Fashion.
Well to be precise being told what is fashionable and only being able to buy clothes someone else thinks is fashionable.
All I want to do is buy lovely, comfortable, cotton checked shirts that keep me cool in summer and go with jeans, skirts or three quarter pants. The sort that are not tapered and stomach hugging. The sort that just sort of hang.
Is that too much to ask. Yes. Yes it is.
There is not a cotton shirt to be found anywhere.
(Except in men's shops and I would buy them but they are too big)
Being a I-do-not-conform-just-for-the-sake-of-conforming-kind-of-gal I don't give a monkeys what someone else thinks is fashionable. Cotton shirts are what I consider the piece de resistance of my wardrobe.
Because take away my qualifications, my clever wit, my extensive travel experiences, my sophistication, wit and aplomb I am just a simple, country girl.
WHO LIKES WEARING COTTON SHIRTS.
SHIRTS I SAID.
NOT BLOUSES.
Tuesday 27 December 2011
Friday 9 December 2011
The inflationary power of words
I have recently been thinking about the power words have. Many years ago someone told me that if you use a word like war zone to describe a situation and the situation wasn't a war zone just by naming it one, it becomes one in your thinking. The effect of this can be rather depressing and self-defeating.
Being a lover of hyperbole and finding it funny to blow a situation out of proportion I realised I did this a lot. But I could see how negative that habit could be so from that time on I was careful to use words to accurately describe what was going on.
However, in the last few months I have noticed that I have again started to use words that exaggerate how serious a situation is. Disaster became one word I used frequently. It actually became a source of entertainment to me to call a situation a disaster. If I couldn't get hold of someone it was a disaster. If I ran out of coffee it was a disaster. I went from one disaster to the next.
Then people in my sphere of influence started to do the same thing. And suddenly we were all experiencing cataclysmic events on a regular basis.
At some point I realised it wasn't helpful to call a situation a disaster even if it was funny to do so. So I stopped doing it. But the people around me are still calling situations a disaster.
And I have to confess I find it a little depressing when they do so. It no longer seems funny. The power of words, eh?
Being a lover of hyperbole and finding it funny to blow a situation out of proportion I realised I did this a lot. But I could see how negative that habit could be so from that time on I was careful to use words to accurately describe what was going on.
However, in the last few months I have noticed that I have again started to use words that exaggerate how serious a situation is. Disaster became one word I used frequently. It actually became a source of entertainment to me to call a situation a disaster. If I couldn't get hold of someone it was a disaster. If I ran out of coffee it was a disaster. I went from one disaster to the next.
Then people in my sphere of influence started to do the same thing. And suddenly we were all experiencing cataclysmic events on a regular basis.
At some point I realised it wasn't helpful to call a situation a disaster even if it was funny to do so. So I stopped doing it. But the people around me are still calling situations a disaster.
And I have to confess I find it a little depressing when they do so. It no longer seems funny. The power of words, eh?
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