Surgalicious

That's it. "Surge" is going on the list of words that need to be retired after this year, along with "throw X under the bus". You can't take a grab bag of corporate tax giveaways, fantastically assume "lower health care costs" without detailing how you get those lower costs, do the same thing for "increased trade overseas", and then convince us it will work because you call it an "economic surge".

Juxtaposed against this surge talk, where presumably the John McCain orders the economy to jump and it says "how high?", he told residents of Wilmington, Ohio that there wasn't anything he could do to stop DHL leaving the local airport, even though his senior adviser/lobbyist helped push the deal through Congress. He can't prevent existing jobs from disappearing, but we're supposed to believe that he can create new jobs just by calling his policies a "surge"? I think not.

Comments

[Quiddity]

I think we should throw the word "surge" under the bus.

How about that?

[Nicholas Beaudrot]

excellent

[litbrit]

I am rather sick of the word surrogate. I keep thinking of the liquid stuff in the tanks they used to breed babies in Brave New World. You know, the blood surrogate to which the overlords would add alcohol when they wanted to produce a Gamma baby for future servant and street-sweeping duties.

So when a newsperson says John McCain's surrogate... I picture a glass tank of fake amniotic fluid having alcohol added to it.

And I'd really like that image to go away, thank you.

The surging surrogate is officially under the bus.

[Lisa Simeone]

"I am rather sick of the word surrogate."

Oh, god, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes!

How is it that we lived for all these years, through all these past elections, when no one used that term? And now almost everyone uses it, all the time? It's like they can't say anything about the campaigns without inserting "surrogate."

But then, I've long been bothered (as y'all know) by the sheep-like behavior of homo sapiens when it comes to . . . well, just about everything, but particularly language. A new bit of jargon comes out, and instead of saying, gee, that's a rather silly or obnoxious, or pretentious bit of jargon, people just can't wait to jump on the linguistic bandwagon.