The Words, the Words: Wow!

From the Lingo Corner

"I know the truth of what I was trying to say," says North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, "but I should have chosen different words." Some of the words he did choose, with regard to the Holocaust and Michelle Obama and the songs of Beyonce and the movie Black Panther and survivors of the Parkland shooting, are filth, satanic, stench of human waste and Media Prosti-tots. He has not specified, so far as I know, which different words he should have chosen to get the same thoughts across.

You know what Hegel would say: The dialectic of form and content is the negative aspect of Appearance through which Appearance proves to be Actuality. (Better in the original.)

Words so often put up a resistance to being tossed about. An actress named Rebel Wilson the other day referred to a fellow actor as "a massive asshole." He denied, in a statement, that he was one; but he passed up the chance to point out a problem with the very phrase "massive asshole." The two words conflict: massive implies not only heavy but solid. "Massive prick," I realize, would have seemed complimentary, but "massive asshole"? Don't people ever take words for real anymore?