On Proofreading

Do it, do it, do it.

Even if its simply a fecebook status up date—matter fact, especailly if it's a facebook updat.

Like Rob Ford's face, words are great big fat things. Whenever an "X" of mine hit a brick wall in his rhetoric, he liked to drop the word respect—disrespect to be exact. The miscommunication at hand was ultimately reduced to an issue of respect: he wasn't getting it; I wasn't giving it. I was genuinely confused not because I necessarily felt his argument was confusing, but because I didn't understand how it was related to the concept of respect.

Other words have a similar ability to blanket meaning: love being a very obvious example. God, another.  These words can be used as stops. When they are spoken, we are stopped from getting any further.

A wise man once offered a very simple suggestion to me that affected great change in my life. During my dark days, weeks, months—(years!Don’ttellanyone)—I had obsessive conversations with myself over the "rationale" behind certain emotional responses I experienced in certain social situations (a blog for another day). I didn't feel that my emotions were rational; I felt, at many times, that I was being irrational.

"How about using the word reason, instead of the word rational?"

His suggestion made a dull, unclimactic sense to me. I decided to make the slight adjustment in my conversations with myself. It began to feel a little bit better. After awhile, I started trusting myself more. Today, reason is one of my top ten favourite words. Rationale carries with it a polarization between sanity and insanity; reason does not. Reason granted me power over my choices.

Reason trumps rationale.

When X felt I was disrespecting him, I would ask: "what do you mean?" He would be unable to answer the question. For him, there was no need to go beyond the word respect. He stopped there. It was incredibly boring.

The problem with respect, love, God, rationale is NOT that they can—and do—mean different things for different people. Rather, the problem can occur when the speaker does not accept responsibility for his/her word choice.

              No [word] is an island.