Absence
If there are two things I’ve taught youngsters in my charge, they are:
-
Turn up.
-
Turn up on time.
Now some of the smareter rounds rightfully point out the redundancy in having.
- Turn up
When we’ve already got
- Turn up on time.
I admire these people, but I do reserve the right to look at an imaginary wristwatch when they do not turn up on time. They’ve clearly understood the lesson.
If you can’t work because of illness or family emergency, you can’t work. That’s fair, and people should get more than statutory sick pay if they genuinely can’t work.
But if you’e off every Monday, and every Saturday there are photos of you on social media looking pie eyed at four AM on a Sunday morning standing to a triffied and a man who looks like Gandlaf in a London basement club, I’m going to question that and the death of your fifth grandad.
Absolutely!
There are two kinds of people in this world when it comes to language: those who look words up in a dictionary, and those who do not.
You can forgive the former for struggling — maybe they’ve got literacy issues, sight problems, or were raised in a house with more vape cartridges than books. Fair enough. But the rest? The ones with eyes, brains, and broadband? No excuse.
People who say “Absolutely!” when they mean “Yes!” are not in the dictionary camp. They’re in Camp Parrot, eagerly regurgitating the noises their fellow parrots make, wasting everyone’s time and breath.
“Yes” has one syllable. “Absolutely” has four.
I suspect that’s the appeal.
In a time where everything’s accelerating and being smart has become a status symbol, “absolutely” feels like a shortcut to IQ.
And within their own cliques, it absolutely is.
The real tragedy? They have no idea what they’re actually saying.
“Absolute” means final. Complete. No more. The end.
“Do you want coffee?”
“Absolutely!”
“Oh good — I’ll begin drip-feeding it to you intravenously until the end of time. And while I’m at it, would you like all the coffee in the world? Coffee-coloured objects? A brown Honda Jazz?”
Pointing this out never helps.
They just smile inanely and say, “Absolutely!”
To be fair, we all do a bit of syllable inflation.
This was confirmed when I floated the idea with a colleague.
He nodded and said, “Affirmative. I agree.”
Still too many syllables.
But at least he knew what they meant.