
Wait. That was optional?
Radio announcer said:
Tori Amos will perform live at Radio City Hall.
As opposed to?
…as in a language meme, not a survey on MySpace.
Because the other day, a friend referred to Castle as “Murder He Wrote.” HA!
And here’s an interview with Joss Whedon about Dollhouse:
The last few episodes we got to play “the man behind the curtain” a lot. We did less of, “And this week, she’s a neurosurgeon!” Which we’ll still do to an extent, it’s part of the fun. But we got into what makes the place tick, what makes it wrong. It was less, “Murder She Was Imprinted to Write.”
Priceless quote, pure Whedon. Except that’s twice in two weeks for me, and that’s weird.
The Palestinians want Secretary of State Clinton “to pressurize the Israelis…to rebuilding the West Bank.”
Seriously? Not “pressure” to “rebuild”? Is there some form of Tourette’s that causes the forced injection of extra syllables?
Just wondering.
The phrase “the elephant in the room” appears to have originated in the 1950s, and was popularized in addiction recovery literature. It’s the big, important thing that no one talks about. In recovery literature, that thing is alcoholism, and it’s often used to describe alcoholic family systems: There’s an elephant in the living room. We can talk about the odor, we can talk about the poo, we can talk about the broken furniture, and wonder aloud why all these things are happening, but we cannot talk about the elephant in the room. So: we can talk about Dad’s violence, his unemployment, his need to sleep in on Sunday mornings, but we cannot talk about the drinking.
There’s another phrase, “the 800 pound gorilla.” It has a completely different meaning and origin. It originates in a silly joke: Where does an 800 pound gorilla sit? Anywhere it wants to. The meaning is something so big and scary that you just have no choice but to give in to it. It’s a lot like “Let the Wookie win.”
But lately, I hear these two phrases conflated, and then you have “the 800 pound gorilla in the room.” There’s even a commercial about it now.
It’s driving me crazy.
Crazy.
There are two different phrases people. Two. Get it together!
That is all.