Monday, December 26, 2011

All The Smart People Are Saying...

This has been bothering me since yesterday.*  As is our wont on Sunday mornings, we watched McLaughlin Group and he was doing his annual year-end Awards Show where they all vote for things like "Best Political Comeback", "Lamest Apology", etc.  I don't remember what the specific topic of this one was, but McLaughlin had asked each guest to predict the outcome of something or other -- it may have been about Libya, but it doesn't matter.

Anyway, one of them prefaced his prediction by asserting, "All the smart people are saying...".

Here's the part that's got me bothered.  Does he mean the people who are saying "X" are saying it because they're smart or are they smart because that's what they're saying (i.e. agreeing with him)?

It strikes me as a wonderful phrase because it allows the person who hears it to interpret the information anyway s/he chooses to interpret it.  How wonderfully meaningless!

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*"bothering", as in "causing me to think about it bemusedly a couple of times", not as in, "the bastard who said this has ruined my life".

3 comments:

Eric said...

Dammit. You have to tell me what his prediction was so that I can say it too. Otherwise, I just have to guess and start spitting things out at random. E.g. "Adult diapers will be the new black." "Charlie Sheen will be the surprise Republican nominee after all the delegates at the GOP convention cast their ballots for 'None Of The Above'." "We will put a man back on the moon next year, but probably not all at once."

I can keep going, but it would be nice if you made it easier for me. Being a smart person is hard enough as it is.

Tom said...

It doesn't matter what "the smart people" were saying, because I guarantee it weren't Republicans who was saying shit. And y'all ain't Republican, so you automagically be a smart peep!

Nathan said...

All of the smart people are saying, "If Eric get into the club, we're changing our name and moving to Dubuque."