Please Allow Me To Annoy You!

Please Allow Me To Annoy You!

Doctor Featherweight is here to clear your mind after endless days of living with the scourge of selecting a cocktail for breakfast. “To drink or not to drink?” And, does Bourbon go well with orange juice? Perhaps your significant other is peering at you with the eyes of a ravenous hawk. Should you slide the juice back in the frig, or pretend to sip it before reaching for the Jim Beam?

But, Doctor Featherweight’s keen observations reach far deeper into the psyche than the choice of libations.  She taught composition for years, a subject that apparently is now too elitist to be taught in today’s no student is wrong, and one-size-fits-no-one classrooms.

Are there little bits of composition here and there that annoy your addled brain even more than the sophomoric tales on the Hallmark channel? Doctor Featherweight not only offers her sympathies, but offers to share her Bourbon. 

Perhaps you’ve even tired of your favorite love story,  “Ebola Saves Christmas.”  Or, maybe formerly delightful yard work has taken on the fiery specter of hell? 

She’d bet, the top of your list is the human tendency to lead us from conceptual thought back into the darkest cave years of grunts and barking.

Dr. Featherstone is pushed toward anger, as so many are, with insipid expressions that have become only as pleasing as seeing children picking their noses for breakfast.  She wonders if we are being led like lemmings, to joyfully leap off the Cliff of Clichés?

Take for example, the “The fact that,…”.  A bit of lexicological rubbish added only to decorate a sentence with prosaic excrement.   She thought Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style did a more than sufficient job of clearing the style garden of such noxious weeds.  “If a fact is a fact, just state it. Don’t give it an introduction.”

The fact that Lily’s brain was as useful as a dead cockroach didn’t matter.

Lily’s brain was as useful as a dead cockroach, but that didn’t matter.

Doctor Featherweight hates a joke being labeled funny before she’s heard the damn joke!  If it’s funny, she’ll figure it out, but all too often, the joke is mislabeled.  This is funny!  Did you hear the one about the farmer and the cow?  He was udderly taken with her.

Another annoyance is writing a color and then adding on the word color.  The tablecloth was red in color.  Really?  Doctor Featherweight asks, did the writer mean to clarify it wasn’t red in circumference?

Another useless complication that makes Doctor Featherweight bite off the lead end of her stubby pencil:  He was six feet in height.  How about six feet tall? 

A favorite these days is to add….on the planet.  Does the writer or speaker think the largest apple tree might perhaps be on Mars?  Or, maybe ‘on the planet’ seems more sophisticated than, ‘in the world’, or ‘on earth.’  How about, “It’s the largest apple tree.”  If Doctor Featherweight wants to know if you mean in Greenland, she’ll ask.

Oh, don’t get her started on pronouns.  She’s heard so many (and yes even a majority of teachers!) exclaim, “He gave it to Mary and I.”  Oh, really, he gave it to I ?   Or, conversely, “Mary and me went to town.”  Doctor Featherweight’s question is:  What did me do there?

Then there is the constant misuse of the past form of op.  You’d think past tense NEVER ended in T.  Well, Doctor Featherweight, and even the minimally educated, know it often does.  Meant not meaned. Sent, not sended, spent not spended, wept not weeped.

Op is the present tense, Opt is the past tense… not opted…left not lefted,  and slept, not slepted, 

So why do so many insist on using opted instead of opt?  A grammatical mystery that Doctor Featherweight is at a loss to explain.  She suspects it’s another grammatical virus passed from mouth to mouth

“That said” has become such a cliché that every journalist finds it mandatory to include it at least once. 

“I don’t believe the Senator meant to call everyone a fool, that said, I hope he included himself.”  May she suggest, “I don’t believe the Senator meant to call everyone a fool, but if he did, I hope he included himself.”

One of Doctor Featherweight’s favorite authors uses the word ‘cheap’ ad nauseam.  He wore a cheap suit, checked into a cheap hotel, ate a cheap meal, and had a cheap girlfriend.  Doctor Featherweight suggests:  He wore a threadbare suit, checked into a shabby hotel, dined on thin gruel, and had a girlfriend who used annoying clichés.   Didn’t matter.  He only wanted her for her voluptuous assets.

When someone says, “I’m not going to lie; it was a great movie,” Doctor Featherweight becomes suspicious that this is an exception to his usual habit. 

Alas, Doctor Featherweight feels she has lost the battle to offend no one, ever.  

That being said, the fact that she offends like everyone, she has opted to tell you like a funny story about a man who slepted too late in his like cheap bed.  But, that’s like for another like time.