0:02 Who are you and where are you going? What do you want? [Music] Little technical difficulties there.
0:37 Hello and welcome to Jiggers's Place. I'm your host Kevin Bemel and uh I'm here every other Thursday at 5:00 PM Pacific time to have a cocktail and a smoo as we say. Uh so my topic for today is uh turns out to be unfortunately uh m much more timely than I intended it. So I choose my topics at least a week in advance, sometimes many many weeks in advance. This one I I just
1:12 happened to choose previous Friday. And uh I'm I'm we're we're meeting today, the day after uh hopefully no matter what your political leanings are, the assassination of a leading political figure in our country, uh Charlie Kirk, uh who without getting into a long biography of of Mr. Kirk. He was a young man, 31 years old, who was very well known on
1:49 the political scene, especially on college campuses. Uh he started an organization called Turning Point, which sought to help engage uh younger people in political discussions and the political process here in in this country. and he was at an event at a university in Utah yesterday and um from 200 yards away a a an assassin uh shot and killed him. Uh it's it's a shocking event for our
2:25 country and as someone who was alive in the late 1960s and early 1970s and lived through the assassinations of Robert Kennedy Jr. But I I did live through the the assassination of uh John Kennedy, although I was only three years old at the time. Uh I but I I I'm I remember uh the day that uh Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I was at school and our teachers were informed and I remember my
3:01 teacher in particular sitting at her desk and crying. Um I was alive when uh the Reverend uh Dr. Martin Lu Martin Luther King Jr. uh was assassinated. Um and uh when uh the same is true of of Malcolm X, um we haven't we haven't seen this level of political violence in roughly half a century, it's extremely disturbing and I think that um without getting into a
3:39 long discussion of the reasons for it, my the topic for today's show lang language inflation I think is one of the problems and uh while I won't be focusing uh solely on language that is oftentimes used in politics um I will be mentioning a couple um that you typically hear in uh I wouldn't even call them political discussions frankly political diet tribes and it's very unfortunate
4:14 Um I I think it creates a climate where um people feel excused if not compelled to commit the the kind of violence that uh took Charlie Cook's life and left his wife and children of ages one and three years old fatherless. So um a little bit of a somber note on on which to start um this afternoon's show. I do think it's appropriate in the light of flags flying at half staff uh
4:49 today. Um but uh and and so I you know I thank you for you know for for for joining me today. I I will be honest. I I thought about cancelling today's show. It's it's uh at least for me again as someone who grew up in a previous time of political violence in the United States a disturbing uh time to to live through again. Uh but um you know in in in any event I hope that uh today's topic will
5:25 uh resonate with you perhaps a little bit more deeply in light of the events that uh have occurred recently. So, as always, we're going to mix a cocktail first. And um the cocktail I'm I'm mixing, if you if you on my email list, you get the recipes uh in in the morning of of the show. This one is called the awesome crisis, which contains within it two language inflated words. Uh and uh it's it's a ginbased cocktail.
6:00 It's not really a riff on anything that I can think of. Uh it's not it's not a blue Hawaiian, although it uses blue curacal. It's not really anything related to a martini to my way of thinking. Uh so it's a it's a pretty original cocktail. Um but it is a gin based cocktail and I'm going to be using tangare number 10. Now I'm a big fan of tang gin. Uh the difference between just regular Tangare and Tangare number 10 is um in in a couple of areas. One is there are a lot
6:36 more botanicals used in Tangare number 10. Uh several of which have a more citrusy um uh flavor to them. So that's number one. And number two, it's this tangray number 10 is distilled in small batches in pot stills uh as opposed to regular tangray which is distilled in column stills. So this is a a much finer expression of of tangray gin. Uh and and as a result it is more expensive than
7:12 regular tangare. But if you're looking for something a little bit different to kind of upgrade your gin cocktails, es especially if you like martinis like me, uh tang number 10 is is a terrific gin. So I'm going to using that as my gin. Uh blue curacal. I'm using dipers. Um this is D Kyper is is one of the uh few uh kosher certified uh lure makers and they they upgraded their look and their labels a few years ago. So this is this
7:48 is pretty slick. Blue Curac is an orangebased liquor. I talked about that I think maybe two weeks ago or maybe four weeks ago um about the different orange flavored liquors. Gonna have some simple syrup and some fresh lemon juice. So, I've got my shaker and off we go to mixing. So, we're going to start out with an ounce and a half of gin. Go that line. There's already ice in in the shaker.
