Good morning, digital neighbors! Happy Tuesday, Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Later Dayers, Conversants & Lurkers—all milling around at the Report. Hey there, Misfits, PHAM and Political Homeless chilling out at Phetasy, and finally all of you ADD Irregulars, WSM Curators, and Curmudgeons stirring it up, Padre’s! Happy Tuesday to all you outliers of the internet and seekers beyond the headlines.

Your word for the day: verbigerated

According to the W3 [or Merriam-Webster], to verbigerate simply means “to repeat a word or sentence endlessly and meaninglessly.” The OED categorizes the verb as a pathological term and defines it as “to go on repeating the same word or phrase in a meaningless fashion, as a symptom of mental disease.”

Verbigerating should sound and feel familiar; it is the way of the nightly news and now a pathological habit of all mainstream media news and commentary. I think the first time I experienced it was after 9/11 and the fixation on the term “cadaver dogs,” which up to that point I had never heard. It got more mileage under Hitler 1.0, G.W. Bush—you probably don’t remember him, but he too was Hitler. Ebony & Ivory delivered us from him for 8 years and led us to the promised land of greater racial division and societal fragmentation, all the while the MSM was there feeding you your word for the day with a relentless consistency that would make Sesame Street or the Electric Company envious.

I never thought I would see critical thinking so easily replaced by the repetition of phrases fed to us by our cultural overlords. “Four legs good, two legs bad.” Well, that is how it started, but not how it ended. I have held this from the beginning of my adult years (I think I got there by my 40s): no one or thing is above question or thoughtful criticism. It doesn’t mean we have to be inherently disagreeable or suffer from some sort of oppositional disorder, but we can and are free to ask questions, to offer criticism, and to seek greater context if there is one.

Under the Don, verbigeration became the new way of life. It was an endless stream of pushed phrases and talking points: Russian collusion, fine people hoax, and an endless torrent of phrases filled his first term. It was all tiresome. I guess the silver lining was that by 2020 I was so used to being lied to by the MMSM, so exhausted with hearing repeated phrases, that the introduction of new phrases automatically made me more suspicious and less cooperative. I didn’t ride the “If it can save at least one life” train for long in 2020. To repeat a phrase that is impossible to evaluate while you adopt practices that are doubtful is not my cup of coffee. At least there was a record low of the flu cases in 2020 because everyone obeyed. S u r e there was. Ever a skeptic, never a cynic.

I get that many people want to be led; I wish we lived in a time that produced better leaders. We live on the vapors of a society of trust from our Judeo-Christian roots, all the while decaying from within through the cultivation of a culture of lies and manipulation. I am hopeful that we are not too far gone, but I know the further we fall from the foundation, the more difficult it is to restore it. I am hesitantly hopeful, but I fear that many will need greater pain before they can snap out of their adoptive mental state of verbigerated thinking. Prayers and peace.

Mountain Sunrise - Ales Krivec - Unsplash