{"id":21133,"date":"2018-01-21T01:13:10","date_gmt":"2018-01-21T08:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=21133"},"modified":"2018-01-21T22:13:02","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T05:13:02","slug":"prairie-lights-going-forward-on-the-road-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/01\/prairie-lights-going-forward-on-the-road-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: Going forward on the road ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Or\"<\/a>

Going forward on the road ahead. Or something.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lately, it seems, there is a whole lot of pivoting going on.<\/p>\n

In earlier times, people pivoted on basketball floors, and irrigation sprinklers pivoted around a central point. That use of the word, to describe an actual physical move, still pops up from time to time.<\/p>\n

But the new sense of \u201cpivot\u201d \u2014 in describing, say, how a business screws up and then adopts a new strategy \u2014 is everywhere. Ditto with politics. When a politician changes his mind, adopts a new talking point or fine-tunes his position on the issue of the moment, the action is likely to be described as a \u201cpivot.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said this was a new sense of the word, but maybe I\u2019ve only begun to notice it recently. The first article<\/a> I found on it goes all the way back to 2012, and the writer referred to it as \u201can overused Silicon Valley buzzword.\u201d<\/p>\n

However \u201cpivot\u201d may have insinuated its way into popular usage, I\u2019m always intrigued by the arrival of new vogue words. They are something like the flu. They spread through invisible means, upon the slightest contact, and before you know it everybody\u2019s sick.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Vogue words and phrases tend stay in fashion until everyone is sick and tired of them, after which they slowly fade back into obscurity, or back to their original meaning.<\/p>\n

It takes longer for some such words to wear out their welcome. I\u2019ve been waiting for the demise of \u201canytime soon\u201d for years now. For hundreds of years, it was thought to be sufficient to say simply \u201csoon,\u201d as in, \u201cThe flu season is not expected to peak soon.<\/p>\n

If you add \u201canytime\u201d to the sentence, it doesn\u2019t change the meaning one iota, but nine times out of 10, I venture to say, contemporary writers would unconsciously opt for \u201canytime soon\u201d \u2014 \u201cunconsciously\u201d being another way of saying \u201cwithout thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same is true for \u201cat the end of the day,\u201d which has enjoyed a very long run, for unaccountable reasons. Sometimes it\u2019s just a longer way of saying \u201ceventually,\u201d and apparently is substituted because it makes the person using it sound smarter, at least in that person\u2019s own mind.<\/p>\n

Even worse is when it is added to a sentence where it means nothing at all. You could say, in talking about this or that problem, \u201cSomething needs to be done.\u201d But if you wanted to sound more deliberative, I guess, or at least more wonkish, you could say, or write, \u201cAt the end of the day, something needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

A related phrase is \u201cgoing forward.\u201d In the sentence above, it could perform the same nonfunction as \u201cat the end of the day.\u201d To wit, \u201cGoing forward, something needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are other, more innocent vogue words, words that aren\u2019t particularly flashy and are perfectly accurate, but in their popularity they push their synonyms almost out of existence.<\/p>\n

Take the word \u201cshutter,\u201d in the sense of \u201cclose\u201d or \u201cshut down.\u201d It seems like a store, or a day care, or a coal plant is never simply closed or shut down anymore. No, it is \u201cshuttered.\u201d Again, it\u2019s not a bad word in and of itself. It might have a tad bit more drama than \u201cclosed down,\u201d but it is a good, workable word.<\/p>\n

Until you read it 20 times in one week. Then it becomes an annoyance, and you realize that, for reasons unknown and by some mysterious process, it has become a vogue word. It has worn out its welcome. But I don\u2019t expect to see it fade away anytime soon. Going forward, it could take years.<\/p>\n

And then there is \u201ciconic,\u201d which must surely be in the running for the most overworked word in the English language. If every moment is iconic, if every old building, song, bridge, automobile and shade of fingernail polish is iconic, well, then nothing is iconic, is it?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve reached this point, perhaps you are interested enough in the subject to help me figure this out:<\/p>\n

What is it about the word \u201cmen\u201d that makes its use as a modifier sound so wrong, in cases where \u201cwomen\u201d sounds perfectly natural? I would actually prefer the phrase \u201cfemale workers\u201d to \u201cwomen workers,\u201d but there is nothing wrong with either of them.<\/p>\n

The same cannot be said for \u201cmen workers.\u201d It sounds ridiculous; it demands the substitution of the word \u201cmale.\u201d Why? I don\u2019t have a clue. Does anyone else?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately, it seems, there is a whole lot of pivoting going on. In earlier times, people pivoted on basketball floors, and irrigation sprinklers pivoted around a central point. That use of the word, to describe an actual physical move, still pops up from time to time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[6670,6669,6668],"class_list":["post-21133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-and-stuff","tag-going-forward","tag-pivot","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21133"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21136,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21133\/revisions\/21136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}