Tuesday, September 13, 2016

To Deplore or Not to Deplore...

     This seems to be the question... on all the news channels this morning.
     Hillary Clinton calls half of Donald Trump's supporter deplorable.  Trump and his supporters, I am not sure which half, take great exception to this.  Clinton backs off on using the word half instead of some.  Then, Mike Pence, who is Trump's running mate lest anyone forgot, on some other news talk show is baited to call David Dukes deplorable.  He declines saying he is not a name caller.  Whatever I just wrote is approximately what happened and now everyone is analyzing, over-analyzing, hashing, and rehashing the use of this word.
     To me, the whole frenzy over this is deplorable, well maybe just sad, definitely a waster of time, and clearly not making the deplorable (agonizing?  paralyzing?  terrible?  insipid? lame, dumb, moronic? oh... what word should I use) choice we have of Clinton or Trump any better.  I have no comments on Gary "Aleppo" Johnson.
     What does the word deplorable actually mean?  What are some other words Hillary could have used instead?  Thankfully, as I am typing this on the internet, I can do a search on the word.  Thanks to Google, we have the following:


  
     I think Hillary could have made it much more interesting if she had chosen a few of the synonyms listed.  Perhaps, she might have chosen to call them wretched instead.  This gives some glimmer of hope that with assistance, perhaps a government program, they could be made un-wretched.  She might have called them execrable which would have sent everyone to their dictionaries to look up the meaning.  It would have been fun hearing the talking heads trying to pronounce execrable.  She could have gone all 1940s or 50s on us and called them lousy.  If she had called them lousy, there would have been a tie in to an article in the Wall Street Journal today informing us that lice have become resistant to over the counter treatments. 
     Dang, she could have used the word diabolical.  She missed the boat on this one.  Diabolical would have allowed her campaign to allude to some Old White Male Conservative conspiracy to take over this country and force Moslems and refugees and such to have to register with the government, build a ginormous Berlin Wall, and such... Nah, this is just silly talk. 
    No, she used the word deplorable and that is lamentable and regrettable just because there is nothing much else happening in the world and that is what the media is focusing on to fill the airwaves.
    Heck, Google even tracked the usage of the word since 1800.  How they do that has to be the subject of another blog.  But, as the graph shows that there has been a deplorable decline of the usage of deplorable at least until today.


     OK.  Now, I am lamenting that I took time for this bloggy bit instead of tackling the many tasks I should be doing.  I think I will go make a lousy cup of coffee and get to it then.







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