Ruff Neighborhoods

In this game we call Life, I try to keep my sunny side up, no matter what. Nine sons in a row, baseball teams make money, ya know! Yeahh, I guess you could say I'm a glass-half-full kinda guy. 

But like most every other Tom Dick and Harry out there, I get my apple-cart upset every now and again. When my world is topsy-turvy, I try not to have a pity party, but rather to remind myself that there's no 'I' in team. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Success comes before work only in the dictionary. 

And that patience is a virtue. And, most importantly, everything happens for a reason. 

STOP! 

Wow, I was starting to get on my own nerves there- not to mention what I must've been doing to yours. If it were in my power(another in a series of What I'd Do if I were Czar of the World rants), I'd zone off all the hackneyed, platitude-laden language to a couple blocks. Zone the shit off like they try to do with pornography. 

Let's say the intersection of Bromide Boulevard and Platitude Parkway(which we can call Bro-Plat, a shout to another troubled barrio)is designated as far as the highest concentration of (horribly)overused words and phrases. Bro-Plat is to cliches what Haight-Ashbury was to hippies..

Here the natives speak a dialect consisting entirely of buzzwords and catch-phrases, which change from week to week, depending on the whims of the media. And as with any language, you have to listen to the inflections in the speaker's voice to get the true meaning. If one exists..

There is a Church, itself more of an Inter-Denominational place(if you could call it that). The central tenets are: 1)patience is a virtue; 2)what goes around comes around; 3)everything happens for a reason; and finally, 4)don't worry, be happy. 

Okay, so you've got the intersection of Platitude Parkway, which for the sake of argument runs North and South, and Bromide Boulevard going East and West. As you head away from this intersection in any direction, the cliches thin out but are still there. 

Heading North on Platitude Parkway, your next big intersection is Meme Street. (Sorry, I couldn't resist).The memes are cheesier on either side of Platitude Parkway but gain in meaning as you drive further. 

Either direction too far on Meme takes you into some verbally unsavory neighborhoods though. Turn left and you eventually end up in Kwik-Cheez, where everything is spelled phonetically or in textlike abbreviations. 

Most of the residents of Kwik-Cheez communicate with each other by phone- either text or Skype. Oh, and the music of Alvin and the Chipmunks is broadcast 24/7. Not a nice place. 

Hang a right on Meme, and you're heading for the most linguistically impoverished area in town. Yep, the slums. The grammar ghetto. Here you won't just hear cliched phrases but out-and-out bad English. "Oh, was ya?" "I ain't never seen them folks." And just as spasm-inducing is the spelling. Known by the rest of the world as Circle Grove, here it's Sirkel Groav. 

All troubled barrios, these regions I've set up. But I'd love to contain some of this stuff. I'd love to never hear everything happens for a reason again- unless I had the perverse desire to drive down to the corner of Bromide and Platitude. And then I'd probably head south and avoid those funky neighborhoods. Especially the one that plays the Chipmunk music..