For All Intensive Purposes, This Is the Worst Paragraph You’ll Ever Read

Or: Malapropism Madness

As language corrupts, thought itself decays; and when thought decays, men become easy prey to slogans.

—George Orwell

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

—Brian Reynolds Meyers

The degradation of man through man begins, much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity.

—Josef Pieper

Above: This author, while writing what follows.

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Language used to evolve slowly, like erosion or wine. Now it mutates like a meme. Somewhere between autocorrect, voice-to-text, and corporatespeak, we stopped precisely picking words and started approx-imating them.

Because of this, English is dying a long, slow death by a thousand misheard clichés.

Every day we “hone in” when we mean “home in,” “flush out” when we mean “flesh out,” and say “for all intensive purposes” like it’s a legal clause.

The internet flattened our vowels and our attention span, and what’s left is the linguistic equivalent of a smoothie made entirely of idiotic idioms and rancid regret.

So, in honor of the great unraveling, I’ve written what might be the single worst paragraph ever composed in the English language; a Frankenstein’s monster of malapropisms that is a eulogy for meaning itself.

Read it and remember that this is what happens when speak before we think.

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For all intensive purposes, I could of cared less, but I’m trying to hone in on the problem and flush out the details to make sure it gets nipped in the butt. At the end of the day, it’s a doggy dog world, and I always end up being the escape goat, even though I’ve been working tirelessly at their beckon call, trying to stay one in the same with the team. I guess its a mute point and that’s just the price you pay when you take things for granite. I’d give my boss a peace of my mind, but it probably wouldn’t bring me any piece of mind. Irregardless, I’ll just tow the line and wait with baited breath to see what happens next. It’s a mute point anyway — by in large, people just don’t appreciate me. Maybe I’ll write an email to extract revenge, but that might reek havoc, and my coworker supposably thinks I have old-timers disease. Maybe, I shouldn’t wet my deep-seeded appetite for revenge. After all, everything happens on accident for a reason.

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If you didn’t suffer an aneurysm while reading this, you’re ready to learn how to right good:

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom