So I was contemplating the meaning of the phrase “… makes me happy” and realized that it means that in the presence of a certain thing, one cannot HELP being happy. Then I realized that’s what being around my girls is like – they MAKE me happy!
So if Fathers’ Day is, for the father, an opportunity to express what fatherhood feels like, well, that pretty much sums it up for me!
I’ll start by saying this certainly is no big deal. No jobs will be lost, heads will not roll, the sun WILL come up tomorrow (unless perhaps, you’re reading this on December 20th), but:
When two teams are playing a game against each other, and one team scores, I really wish commentators (and when did ‘commentators’ become a word – so they ‘commentate’, do they?) would stop saying the team that’s behind is ‘within‘ whatever the score differential is – to wit:
“…The Mudhens started the inning with a commanding lead of 6-1. Now with the grand slam, the Bulls have made a game of it by pulling to within 1!…”
Is it really ‘within’ one?
NO!
It’s just 1.
At least in baseball, scores are recorded as integers, so there’s never any fractional ‘phantom ground’ that would justify describing the difference between the leading and losing teams’ scores as ‘within’ any number, whole or otherwise. EVER!
OK – it’s an idiom. It’s also idiotic.
All my life I thought of Thomas Edison as the guy who invented all this cool stuff – a real hero. Now thanks to the history channel, I’ll only be able to think of him as the guy who electrocuted an elephant in public to ‘prove’ the falsehood that AC is more dangerous than DC.