Gallimaufry with Forbidden Phrases

• According to John Rentoul of the British newspaper The Independent, these phrases should be banned due to overuse. He tips his hat to George Orwell, all well and good, but someone in the comments notes that the Irish satirist Brian O’Nolan also eviscerated bureaucratese in his day, which was even earlier.

• Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is a staple of introductory psychology classes. But Gary Lachman (a/k/a Gary Valentine of Blondie, etc.) at The Daily Grail notes that it can take some odd twists in the world of the esoteric: “Maslow’s vision of a kind of Brahmin caste of ‘self-actualizers,’ uninterested in the kind of material gratification that most people desire, and oriented toward more ‘spiritual’ concerns, is a recurring fantasy in the world of occult politics.” Read the rest.

• If you have a book proposal in mind, does it include zombies? Get on the zombie bandwagon! Consider this one: “Christ, mythras [sic], and Osiris as zombie archetypes – a new spirituality for a new age…”

• Odd manners of dying in sixteenth-century England.

One thought on “Gallimaufry with Forbidden Phrases

  1. Pitch313

    Yes! The Language Security Agency ought to ruthlessly frisk us before we utter a single overused word. And confiscate those words out of our mental carry-on baggage before we get to take a seat on the Conversation Airlines flight.

    We have met the zombies, and they–because everybody knows that a zombie is the person whose brains it most recently ate–are us and our pop culture heritage…

    The perils of brainification among self-actualized zombies…They can’t eat just one, like the the hordes of the as-yet-unrealized zombies.

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