8:27 Start out with some gin. And we're going to use 3/4 of an ounce of blue curacal. Just going to take us to the middle of that one. Okay. And a half ounce of simple syrup. There are a number of simple syrups out there. Simple syrup is just really a mixture of sugar and water. So, uh nothing to I used to make my own. Uh or
9:03 I have made my own in the past. Um I'm just using this is master of mixes simple syrup. Um but there are other ones out there, a number of which are are so okay. Okay. So, half oz of simple syrup, half oouncez of fresh lemon juice, and we're going to shake it. Uh, if you get the recipes, it says shake it for 15 seconds. A little longer than that is okay as well. We want to make sure, as I always mention when we shaking cocktails that uh
9:39 in addition to mixing the the various ingredients, there's also an opportunity for some of the ice to melt because the water opens up the flavors. So, give it a couple more seconds here. If you if you're using a a shaker, um a metal shaker I should say, which is most of them are, you'll see it's nice and frosty on the outside. See if you can see that. And that's a good sign that you've you've shaken it enough. Okay. And I've got my highball glass. This is something I
10:14 inherited from my grandmother. It has a bee um monogram on it. Oops. And we're going to Oops. Take that whole top off. You want to strain it into a eyeball glass with ice. And we're going to top it off with a little bit of sparkling water, soda water from the siphon here. And we're going to garnish it with a lemon wedge. Give this a try.
10:55 Ah, very refreshing. Great on a on a tough day to get us going. Okay, see you on the couch.
11:53 Sorry about that. Notice the uh lovely blue color. That's of course due to the blue curacal and uh it gives it that kind of luminous feel and the soda water which adds some carbonation makes it quite nice. So getting to our topic, for those of you who are regular watchers of the show, you have probably noticed I have in the six years that I have been
12:32 broadcasting, I've probably used the word awesome twice, if that. It's not in my everyday lexicon. And there's a very specific reason why. It's it's not that I don't encounter things that are awesome. It's that most of the things that I'm told are awesome are frankly pretty everyday. They're pretty pedestrian.
13:08 And because I value relationships so highly, I put a a very very high premium on effective communication. Now to to communicate effectively I think requires accurate word selection and the conveyance of
13:44 the proper amount of emphasis on a particular topic And so if we think about what the word awesome really means, it comes from the word awe, which means to stand in wonderment at the astonishing greatness
14:19 of a phenomena. a phenomenon. And the fact of the matter is most of the things that we encounter each day don't rise to that level. So they're not awesome. And I I've had people tell me on a, you know, from time to time that something I did was awesome or something I said was awesome. And if I know them well and if if I don't know them very well, I just sort of shine it on and and move on with it.
14:56 If I know them well, I will sometimes ask them why they think what I've said or done is a source of astonishing wonderment. And no one has ever been able to explain to me why they said my speech or actions rose to that level. And the fact of the matter is they didn't. Okay? I'm not awesome. The things I say and do are not awesome.
15:32 Hopefully they're relevant. Hopefully hopefully the things I say are relevant and food for thoughts. Hopefully the things that I do reflect my intention to be a good man, but they're not awesome. Right? So awesome is my most frequent example of language inflation. Sometimes I'll ask a friend who uses the term
16:10 awesome if this thing that you just called awesome is indeed truly awesome. So what is the birth of a child? What is the What is a a falling star or a meteor? What indeed is God?
