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..at the end of the day ....March 30, 2008   Readers of this journal know me to be a man of resolve.  For example, I have long advocated the death penalty for littering.  I have called for the abolition of bullshit words like proactive.  Before that word crept into the vernacular, we managed just fine using active and reactive.  And those who seek closure know better than to seek it near me, unless they also hope to find The Big Closure.  So it should come as no surprise that I would campaign against the latest phrase du jour, 'at the end of the day.' Last week, my dentist cancelled a scheduled root canal.  I filled the unexpected gap in my day by watching a televised panel discussion on subprime mortgages.  One of the guests repeatedly prefaced his observations with the phrase "at the end of the day."  At the end of the day, this; at the end of the day, that.  Had I been the moderator, I would have asked the corpulent fuck exactly how nightfall can save us from greedy lenders and dumbass borrowers.  What is so special about the end of the day except that it's over? Still I am as fair as I am resolute.  Until recently, I was a critic of those who insisted upon naming children using punctuation, in particular, apostrophes.  Hell, I'd even damned the innocent children who were given those spellings on grounds they probably approved.  But, thanks to my son who is a teacher, I have altered my position.  Until he told me, I had no idea how the spellings were verbalized.  As it turns out, when my son asked his student, Art'erial Plack, to spell his name aloud, the boy answered: A-R-T Comma to the Top E-R-I-A-L Thinking the child was pulling his leg, my son waited until his next class and asked a pretty little girl named L'exus to spell her name. L Comma to the Top E-X-U-S Putting aside the economy of language that the word 'apostrophe'  has over 'comma to the top,' the word apostrophe is, well, accurate. There is no such thing as comma to the top.  Yet it is this compounding of sins, this overdosing on wrongness, that has brought me full circle.  Because, at the end of the day, all I really want is closure.  previous..|..current..|..archives..|..1st quarter index..|..next

Copyright © 2008 by the beastmaster