Over the last few years a couple of words have crept onto my shit list. Ok, a few dozen marched onto my shit list too playing kazoos and waving the Union Jack, and some just climbed the shit list for the lower ranks. Pithy and Clever. Oh, wait. Those are the words that crept onto the shit list. I don’t think that was their intent, though, flies, for instance, aspire to the shit list.
Nothing wrong with the words. They have a neutral flavor on the tongue, well, clever does, pithy tastes a bit fruity like you are drunk with a lisp and trying to say pissy. Before these guys humped their way onto the shit list I thought of them as compliments and I suppose they are used that way often enough to justify the butter list (for lack of a better phrase, it’s certainly kinder than the grease-my-pole list which sounds dirty even though it’s not meant to).
To me clever and pithy have come to mean patronizing, as though you’ve done something everyone else has done but your timing was spot on. It’s being damned with faint praise. If I’m clever or pithy I’ve missed my mark or I’m being passive aggressive; saying shit just to let you know I’m awake.
Puns are clever. Quotes are pithy. My pole? Add water and it makes it’s own sauce. I might be getting too old for this, but, I’d rather fail in a spectacular way than succeed in a clever and pithy way.
I guess I can’t really be insulted by those words, only my own perspective. In general that’s true of anything, call me an asshole if you want I can choose to take it as a compliment (not being an asshole but for getting under your skin). By the same logic I can choose to be insulted by a real compliment e.g. why’d you call me a gentleman? I’m an asshole. Y’all either already know all that or you don’t or you apply what’s useful from all that on good days and bad.
Shit. Phone, hang on.
Wow. Lapse in concentration. If I were writing stuff I liked I wouldn’t answer the phone.
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