16:48 If something so every day is awesome, what word do we use to describe these phenomena that are rare, astonishing, and in the case of God, so all-encompassing that human perceptabil humans ability to perceive is too limited to actually understand the greatness of God. Right. So it's it's become a thing that we say
17:26 that has lost its meaning. And that's the other problem I think with language inflation is we take words that once had a profound meaning and render them for all intents and purposes meaningless. And that's a shame because instead of enriching our lives and the lives of our friends, loved ones, we diminish them. English is
18:02 perhaps the most word-filled language in the world today. Whereas Hebrew, the language of the Bible, is made up of roughly 20,000 root words. English has somewhere between one and two million words. And while we we will list many you know many words as synonyms
18:37 indeed there are slight variations of meaning so that in reality rarely are two words literally synonyms. And so to diminish the communicative nature of of of our language by inflating a word to the point where it's meaningless is really a shame.
19:15 So let me let me give you some other words. that uh that I think are frequent victims, shall we call them, of language inflation. So, one of them is crisis. Have you noticed that every problem that we have is now a crisis? It's not a problem, it's a crisis. Whether it's
19:52 just something happening to an individual or whether it's something societal, it's a crisis. So we have a crisis of obesity, right? And for an individual, if they're overweight, I have a crisis in my life. Neither one of those are true. It is it is a fact that the number of people in the United States who qualify as obese
20:28 is much higher today than it was half a century ago. And there's pretty readily understood reasons why that's the case. There have been some significant, shall we call them, missteps by public health officials and and people who uh review and deal with nutritional standards. There have been there's been a tremendous increase in in uh in the sedentary nature of work and
21:06 lifestyles in the United States. And there has also been a deemphasis on exercise as part of a healthy life. Even as people who are dedicated to exercise sometimes become ever more fanatically so. And finally, there has been an attitude adopted that uh eating healthy and exercising and and
21:41 aspiring to live a healthy fit life isn't necessary. So, all of those things are unfortunate. They're all problems, but they're not a crisis. They don't signal the imminent destruction of our society. They just don't. That's not to say that they're not that that it's not a significant problem or a problem that our society has
22:20 really not addressed for decades. Yes, all of those are correct. But it's not a crisis. And to and unfortunately because every problem is now labeled as a crisis. What happens when there really is a crisis? What do we call it when there's an earthquake that causes a reactor meltdown that leads to a significant release of
22:58 radio act radioactivity like there was in Japan in 2011 when there was an earthquake and a tsunami that caused a meltdown at the Fukuima nuclear power plant that released that released a an enor an an well I don't know enormous is too big that released a large radioactive plume that oh by the way my ship the USS Ronald Reagan sailed through multiple times as we sailed north and south along the coast of Japan that's a crisis
23:33 there were people who couldn't get food who couldn't get water who had insufficient clothing. They lost literally everything and they were in imminent danger of dying. That's a crisis. Most of what we have going on here in the United States, it's not they're not crises. They're problems. And they're problems of long duration
24:09 that continue to get worse. because for whatever reason as a society we choose not to to deal with them in any serious way but they're not a crisis. They're not a crisis. Why is this important? Because when we label something as a crisis, a crisis usually can be dealt with with a high level of activity, a huge
24:45 burst of activity over a short period of time and then the crisis is either reverted if it was a looming crisis or the crisis was dealt with. In the case of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, my ship, we flew helicopters in uh with water, food, and clothing to help the people out until the Japanese authorities could get regular vehicular access to these areas and set
25:22 up a long-term recovery plan. So to call something a crisis that really requires a marathon to solve is a problem and it actually works against solving the problem. Okay, so that's another one. The next one I want to talk about is depressed. You hear people talk about this all the time. What's wrong? Oh, I'm depressed. Why are you depressed?
