For the past few months, we have all watched, listened, and thoroughly enjoyed the crazed rants of Charlie Sheen. He redefined “winning” as possessing tiger’s blood, as not dying, being on an eponymous drug that is lethal to anyone but himself, and blinking to cure addiction. He even coined the word “bi-winning,” meaning one “wins here” and “wins there.”
Unfortunately for me, guardian of literacy, his mental unsoundness does not translate to grammatical unsoundness. With the exception of referring to the “gnarly gnarlingtons” in his life and saying that he is “bi-winning,” what he says makes sense, linguistically speaking, at least.
Fortunately for me, Glenn Beck, who was recently fired from his Fox show, says nihilistic, narcissistic, and nettlesome things that offend both our sense of being and our sense of language. On his television show in March, he gave his own reason for the catastrophic earthquake in Japan:
“I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes. Well I’m not saying I’m NOT NOT saying that either. What God does is God’s business. I have no idea but I’ll tell you this: whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus, there’s a message being sent and that is, ‘hey you know that stuff we’re doing? not really working out well, maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.”
It’s really no wonder that over 300 advertisers dropped him and now Fox has dropped him too. What are you saying, Glenn? Besides claiming (while simultaneously disavowing) knowledge that the disaster victims in Japan were victims only to the wrath of one or more angered gods, Glenn used so many double-negatives (quadruple negative, perhaps?) that he essentially stated twice that he’s not saying that God (or gods) cause earthquakes. That might be a nice sentiment were it not for the fact that his message is so weighed down by his faulty linguistic skills that misconstruction is inevitable.
“Well I’m not saying I’m NOT NOT saying that either,” means “Well I’m not saying I’m saying that either.” He already said that in the first sentence, and I believe him even less the second time around.
Now, I know that I give quite a few shots to Republicans, and my intention was never to be a political commentator, but this crosses party lines. Glenn Beck thinks he speaks for God and, boy, is his God mean. What have the Japanese people done that is so wrong that they could ever deserve such a horrid event? What “stuff” is “not really working out well?” Did the brakes on Glenn’s Corolla stop functioning properly?