Existentialism

Every so often and more often than not words comes along that almost everybody likes to use in a simple sentence. It’s mostly used on cable news shows by erudite and professorial news wonks. You know like Lawrence O’Donnell, Brian Williams, or Anderson Cooper. Talking heads with a vocabulary bought from Saks Fifth Avenue or Nordstrom’s. Spoken to folks like us who got our vocabulary from Wal-mart or Old Navy. None the less a word or two over used to the point that almost everyone we encounter uses these words either semi-expertly or recklessly. But used too often. I’ve heard people use one of these words surrounded by single syllable words. People obviously using a multisyllabic word to impress his or her friends. Look at me, I can say and use big words in a sentence.

And the word TV folks love to use the most is “Existential.” Meaning to exist or being in existence. Often combined with the phrase ‘existential threat.’ Ignoring a phrase like ‘danger does exist.” Or the existing threat is…” But exist is a nice simple two syllable word. Most anybody could easily understand.

But media people love big hard to pronounce and hard to understand words. Just to keep we simple minded people off guard or impressed.

There is an existential problem here. Most of us are not impressed. I’ll watch Antique Road show instead. And don’t get me started on ‘Infrastructure.’ And you can take the over used words calculus or algorithms and shove it.