Posts

The World's Greatest

Image
I was in a cult once. That was a long time ago.  My time with them began about 24 years ago, although pinpointing the exact year has proven to be slippery for me.  My time with them came to a close around five years after joining. I find myself thinking about them often. They called themselves "The World's Greatest." We were anything but, of course, which was kind of the joke after a while.  Yet, in retrospect the name served a purpose. When we called ourselves "The World's Greatest," amid self-aware chuckles and incriminating sidelong glances at one another, there was still something... aspirational about the title. Whether or not we actually were the world's greatest was debatable. Greatest at what? How was that measured? Who said so? It still gave us something to aim for.  The World's Greatest was an exclusive, invitation-only membership with a strict color-specific dress code, and whose members were each responsible for upholding a single piece o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Taylor Found Swift

Image
People love dunking on cliches and platitudes.  Puns and "small talk" are other adjacent forms of language that are also thoroughly groan-inducing. Granted, these forms of "communication" (in the loosest sense of the term) represent language's  lowest-hanging fruit one can offer while in rhetorical discourse. I do not want to overstate their usefulness. But I also want to make a positive case for them that, while sickeningly neutral, platitudes do have  some utility. For all their hollowness, there is a simplicity and brevity to them that make them easy communicable ammunition  when you're otherwise at a loss for what to say. "Oh my god,"  "What, what is it?" "My pet goat Aloysius has grown eight mutated spider limbs and is weaving a macabre web of pale fibrous thread in my house doorways. I believe he might be building a trap to catch and liquify my insides to slurp out for his nourishment!"  Slight pause. You're not sure w...
Post a Comment
Read more