Why are things “old-fashioned” yet “newfangled?” You never hear about “new-fashioned” stuff or “oldfangled” items. What is “fangled,” anyway? “Yeah, we’ve been fangling stuff like this for years, but this is the newfangled way of doing it. Lotta progress in this here fangle procedure, that’s for sure.”

I’m just looking for a little consistency, that’s all.

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So, I’m surfing around the Web today, and I see one of many ads for Obama, exhorting me to vote for him. Fine as far as it goes, but this one attempts to engage me by asking if I’ve voted yet. Then it has three radio buttons I can click with different answers: Yes, No, I’m Not Sure.

“I’m not sure”?

How exactly would that come about? “I tell ya, I had a lot going on that day. Had to pick up the dry cleaning, get the groceries, drop the kids off at soccer practice… I might have stopped off at a voting center, stood in line, signed in, entered the voting booth, and made a selection for president, but damned if I can remember for sure. Like I said, lot going on.”

Guess we’re going after the former Bush voters.

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Is there some sort of award in television broadcasting for coming up with the most “clever” male-centric sound-alike terminology? In the last two weeks on the CBS News, I’ve seen stories about how manorexia is on the rise, how to decipher a man’s brocabulary, and how to tell, if you’re a woman, if your significant other is subjecting you to maleienation. What’s next? Encouraging men to go get manograms? An in-depth look at underwear and men who like to wear manties? Talking about how men hide their true selves behind maskulinity?

I’m a shoe-in for an Emmy at this rate.

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Just a helpful little tip to companies: If you’re going to hire someone to work in a customer service capacity, either phone support or cash register jockey or restaurant waitstaff or anything requiring actual communication with the customer, could you please make sure that they speak the language fluently? Call me a racist if you must, but I am growing exceedingly weary of calling customer service and having to spend an extra twenty minutes either repeating myself because they can’t translate what I’m saying fast enough, or asking them to repeat themselves because I have no idea what they just said.

I know times are hard and language-challenged folks are going to be cheaper to hire than public speakers. I know shipping off your call centers to some dirtball country with huge populations and no labor laws really increases your bottom line. I know that taking care of your shareholders (and your own personal portfolios) is far more important to you than taking care of your actual customers. And yes, I’ll even admit that, usually, eventually, despite the increased difficulty, hassle, and frustration, the transaction ends more or less with the customer getting something close to what they want. But still, it should not take me ten minutes and seven attempts to order a freakin’ cheeseburger!

So here’s what I’m going to do. Next time I get on the phone with the credit card company and the phone is answered by Apu, I’m going to hand the phone over to the SBM and let her handle the transaction. In French. Or Dutch, her choice. They’re going to offer up someone who doesn’t speak English, so will I. Probably won’t get anything accomplished, but I wasn’t before, either.

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The SBM and I are getting ready to move to a new apartment and, after slogging through nine pages of legalese in the lease contract they sent us, I would like to propose a new shorter, simpler form that every rental properties could use to save everyone some time. Because having read several leases in my time, and this one proving to be no exception, they all seem to say the exact same thing. So here is my suggested easy-to-read, easy-to-understand standard lease agreement for apartment complexes:

1. We are the rental property. We are more powerful than all your gods.
2. Nothing is ever our fault.
3. Even if it clearly was our fault.
4. Like, say we barge unannounced into your apartment while you’re entertaining guests, and we randomly open fire with high-caliber automatic weapons and destroy all your belongings and put holes in the walls and puncture all the pipes causing water damage and injure your guests, including your boss who you were trying to impress in hopes of getting that big promotion. That’s still your fault.
5. You have no rights beyond those which we grant you.
6. We grant you no rights.
7. You owe us money for everything, including rent, water, sewage, trash, keys, cards, keycards, parking spaces, package pickup, pet ownership, repairs for damages you didn’t actually cause, cleaning that we never actually do, that little hole in the door you look through to see who’s knocking, oxygen, and sunshine. If you’re late with your payment, we can—and will—kill you.
8. You have no legal recourse.
9. So shut up.
10. Sign here.

See? Short, snappy, easy to understand. It says exactly what the actual lease agreement said but didn’t take me over half-hour to get through it.

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“Pepcid stops heartburn before it starts.” “Let’s stop teen drinking before it starts.” “With proper diet, you can stop high blood pressure before it starts.” I utterly loathe this phrase, this idea of “stop X before it starts.” Call me nitpicky if you want, but it’s a pointless, mean-nothing phrase that is inherently impossible. You simply cannot physically stop something that hasn’t already started. Can’t do it. Stopping implies an arrest in motion, so if there’s no motion, there’s no stopping.

Think of it this way: Your car’s out in the driveway right now, right? Stop it before it starts. Go on. It’s not running, not moving, but go stop it. See? Short of yanking out the alternator, I don’t know what you could do. And even that isn’t stopping it before it starts, it’s preventing it from happening, which is what all these other “stop it before it starts” people actually mean.

So, please, just stop it.

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As a child, I was terrified that going to school would actually land me in the Egyptian land of the dead, because I heard over the summer they’d gotten a new bus.

Get it? A-new-bus? Anubis? Get it?

You don’t get it.

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The winners of The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which honors writers who can create the absolute worst opening lines to non-existent novels, have been posted over at the San Jose State University website and the results are truly astounding. These are people who can mangle the language like no other (well, maybe Tom Clancy), who can slaughter a simile, mutilate a metaphor, and do something truly unspeakable to a poor, defenseless descriptive passage.

Personally, I liked some of the runners-up and dishonorable mentions more than the actual winner (which was, admittedly, quite good… er, bad), but most of the entries are fine examples of prose gone horribly, horribly wrong. Enjoy! Or not. I’m not really sure.

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I’m cruising by the living room yesterday on the short trip back to the bedroom when the Soon-to-Be Mrs. calls from the couch, “While you’re there, could you turn up the air conditioning?” I sketch a little salute without breaking stride, pull up next to the thermostat, hover my finger over the temperature buttons and pause.

Turn up the air conditioning? Now, does that mean she wants it colder, as in, “Turn up the amount of cold air being produced,” or does she want it warmer as in, “Turn up the temperature”? If someone tells you to turn up the heat, that’s obvious. Make it warmer. An increase in heat equals an increase in temperature. But with air conditioning, the inverse is true. If I turn up the air, I’m turning down the temp. Is that what she actually wants?

I’m standing there pondering this when the SBM calls from the other room: “Did you turn up the AC yet? It’s freezing in here.”

Ah, there we go.

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My fiancee has created a new word for the growing Internet-age lexicon. She went to iTunes the other day, bought some music. Later, she was telling me about it and sort of stumbled in the telling. Did she download some music? That sounds like it was free. Did she buy some music? That only tells half the story. Did she buy and download some music? Accurate, but too wordy. She thought about it a second. What did she do?

Downbuy.

That’s it, folks. That’s the word to describe any sort of electronic purchase where you are able to download the content and use it immediately. You downbuy it. Past tense, downbought. Works with iTunes (music and video), Xbox Live or PlayStation Network content, Amazon Kindle books, or anything else you can buy online, download, and start using. “I’m going to go to iTunes and downbuy the new Burning Puppies CD.” It’s snappy, descriptive, and sounds just vaguely geeky enough to be considered cool by the Web folks.

Hey, it makes more sense than “LOL,” “pwn,” and whatever hell “teh roxxorz!!1!” is.

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