Words that only appear in newspapers should never appear in newspapers
It's Monday and I'm in a bad mood. So what do you get? A rant, from left field.
There's a joke here in Chicago that the word "Chicagoland"meaning Greater Chicago and invented, as near as we can tell, by the Chicago Tribuneis a newspaper-only word. Even the weatherman is embarrassed to say "Chicagoland" out loud.
A good way to get a quick chuckle in a Chicago bar is to tell people you're the greatest [blank] "in all Chicagoland."
(Another great way to get a quick laugh in Chicago is to say, "You haven't been young since Lincoln was an alderman.")
No mind: I've been used to Chicagoland since Lincoln was alderman.
But I'm getting sick and tired of this headline, which seems to appear in the business section of every newspaper in the U.S. every day of the week: "XYZ company is burnishing its image."
First of all, why say "burnish," when no one any longer "burnishes" anything besides their image? People "polish" their cars, their shoes, their dinner tables and their good silver.
If you remarked that a friend's brass banister was shiny and he replied that he just burnished it yesterday, you might draw some unhappy conclusions about that friend and his prissy fixations.
Lately, the company often inevitably to be "burnishing" its image is Wal-Mart. Like most companies said to be "burnishing" their images, Wal-Mart's "image" is in need of more than a vigorous shine-up. Powerful critics are questioning company's very right to do business, and Wal-Mart's counterpunches are feeble so far.
As final word on this unwelcome Monday rant on image-burnishing, I offer you the old cliché: say:
You can't burnish a turd.
