Next time it's our overuse of "multiple" but right now we've got to question our overuse of "that's a good question". It's gotten way, way out of hand.

::::::::

When you say That's a good question
That makes me feel smart for about one second
But really I think it's a way of saying
That you are smart for recognizing a good question
But it is insulting to me because it insinuates
That my other questions were not very good

And so I ask you and everyone Please
Stop saying That's a good question
Say Wow OK I will try and answer that
Or I'll have to think about that a second
But please don't expect me to say
That's a good answer because I expect you

To answer all my questions well
Or to the best of your ability
OK Awesome Oh and another thing
Please don't say Awesome anymore
What do you mean by Awesome anyway?
Now that really is a good question

.........

Reflection: Chipping away at annoying shortcuts in the English language is not my thing. I actually enjoy falling back on pop-phrases that facilitate conversation between strangers. It helps us feel like we know each other when we use identical or predictable language, like "that's a good question" which I hear multiple times in interviews along with "awesome". By the way, I slipped "multiple" in because that is another word I think we have to stop using so much. We could really show off with that one with: numerous, various, sundry, quite a few, myriad, miscellaneous, multifarious, legion (that one has to come at the end of a sentence). I'll share what legion means: A legion was originally a horde or a large number of people or things. It was originally a term for a military unit. In Roman times, a legion was a large unit of men in the army, and the word is still used in a military context. However, it also means a whole bunch of people doing anything. But, as an adjective, it can refer to things besides people. You can say "His doubts were legion", but the sense is "hoardes" and so it really connotes "many of a bad thing" like a legion of Romans advancing over the hill, if you were a Celt on the battle field or Republicans if you are a liberal.

(Article changed on November 21, 2020 at 13:27)

(Article changed on November 23, 2020 at 18:14)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.