House of Eratosthenes

I work in a highly technical job and it continues to come as a surprise to me when I hear people there using the word “basically.” The B-word means, in my experience, that you’re stating something for the record because you want people to behave as if it’s really true, but you aren’t really willing to put your name up next to it without some insulator. That’s what the word “basically” is for, it is an insulator. It has no other purpose.

In my world, that means it might as well be a negator; it might as well be synonymous with “not.” Maybe that’s Dick Blumenthal’s problem, maybe he should have told people “I basically served in Viet Nam.”

I do hate that word.

I basically think poor Blumenthal is being given a bum rap here, and a raw deal. Basically, I agree with the old dictum that every time a democrat is caught lying, a Republican somewhere must have done the same thing, because there is basically perfect symmetry at work here. Basically, all they’re trying to do is help the “little guy” — who is basically you and me — and when they tell you something you can basically trust ’em.

And it’s such a tragedy this “anti-incumbent mood” is driving so many of them out of office. A real shame. Basically.

Well that’s because people use the word in places where it makes no sense. “Basically” means “in general, at the root of it all, this is its nature.”

He’s a basically decent fellow. So he’s decent at his core, but he does occasionally show rough spots.

Therefore, “I basically served in Vietnam” would be that “most of the time I served I served in Vietnam, but I occasionally ran a few missions elsewhere.”

So he’s lyin’.

Plus I don’t give a rat’s ass if a Republican did the same thing. Was it wrong? Then it was WRONG.

It’s like this whole “where were you when Bush was spending us into oblivion?” As if that somehow justifies Obama doing it faster, and we should just shut up about it.

I came up with this one tonight… Imagine you’re on a submarine, and one captain would let seals deteriorate and they started to leak. He had his engineers assure everyone that they had it under control, and he didn’t appear panicked, so those who weren’t really paying that much attention except for the annoying water they had to step in from time to time didn’t worry too much about it.

The next captain let more seals break, and actually used material from smaller seals to plug up bigger seals. The leaks got worse, but we were assured that if we did this, we could get to a better ship yard sooner and have repairs done properly.

But then this Charismatic Captain replaced him and started using all the gaskets that were any good to plug up holes in the officers’ quarters, while he told them all it was all in the interest of liquid fairness – to spread the leaks around, so that everything would be fair.

It was now obvious to more than half the crew that there was no way to pump the water out faster than it was coming in at this point. But most of the other half who had voted for this captain were still hoping somehow they’d be invited in to the Officers’ quarters for protection, and outwardly they didn’t want to appear to be guilty of poor judgment in their Captain selecting.

In response to the half the crew that was now for plugging up any hole with whatever they had, and for stopping the practice of cannibalizing seals for use in other places, the other half rebutted their pointing out how fast the ship was sinking by saying, “where were you when we had the previous Captain?” as if they had no right to try and save the ship today because they did not recognize the danger yesterday.
- philmon | 05/19/2010 @ 20:16
It’s like this whole “where were you when Bush was spending us into oblivion?” As if that somehow justifies Obama doing it faster, and we should just shut up about it.

Carping about it every damn night on some blog, that’s where.

Where were the peaceniks when Clinton was bombing the smithereens out of Serbia? That’s MY 25K question for the Left.
- cylarz | 05/19/2010 @ 23:09

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He Basically Served in ‘NamWednesday, May 19th, 2010

He Basically Served in ‘Nam
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010