Category: language

Like fashion, some phrases come along and — like capris pants or tribal tattoos — it suddenly seems like everyone is making use of them. One recent occurrence is “make no mistake” which, near as I can understand it, is a speaker’s attempt at emphasizing a point. However, whenever I’ve heard it, it’s come off condescendingly (and maybe that’s part of the idea, for all I know).

I knew that I couldn't be alone is my distaste for the phrase, but it was only recently that I came across some prose expressing as much. Writing for Slate Magazine, Timothy Noah is no fan of “make no mistake” (or, as he half-jokingly calls it, MNM) either:

[… ] “Read my lips” is funny—unless, of course, it’s spoken to a deaf person—and swagger always comes across better when it's leavened with humor. “Make no mistake,” on the other hand, are the words not merely of a bully, but of a bully who lacks panache. It practically begs for a defiant response. Listen, buddy, I’ll make a mistake whenever I goddamn well feel like it.

I think Noah was able to capture my feelings on this one. At first, when trying to figure out my distaste for the phrase, I thought that maybe it was because the speaker was being redundant (after all, who intentionally makes mistakes?). Thinking further, and looking at it from the perspective that Noah offers, I think he’s right — by chiding the listener not to make mistakes, the speaker is implying that the listener is prone to making them. Well, that’s not very hospitable, now is it?

I suppose that I can only count down this phrase’s fifteen minutes. With any luck, it’s merely a passing fad of the pretentiarati.

I was familiarized with the idea of “sunken costs” during Jason Fried’s 2005 panel at SXSW on How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams. I had heard the term before, but didn't entirely grok its meaning until Jason went over a few anecdotes (in the context of small teams, natch). One example he gave is that a small company may buy a new server with the expectation that they’ll need it as part of an upcoming project; however, when it comes to the stage in the project, if it no longer makes sense to use the server, then it shouldn't be used (since the money is gone, either way).

I've internalized this thought process for my personal life, to some extent, but I haven’t really been able to explain it well to others. I ran across an entry in Wikipedia on Sunk Costs which I thought explained it fairly well:

Economists argue that, if you are rational, you will not take sunk costs into account when making decisions. In the case of the movie ticket, there are two possible end results. You will either have:

1. Paid the price of the ticket and suffered watching a movie that you do not want to see, or;
2. Paid the price of the ticket and used the time to do something more fun.

In either case, you have “paid the price of the ticket” so that part of the decision should cancel itself out. If you regret buying the ticket because you do not think the movie is worth the money then your current decision should be based on whether you want to see the movie at all, regardless of what you have paid for it — just like deciding whether you want to go to a free movie. […]

Or, put another way, here’s a scenario that may have occurred to you in real life. Suppose that you go out for dinner, enjoy the entree, and afterwards order a slice of chocolate cake from the dessert menu. Perhaps your eyes were bigger than your stomach, though and you start to become full halfway through the cake. At this point, there are two ways this could end up — either you will have:

1. Paid for the chocolate cake but eaten all of it anyway, or…
2. Paid for the chocolate cake but refrained from finishing the slice

Either way, you’ve paid for the cake. So, you may as well base your decision on whether to finish eating the slice on factors other than whether you’ve paid for the cake :).

It would be untrue to say that “ironically, I don’t understand what irony means”. Not that I understood the understood the nuances behind irony (until recently), but that the sentence itself wouldn’t be an example of irony. If all this is too meta too soon, I’ll back up a bit.

I’ve become aware that many Americans misunderstood the meaning of “irony”, equating it with a gap between what is expected and what actually happens, such as saying “ironically, I encountered a traffic jam when I was already late”. I hesitated in using the word until recently as I didn’t want to contribute to that blunder. A trip to Wikipedia has helped clear up the nature of irony, though.

At first, I skimmed through the article, but that only made me more confused. After reading it more carefully, though, a tidbit towards the beginning helped shed some light on it — “A common metaphor for using irony is to ‘have your tongue in cheek.’”. And, an example that they give is that saying “Lovely weather outside!” — when it's actually raining — would be irony.

So, is irony the same thing as sarcasm, then, you might ask? Well, as I understand it, sarcasm is a subset of irony, with the addition that sarcasm also includes an aspect of ridicule. Anyway, I’m obviously a master of irony now. (See? That’s irony in action ;). )

I ran across gemütlichkeit in Wikipedia and I like its connotation of “a cosy place”, but with a meaning conveying more than just “cosiness”:

Gemütlichkeit is a German abstract noun whose closest English equivalent is cosiness. However, rather than basically just describing a place as not too large, well-heated and nicely furnished (a cosy room, a cosy flat), Gemütlichkeit connotes, much more than cosiness, the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the spending of quality time in a place as described above. […]

The article went on to say that Queen Victoria was one of the first to use the adjective gemütlich in English; since it seems to be a useful word, I might be inclined to do the same. How would it be pronounced, though? Something like geh-MUTE-lish?