25:57 Oh, I got a bad grade on a paper. Oh, I had a problem at work and my boss is mad at me. Did you get fired? No. Are you going to get fired? No. Depression, in case we missed it, right, is a clinical psychological assessment. Most of us are sad
26:32 or blue. That used That's a great term, right? Blue. I'm feeling blue. But we're not actually depressed. We haven't received a clinical diagnosis that requires mental health counseling and perhaps uh some sort of psychiatric treatment. And I would argue there's something slightly narcissistic in describing our sadness
27:08 or our you know blue feelings as being depression. It's it's elevating the problems in our lives to almost cataclysmic proportions which is essentially telling ourselves they're beyond our capacity to cope or it's beyond our capacity to cope. It's a very disempowering message to tell ourselves.
27:43 We're better off saying to ourselves, "I'm sad. I'm feeling blue. I'm upset." Those are much more manageable. Well, they're f first of all, in most cases, they're probably more accurate, much more manageable, and something and and a situation that allows us to be more resilient than the clinical case of depression.
28:19 Okay, that's number three. Number four, calling people with whom we disagree Nazis. Now, as a Jew, to call someone in contemporary American society a Nazi is is candidly not just language in inflation. It's offensive. The Nazi party and dedicated members of
28:58 that party were responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews and estimates are as high as at least a million other people including Slavs, blacks, mentally ill people. They were mass murderers on an industrial scale. I have yet to see anyone in the United States
29:34 who is advocating for mass murder on an industrial scale, let alone actively seeking to pursue it. And this is a particular particularly heinous example of language inflation because if our political opponents are Nazis, what is somebody like Vladimir Putin who is
30:10 in many ways looking to exterminate his enemies in Ukraine? For example, what is an organization like Kamas who roughly two years ago attempted the systematic elimination of Jews and by the way would systematically eliminate any individual with whom they disagreed. I mean I mean are they super evil Nazis?
30:52 So here again we have a problem. the the people with whom we differ with here in the United States, they may be uneducated, misguided, duped, maybe even stupid, but they're not Nazis, you know. Sorry, they're not. And by the way, this goes no matter which side of the political spectrum
31:30 on which you fall. Now, that's not to say that there aren't neo-Nazis here in the United States. Of course, there are. They're they're kind of silly. You know, for my view of neo-Nazis in the United States, I refer you to the Blues Brothers movie and Henry Gibson and his, you know, group there. You know, that's about as effective as the Nazi party is here in the United States. I it's it's frankly very hard to take
32:05 them seriously. Okay. Another example of language inflation. Okay, by the way, very closely related to that is the term fascist. This is another term that's thrown around. Fascists are evil. Bonito Mussolini, evil. Joseph Stalin, evil. Mount Dong evil. Fidel Castro evil.
32:42 There are no fascists in contemporary American politics. Sorry, there aren't. Not one of them has refused to leave office when not reelected andor sought through political violence to maintain their position in the government. Now, that's not to say that there aren't
33:18 politicians who do things that we may not that we may vehemently uh with with which we may not vehemently disagree. There there certainly are politicians who at least seem to want to cretail what we view as as our rights, whether it's free speech or whatever. But the fact of the matter is the systems in the United States are very strong. And even if these people temporarily
33:54 seem to be able to hold a hegemonic influence over us, they eventually get found out. And those those attempts to unduly control us get shunted to the side. They're not fascists. Not in any true definition of what those terms have meant throughout history. And again, to label them so. So then if they're fascists, what is Xien uh Xi in in China
34:34 who forces the weaguers to go through re-education or face being killed. Okay. All right. Unbelievable. All right now, this is one of the ones that I struggle not to use because sometimes
35:11 it seems like things that happen are unbelievable, but the reality is they may be unexpected, but they're not unbelievable. Unbelievable literally means they are beyond belief. In contemporary America, in the world as it sits today, is there really anything that's beyond belief? I mean, sadly, is it beyond belief that Charlie Kirk was assassinated?
