QUANTITATIVE EASING. FISCAL CLIFF. Scope creep. These are the words we are using going into the new year. I’ve heard them all recently on the news. The lingo du jour, they are the words of the moment, among others, and they typify a time, a place in history, and while all of these phrases are about the economy, I bet you’ve got others you’ve picked up that could make a nice little – how shall we say? – play on words. That is what we do for a living when we make our stand at writing memoir, yes?
We play on – or with – words. We play hard. We sweat, we bleed, but play, we do. What words have you heard that are in the cloud right now? There is the language of the season, of course. Such phrases as “comfort and joy” can be toyed with, dressed up, merely considered, or stretched and repurposed to build a nice essay around.
How? Have a look at my interactive calendar and choose a date a month or two out. How about Valentine’s Day? What phrases do we associate with that emotional high holy day? Given some good strong lead time, can you come up with an essay that traffics in the excesses of our retail abandon on such days, or talks about a groovy kind of love? Want to write an essay for public radio, perhaps? Remember to think in propinquities, an ethic I teach to get you to write with a little edge.
Got any good phrases to share? Let’s have ‘em.
Jim Faris says
How about:
“Work smarter, not harder…” after the company lays off workers.
or the one that is so played out and actually really annoys me “Think out of the box”.
The 4 successive Quotes from a very famous person, process improvement guro…
1. You don’t know what you don’t know… (I don’t like this one)
2. If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it. (success of government programs?)
3. If you can’t express it in the form of numbers you really don’t know much about it.
4. If you don’t measure it, can’t express in the sense of numbers you are a mercy of chance…
And from one of the leading statisticians of Lawrence Livermore Labs…
“The generation of random numbers is too critical to be left to chance…”