Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance—Albert Maysles
I’m often intrigued by the derivation of unusual expressions that have become common in our contemporary speech. I remember being amazed at learning where ‘a wet blanket’ came from, which I’ll leave up to you to search out for yourself. You have AI and Google now, neither one of which existed when I first got curious about this kind of linguistic creativity. But this return to probing the English language was rekindled for me recently while watching a show about warfare at the turn of the 20th century. One of the poor soldiers announced that he would ‘go over the top’, meaning he’d leave his trench to join the fighting. It struck me uniquely because I’d just been expressing my dislike for a performance I’d seen which was so ‘over-the-top’. I realized that all the excesses of that war-time reference were completely appropriate to the presentation I’d seen and rejected. I’ve often commented on being uncomfortable with writing that describes some kind of outrageous behavior that felt unrealistic to me. But why should that matter? I finally figured it out the other night when I was in a 92Y lecture about the work of America’s quintessential composer, Irving Berlin. Continue Reading