35:48 And I think unfortunately the answer is no. It's not beyond belief. Not because it happened, but because what's been going on in our society for the last two decades has certainly created conditions where something like this could happen. Things just aren't unbelievable. I mean, they're surprising. They are disturbing and sad
36:27 but unbelievable. Unbelievable would be a huge meteorite striking the earth. We and even that's not literally unbelievable but such a phenomenon that hasn't happened since the destruction of the dinosaurs. That would be unbelievable. But not unfortunately for good or for bad not the things that happen in society today. Society is too freewheeling.
37:02 It h it's too constraintfree. And so a claim of unbelievability is difficult if not impossible to sustain. Here's one of my favorites. Literally. Literally means take my words at face value. There was literally a million people.
37:37 Blah blah blah blah blah. Really? Literally a million people? Probably not. No. Figuratively, there was a million people, but not literally. Literally now is used to emphasize whatever it is we're saying, but it's being used in a completely untrue way. And if I mean when we use the word literally
38:13 as an emphasizer I think today what we do is we tell people don't believe what I'm saying or at least have a doubt about the veracity of my statement. And again this is another one that I struggle with. I saved the ones I struggle with for for the end. Mayalpa, right? I I I'll find myself saying literally, and I'm about to say, and then I say, well, wait, not literally.
38:52 Here's what I was going to say. I have to back off. saved literally for when it were saying the actual truth. It was literally freezing. Really? Literally fe freezing. It was below 32 degrees. Oh, well, no, it wasn't that cold. It was 45. Ah, it seemed like it was freezing. Okay. Now, by the way, when I was stationed in Germany, there were days when it was literally freezing. It was
39:29 literally that cold. It was in the high 20s uh Fahrenheit. It was below zero centigrade. Cover both temperature systems or two temperature systems anyway. Right. It was so hot I was burning up. Well, that's interesting. You're still here. If you were burning up, wouldn't flames have consumed you? Right now, I'm giving you some silly examples, but but it's through the silly examples
40:04 that we acclimate ourselves to language inflation. So, let's maybe watch our tongues a little bit more carefully. Okay, my final example is always and never. These people always really always literally every single time. No, this is this is another one that I I find myself going all I go I always No,
40:42 not and then I have to back I have to back off. No, not always. These drivers never stop at stop signs when I'm walking. Never. That's not true. First of all, all the Whimos always stop at stop signs. They do. They all Well, as far as I've observed, because they're programmed to stop at stop signs. They can't break a stop sign the way a live driver can.
41:22 What we mean is frequently or almost never, right? That's really what we're saying. But we feel like we have to emphasize it to get the person to really believe us. Right? You can tell like with a hand, right? And it's a shame because we're accreing to ourselves a level of certainty and moral appropriation or disapprobation that we don't have.
42:00 And for someone who cares about the truth, we're explaining to them that we can't be trusted. And so to go back to where I started, oops. If we care about relationships, then we should care about communication. We should care about building mutual trust.
42:38 Mutual trust shouldn't come from the sense that somebody agrees with everything we say. That's pardon me. That's not a that's not a mature basis for establishing trust. Oh, this person agrees with me, therefore I can trust them. That works right up until the point where they do something that shows you they shouldn't you shouldn't have trusted them. Someone is trustworthy for a number of reasons and one of them is fidelity to telling the truth.
43:19 People who inflate language have a lower fidelity to the truth. than people who seek to use language accurately and in a communicative fashion. So for those of you who really seek to build quality relationships, for those of you who are seeking something you can do
43:55 to change what's happening in our society today, I encourage you, I beg you, estu language inflation. Let's embrace the beauty, the fullness, the richness of English. Take a moment to search for the for the accurate word to describe what it is you're communicating to another person.
44:34 It's a tough task. We're so acclimated to just speaking in the most inflated, even inflammatory way. If you care about your loved ones, if you care about our society, let's put a circle with a line through language inflation. So I thank you so much for joining me. I wish you a wonderful evening,
45:12 a great day tomorrow, and a restorative weekend. And I look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you so much for joining me and signing off as I always do. Marie darling, you are my bell. Courage at all times, my friends.