ANNOYING WORDS. ONLY WORDS?

Annoying words can be found everywhere. In any book, on any TV show, and coming out of the mouths of people I like.

Go ahead and sweep your life clear of people who don’t respect your point of view, your ‘beliefs’, or the car you drive, and you’ll still be stuck with annoying words.

In fact, the words may come from people more annoying than those you cut from your ‘sharing our lives together’ group.

Now you’re stuck with annoying strangers.

One word has given me the creeps since it showed up on sports talk radio, sports talk television, and halftime of every game broadcast on any channel, and it keeps on giving:

I’ve seen too many sports geeks swoon over an athlete’s ‘physicality.’

But I do give them credit for adding to their vocabulary.

I was getting tired of hearing ‘Dumb Jock’ anyway.

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Now, I understand why doughy, out of shape men, guys who look like the either lived next to a bakery or grew up in the back of a pizza shack, are hired to comment on sports.

A guy like Brian Windhorst talking about the NBA, an association of the greatest athletes in the world, makes the rest of us feel comfortable.

When he’s on the screen the rest of us can kick back knowing he’s more of load than we are, and he’s on TV.

To tell the truth he makes me feel just like that. Now I’m thinking about adding another plate of food to my high school anniversary diet. Why not?

When men like Brian Windhorst talks about physicality he’s talking about LeBron James and his NBA James Gang.

Windhorst began covering James during his high school playing career, and began covering the Cavaliers in 2003, the year that James was drafted. While James was the youngest player in the NBA, Windhorst was the youngest traveling NBA beat writer.

When LeBron took his physicality to Miami, so did Brian Windhorst.

Annoying Words Travel

Just like you don’t need a gym rat to explain physicality, but it helps, transparency has similar problems.

As grown-ass adults we ought to know what is and what isn’t transparent.

In materials: Can you see through it?

In communication: Do words describe the actions proposed or taken?

Clear glass is transparent; public officials like to claim transparency.

We should believe what they tell us as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Which is why transparency is one of my annoying words.

If someone has to tell me they’re being transparent, then I’m suspicious of why they thought I might have doubts.

What don’t I know that I ought to know?

Can someone explain that to me like I’m a third grader?

As it turns out, there is that special someone who can explain it all in the most transparent way with all of the transparency needed to clear everything up.

Which brings this post to the third most annoying word on the list.

So far.

Indictment

This word doesn’t sound like it looks.

Where’s the transparency?

‘In dite,’ not ‘In dick?’

It’s popular among annoying words because of one guy.

Whether you think he’s a dick or not, he’s been indited, indicted, not indicked.

Without using tags or names, my criteria for a president, whether I voted for them or not, is ‘Can they do the job of keeping America from driving into a ditch?’

For some background:

Mobsters? Several mobsters.

Although this is an indictment against Trump, I see the plan for his defense unfolding. Slowly.

In Trump’s formative years there was a mafia guy wandering around his New York neighborhood in a bathrobe.

The Odd Father

In 1969, Gigante was indicted in New Jersey for a bribery scheme in which members of the Old Tappan Police Department would tip him off whenever he was being surveilled.

Now a capo, or captain, in the Genovese family, his higher profile brought a lot more heat than a foot soldier had to contend with, so Gigante went all-out and began his now-infamous pretense of mental illness to avoid prosecution.

His lawyers presented reports from psychiatrists at his trial that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and he was declared unfit to stand trial and the charges against him were dropped.

Gigante was said to continue to run the Genovese family from prison until 2003. That year, Gigante finally copped to faking his insanity in a plea deal on obstruction charges stemming from the 1990 and 1993 charges.

Gigante’s lawyer said after the plea, “I think you get to a point in life – I think everyone does – where you become too old and too sick and too tired to fight.”

Soon after, Vincent Gigante died in prison at the age of 77, following a more than 50-year run as one of America’s most powerful mobsters.

Dying in prison at age seventy-seven sounds bad.

It sounds even worse than annoying words.

Maybe it’s the physicality, or transparency, of the indictment.

Trump is 77 this year.