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Grinds my Gears: People who speak (and act) in clichés (pg. 3)
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
You'd love this guy, the moment you met him. He's a martial arts expert and all about his eclectic hodgepodge of Buddhists and Native-American beliefs. The Ancients of Folderol and the Mystics from beyond the shroud of Gōngniú Fènbiàn course through his every breath. He is the truth and the light. |
so it begs the question, why the were you at an event that included this stick? |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
So, I'm at an event the other day and the speaker is dropping all of these trite little "life" slogans.
"If you lay the 'O' that begins 'opinion' on its side, it creates a hole for you to fall through." - This was my favorite, carefully punctuating his solipsistic diatribe about how he's acquired a "pocket full of them."
"Not very many people know the difference between the words, 'illiteracy' and 'illiterate.'" - This is among his more vexing.
It's so bad that I started coming up with ridiculous clichés of my own. "I always wake up in the morning but I never wake down." They are uttered with this almost grandiose pomposity, as though they are tied to some intrinsic, arcane wisdom which confers legitimacy on them. What is worse is that his audience seemed to be hanging on every word as though they were some sort of novelty.
How do you handle people like this? The last time someone used such a cliché in a conversation with me I made them cry without even meaning to hurt his feelings. He stopped talking, began breathing through his mouth, and his cheeks became rose red. For the rest of our time together, he just sat there, looking befuddled and forlorn with a thousand-yard-stare. |
You should format your posts like a wikipedia page. I want to click on some of those words so bad. |
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| Paradox Lost |
| I imagine most people use platitudes to further bolster a point they're making, or adopt them as a means of gleaming personal inspiration. To that end, it certainly doesn't bother me, but what does bother me is when they're issued as the sole and central rebuttal to an argument you're advancing. It's not too difficult to understand why, as they have a succinctness and rhetorical aesthetic that can be quite potent, if also an oversimplification of a topic that deserves a more nuanced treatment (and I concede that's not always true). |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
You'd love this guy, the moment you met him. He's a martial arts expert and all about his eclectic hodgepodge of Buddhists and Native-American beliefs. The Ancients of Folderol and the Mystics from beyond the shroud of Gōngniú Fènbiàn course through his every breath. He is the truth and the light. |
http://www.reiki.ca/index.htm |
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| Redd |
| quote: | Originally posted by dj_alfi
You should format your posts like a wikipedia page. I want to click on some of those words so bad. |
:p |
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| dj_alfi |
| quote: | Originally posted by Redd
:p |
It says click, not dick you pervert. |
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| knowhope |
While in Orlando, there was an Avatar convention in my hotel.
Avatar was created by Harry Palmer, who is infact a 15 year old member of Scientology. His creation is a splinter group of Scientology for his own fanancial personal gain.
Anyhow, while in the Hotel, the cult like attitude and mind set blew me away. It's exactly like the youtube video, except i had in my face, since they were constantly talking out of their ass. Since the experience, i've tried my hardest to represse my resentment towards these people, because i know my faith in humanity will crumble. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
At the risk of pedantry, you probably mean platitudes rather than clichés. |
Certainly more accurate.
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
so it begs the question, why the were you at an event that included this stick? |
Going back to college. It's part of my college's general education requirement. To be honest, I'm not very proud of it at my age but it seems to be a necessity given the depressed economy.
| quote: | Originally posted by Paradox Lost
I imagine most people use platitudes to further bolster a point they're making, or adopt them as a means of gleaming personal inspiration. To that end, it certainly doesn't bother me, but what does bother me is when they're issued as the sole and central rebuttal to an argument you're advancing. It's not too difficult to understand why, as they have a succinctness and rhetorical aesthetic that can be quite potent, if also an oversimplification of a topic that deserves a more nuanced treatment (and I concede that's not always true). |
There are the occasional conversational ones, dropped here and there to speak to a commonly accepted adage. "Do unto others", comes to mind as an example of what I'm referring to. This instructor is using them as though they were sacred revelations (i.e. The first St. Germaine Video) sometimes prefacing something he wants to expand on or even summing up his conclusions, when he isn't just saying them. Whether he defers to platitudes in an actual dialogue with students remains to be seen. He says that he'll never answer a question with a direct answer, favoring a Socratic dialogue where student questions are answered with another question. The example you're speaking to as objectionable brought to mind Robert Jay Lifton's thought terminating cliché (from p 429 of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China).
The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In thought reform, for instance, the phrase "bourgeois mentality" is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas or concerns, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| Nothing wrong with going back to school eddie! What will you be studying? |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
Nothing wrong with going back to school eddie! What will you be studying? |
Automotive technology, next Fall. (Thanks) |
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