Friday 29 July 2011

Words and Phrases that Make Me Laugh

We have been having a new roof put on our house. The man who is doing it enjoys his job and can talk for ages about what he's doing each day. He's almost finished now though, as he told my husband this morning. 'Yeah mate, it'll be good for you to have closure', he said. Where did he pick up that word 'closure'? It seems to me to come straight from the world of therapy, but he doesn't seem at all the kind of person to have done any therapy. Perhaps, though, he just means 'closure', as in the hole in the roof will finally be closed?

4 comments:

  1. "Closure" has been for some years a staple of pop psychologizing. The word has its uses, heaven knows--I first heard of it in "error of closure", which is the error when a surveyor measures his away around a closed course, plots it on a map, and finds that the ends don't meet. Now with lasers and GPS, errors of closure must be mighty slim. And functions and relations in mathematics have their closure.

    But I do like a roof with closure.

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  2. As long as he doesn't say, 'We have lift off', I'll be happy.

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  3. I think you may find this useful for further meaningful communication with tradespeople:

    http://www.trojanmice.com/randomjargongenerator.htm

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  4. Thank you, Polly, I like that, and, to partly quote from it and partly our Prime Minister: Based on the current scenario, there will be no more tradespeople, under the household I lead (not until we've paid this lot of them anyway.)

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