Ok, another Friday Quick Hits.
(so it's Jennifer Love Hewitt, so what?)
Really? Seriously? Ok, this is going to rankle some people. It might even raise some cockles. But starting or ending an incredulous statement with "Really?" or "Seriously?" has got to end. Such as, "You're late again, seriously?" or "Really? A hat in the movie theatre?"
It was, at one time, slightly funny and had a certain level of clever shit-giving. But now, it's just overload. It's saturated commercials now, and that is a clear indicator that it's jumped the olde shark. So, stop it.
Emphasis. This may be a bit tangential, but here we go. I'm not sure where this inability to speak comes from, but let me vent, ok? When a person says, "Long Beach" the emphasis is supposed on the word "Long." As a speaker you are saying it's "LONG Beach" as opposed to "HUNTINGTON Beach" or "VENICE Beach." But I hear, all too often, the word that is supposed to be emphasized, due to it being the determining descriptive factor, ends up NOT being emphasized. I keep hearing "Long BEACH." As opposed to all the other places here in southern California that start with the word "Long." Oh, wait, there aren't any other places. It's a laziness in speech. Again, stop it.
Kobe Bryant. I am a basketball realist. I love the Lakers and always have. But I'm also a realist. (No, Kobe isn't as good as Jordan, stop saying it.) I can look at players and say "he's killing us" and STILL like him. Not myopic, I suppose. But a celtic writer on ESPN focused only on Kobe's bad shooting in game 7 and 4 turnovers to downgrade his performance. But, that's just idiotic.
If you actually watched the game, here's what actually happened. Kobe shot like shit. Horrible shooting percentage. But, he DID do other things. 15 rebounds is huge. Also his defense cannot be overlooked. Take a look back. When he was on Ray Allen, Kobe was running around and through picks and basically giving it his all. But since he's Kobe, it's ignored. And when he was on Rondo, who killed the Lakers by driving to the hole, Rondo was totally kept out of the lane. He made Rondo, in the half court set, irrelevant. Sounds critical to me. So if you look at the box score you see a bad shooting night and some rebounds. If you watched the game, you saw a guy giving it his all on both ends and being amazingly effective. Now if we can just get him to stop taking all those shots. . . .
(oh, just a note, he DID play most of the year with one, and sometimes two, totally fucked up fingers on his shooting hand. Nobody ever brings that up. Oh yeah, it's because it's Kobe. I'm not Kobe lover or hater, but give the dude some credit, geeez)
What you call lazy speech is something that I think is probably a by-product of dialects. I'm not sure, but I think East Coasters and Midwesterners tend to emphasize the second word more (they say root BEER and ice CREAM, whereas we normal people say ROOT beer and ICE cream). Your LONG Beach example is interesting because for every other Beach city in Southern California I hear people emphasizing the noun rather than the modifier: LONG Beach seems to be the sole exception (Huntington BEACH, Hermosa BEACH, Newport BEACH, Redondo BEACH; as opposed to all those other Huntingtons, Hermosas, Newports and Redondos out there). We only say HUNTINGTON Beach when we really ARE trying to distinguish it from another place: "Did you say you were from HUNTINGTON Beach or SEAL Beach?"; otherwise, it's "Are you from Fountain Valley or Huntington BEACH"?
ReplyDeleteBut LONG Beach, except when uttered by these misguided soles you disdain, is almost always LONG Beach. Not sure why LONG Beach gets to be special; maybe it has something to do with those Iowans who settled By The Sea. No, that can't be it, they should have been pronouncing it the other way. It's a mystery.
(For those who don't know, "Iowa By the Sea" really WAS one of LB's many nicknames. It sorta fell by the wayside--or the seaside--for fairly obvious reasons. Nobody--not even a displaced Iowan--wants to seem THAT dorky.)