more annoying expressions

okay, i just thought of another one.

level the playing field

as in, "little billy has adhd, so we're going to tack an extra 150 points onto his sat score. we're just trying to level the playing field."

listen, i grew up in santa clara, california. i haven't been there in 22 years, but i can imagine what it looks like now. lots of smartly clad youngsters spilling out of sports utility vehicles and prancing around with soccer balls on meticulously manicured grounds in an absent-minded ritalin haze.

well, let me tell you something, in my day, things were a lot different.

we used to play pick up baseball games on this field at walter g. brown elementary school that looked like a gopher habitat that had been illegally strip mined. you want to talk about your uneven playing fields!

and when circumstances precluded using the baseball diamond at brown, like, for instance, when the teenagers were smoking doob under the backstop, or the police tape was still up from the most recent homicide, we'd end up playing out on the southern pacific right of way out behind the safeway. not only was that about as uneven a playing field as you're likely to find in the industrialized world, but you did not want to be sliding into second when the 3:15 was heading back to san jose!

what i'm driving at here is, look, not once in all those pick up games did one of us say, "hey, look how uneven this playing field is! the other team clearly has the advantage!"

because that wouldn't have made any sense, right? because we were all tripping over the same tire tracks, gopher holes and empty pints of wild irish rose, right? we were both playing on the same damn field! sure it was uneven, but it was the same field for both teams! you could have run a damn steamroller over the whole thing, it wouldn't have made the game any more or less fair, right?

well, listen friends, i can't do this alone. won't you please help me shame the american public out of using this moronic expression? if necessary, appropriate these anecdotes of mine and adapt them to your own childhood. i think they get the point across pretty clearly, and they'll make you seem a lot more colorful.

play ball!

Kurt "big daddy" True
1 july 2001