The Ol' Bloviator realizes that he has been indulging in some heavy petting of his peeves here lately, and he chooses to chalk this up to our God-awful weather rather than the onset of old age, although he is fairly certain that Ms. OB would dispute this point. It seems that he is getting especially fractious on the matter of word usage, perhaps because he sees ungrammatical and obfuscatory language as a sign of a society coming intellectually and morally unhinged. What set him off this time was this story about a young woman who describes her actions in getting soused, driving the wrong way on a busy highway and causing the deaths of two innocent people as "a horrible decision." At face value, this assessment should be a finalist for the Understatement Hall of Fame except that it probably should not be taken at face value because clearly she did not, as old Mr. Webster understands decide,"come to a resolution in the mind as a result of consideration" before acting as she did. She simply got drunk and engaged in criminally irresponsible behavior that produced tragic consequences and would have been no less criminally irresponsible if those consequences had somehow been avoided. In this case, the young lady has already done some hard time in the pokey and, to her infinite credit, she is now dedicating herself to at least keeping others younger than she from doing what she did, even if she is doing so in language that seems to mitigate--if not trivialize it. For other examples, there's an Ohio woman's response to the report that a friend of hers had robbed a bank and then sped away with his six-year-old daughter in the car with him: "People make bad decisions." Then there's the ardent Tennessee fan who described a football player's actions in observing a hold up and then jumping in a getaway car where police supposedly found drugs as the young student-athlete's " 2nd bad decision on record." The first, by the way, was apparently failing a previous drug test. Finally, let's look at that virginal paragon of virtue, Miley Cyrus who bemoaned her "bad decision" after being caught on video taking a big long pull on a bong allegedly filled with salvia. (The OB confesses at this point that he did not realize this particular herb had such potency, and he hopes sincerely that this new knowledge will not lead him to make a you-know-what by raiding his neighbor's front yard and enjoying a toke or two himself.)
What it all boils down to is this: Describing everything from armed robbery to sexual assault to shoplifting as a "bad decision" amounts to putting them in the same category as wearing a polo shirt to a first-time meeting with an uptight potential client or, as the OB regrettably did, buying a chunk of Delta bonds on the supposition that such a big, busy airline could never go under. The appeal of this together inappropriate conflation is that it blurs the distinctions between behavior that anyone not raised by wolves surely knows is morally wrong and behavior that is simply ill-advised, or premised on fallacious information or assumptions.
You may feel that the OB is being particularly harsh (not to mention narrow-minded and a trifle tight-assed) in taking this stance, but let me assure you that when it comes to both bad decisions and bad behavior, his record gives him no choice but to be all for forgiveness . However, if we want to assess the effect of repeatedly describing the latter as the former in order to make it seem more forgivable we need only consider how many times we've heard the phrase "series of bad decisions" used in the same sentence with the likes of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan.
This morally-freighted shift in syntax is only slightly less troubling to the OB than today's utterly casual employment of suggestions of superior virtue or faith as a marketing tool. When he heard that something called "Integrity Bank" had failed, he felt sorry for the shareholders, of course, although he couldn't help but think that the poor souls should have known better. The OB would never have ventured into that establishment to use the restroom, much less make a deposit that actually went in the vault. When he's looking for a building contractor and runs into one who touts his own faith and talks about how "blessed" he is, the OB knows it's back to the Yellow Pages for him. After all, when he and Ms. OB were building their last domicile, the electrician, a self-styled evangelist who was not the least bit shy about quoting Scripture or invoking the Good Lord, was unfortunately the least dependable of all the subcontractors by far. He had sworn, however, that he would be there on a particularly critical occasion when some of the other subs needed to get together with him in order to continue what they were doing. Suffice it to say, the day crept by and he never showed. The next time I saw him, I asked why he had not come, and he allowed that the Lord had spoken to him and told him to attend a "Promise Keepers" rally instead.
Then, of course, there's the locally famous cheerleader coach who was recently hauled into U.S. District Court, where she pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to file an income tax return on more than $1.2 million in gross revenue she got from UGA cheerleading camp. Here's another strikingly "bad decision," especially for someone whose bio on the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Cheerleading website says her favorite quote is "Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders and says.... "Oh No....she's awake!!" Apparently the IRS isn't as easily intimidated as old Beelzebub.
