Things Women Do

A couple weeks ago, I was the "Guest of Honor" at one of the country's largest breast cancer walks. It was goofy, like Mardi Gras, but sober, like a church square dance. People wore boas and cowboy hats and put their Boston Terriers in pink TuTus. Women like this one:


And these two:



And these W.I.T.'s (Women In Training):


When they release doves into the air to start the walk, I stood next to "the Pats" -- two old friends who started this particular race. 15 years ago, over coffee, Pat 1 and Pat 2 decided Little Rock needed to participate in the Komen movement and that they might as well be the ones to do it.

This year, 46,000 women walked.


I left proud to be a woman and wondering if there will every be anything that I start that is as utterly good as what The Pats have done down in Arkansas.

Funny Thing My Friend Steve Wrote

My friend, Steve Birenbaum, recently recorded one of those NPR Perspectives pieces about buzz words. Having spent the last 10 days digesting political conventions at a rate I thought only possible with American Idol, I've been steeped in catch phrases lately. I got a kick out of his take on it.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR
by Steven Birenbaum

Maybe my trip wire for hyperbole is set too high, but lately I’ve been keeping a list of catch phrases. The kind that show up in PowerPoint slides and speeches, book covers and blogs. TV news couldn’t exist without them.

Most famous is “tipping point.” Borrowed from epidemiology, it’s when an epidemic reaches a boiling point. Since Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point became a sacred text in corporate America, the phrase has been everywhere. And with good reason, it’s a beautiful metaphor with seemingly unlimited application.

And that’s the problem. Used so often, and off handedly, “Gas prices have reached a tipping point”; “the obesity crisis may finally be reaching a tipping point”; “the number of kindergartners with cell phones is poised to reach a tipping point” – it threatens to lose its currency.

If it’s possible to reach a tipping point with “tipping point,” I’ve reached it. Not unlike that moment when “Who Let the Dogs Out?” passes from “hey, that’s funny” to “enough already” to “please dear God, get that song out of my head.”

“Perfect Storm” is another perfect example. A gripping account of New England fishermen who died in a once-in- a-hundred-year storm, it’s shorthand for circumstances that combine to create an unprecedented situation. “The conditions that created the sub-prime meltdown were a perfect storm waiting to happen.” Or, “the shots I did on an empty stomach created a perfect storm of a hangover.”

A search of “perfect storm” returns more than 12,000 results in the news database Factiva for the past year alone. “Tipping point” more than 13,000. Can there really be that many perfect storms and tipping points?

Then there’s “on steroids.” California’s failed plan for universal health care was likened to “Massachusetts’ plan on steroids.“ An invasion of Iran could be “Iraq on steroids.”

Sports fans: we know who’s to blame. It’s a hip way to comment on the super-sized nature of modern life, so that a Dairy Queen banana split becomes “dessert on steroids.”

I wonder if the Gladwells of the world aren’t sick of their own buzz words, having moved on, while adoring fans join the party years later and shout out for them like a verbal version of “Freebird.”

To quote another popular saying – this from TV – these phrases have “jumped the shark.” Time for a new phrase. Something that makes tipping point look like a perfect storm. . . on steroids.

With a perspective, I’m Steven Birenbaum.