Why do people add extra words?

I think possibly ad men are to blame for this. Stupid, illiterate ad men.

Car commercials will talk about their "sale event." Is this in any way different from a "sale?" No, it's not. Does it sound classier? No, it doesn't.

Weathermen will talk about "storm events." Are these different from "storms?" No, they're not. Are they less destructive? No, they're not. You get the point.

Or the substitution of meaningless words for actual ones. I passed on my way home a "Movement Arts Center." I believe in days of yore, when we used words that meant things, or, the Nineties, these were called "dance schools." Now, I know what you're going to say. What they teach is not "dance." Well, it's not "art," either, so the new moniker isn't an improvement.

Plain English, people. Read your goddamn Strunk and White.

Why does Barney have a life-sized clone trooper?

So, we've already heard from Barney that his apartment is specially designed to repulse women. A life-sized clone trooper accomplishes this, with room to spare.

BUT. It also repulses everyone else. A life-sized stormtrooper? Awesome. A life-sized clone trooper? Not awesome.

It could mean that you don't know the difference, which is pathetic. It could mean that you think clone troopers are cool, which is worse than pathetic. It could mean any number of things like that. But one thing it has to mean is that you have given George Lucas more monetary encouragement to ruin your childhood, and everyone else's childhood, even further.

No bro would ever do that, Barney.

Why doesn't the iPod shuffle have any kind of battery indicator?

When it's plugged in, it lets you know whether it is fully charged or not. But that is the only information it will give you on this point. Otherwise it will just stop playing.

Which is stupid and useless.

Yeah, I really have nothing clever to say about this. It just pisses me off.

Why do shops leave naked mannequins in their windows?

Mannequins are incredibly creepy anyway, even if you haven't seen the Doctor Who episode when they come to life and try to kill everyone. They have those blank, staring eyes and the very slightly unnatural poses that just give you the heebie-jeebies.

They are doubly creepy when they are unclothed and you can see the seams and the armatures. Sometimes they are disassembled. Dismembered body parts are not much less discomfiting when made of plaster.

The nudity is a particular problem with some of the more hip stores, because they seem to think that anatomical correctness is a goal with mannequins, instead of something to be avoided at all costs, for everyone's peace of mind.

Cover them up, people, or take them out of the window.

Why do people ruin nice buildings?

I hate when people build new ugly buildings, but at least I can see the logic. They're trying something new, something different. It may look like the poodle was sick, but at least it's innovation.

However. Remodelling old and beautiful buildings is evil.

Say, for instance, you're working with the college that invented American college Gothic. It's a Quaker school, so they don't have a chapel. Instead, they have a large, theatre-type hall, and attached to the back of it, various ancillary rooms. It's quite pleasant; the building itself is well proportioned, and there's a lovely sloping grass court associated with the back.

So what do you do? Do you leave it as it is, perhaps modifying the inside to modernize the lights and other systems? Or do you tear out the court and built a concrete and glass cube?

Step back! We have a winner!

I have only seen the artist's renditions and the giant hole in the ground. But the tiny artist's renditions are heinous, and I imagine they will be a thousand times more heinous when they are a thousand times larger. The new construction is out of scale, clean out of the period, and out of its mind.

You can't ever recant from these things, once they are done. The construction methods and materials are lost, not even touching the necessary aesthetic sense. There are much better ways to spend millions of dollars than ruining beautiful things.

Why do people think there are color options for their Jaguars?

Because there aren't. Color options, I mean. Or "colour options," I suppose, if you want to get technical.

Jaguars are British racing green.

Why do people say "shirt-sleeves" when they mean "short sleeves?"

Let's review. "Shirt-sleeves" is what you are wearing when you have removed your suit jacket. You may or may not still be wearing your waistcoat. You may or may not have unbuttoned your cuffs or removed your cufflinks. People can see the sleeves. Of your shirt. Thus, "shirt-sleeves."

"Short sleeves" are those sleeves that are short. They stop above the elbow. People who wear them invariably look like sartorially retarded dweebs. Think Dwight Schrute. Much worse with a necktie. Never, ever, ever acceptable.

Just because gentlemen tend not to wear suit jackets nowadays, and almost never wear waistcoats, does not mean that the meaning of "shirt-sleeves" has changed. It will never mean "short sleeves." Because words have meaning.

Why are there Chipotle rookies?

Look, it's not that hard. There are only so many options, and they're all written on a board in front of you. Plus, there's been a queue. If you don't know whether you want steak or barbacoa by the time your burrito-wrapper asks you, you need a kick in the pants.

At the very least, you should be behind me in line.

Why don't people know that "panini" is plural?

"Little breads," it means. One would be a "panino," or, shockingly, "little bread." You cannot sell paninis, because that word is meaningless. Plurals are not intensive, Gollum.

But you get this everywhere. You know the proprietor is trying to sound classy by calling his sandwiches "panini." I suppose the irony of being exposed as ignorant is lost on him.

That's it. If I ever own my own sandwich shop, I'm selling paninoes.

Why is Spike's British accent so painful?

Some time ago, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still on television, I saw an episode that had Spike in it. He said things like "Leicester Square" and "bloody," so I was pretty convinced he was British.

This was a good thing, because if I didn't know that already, I would never have figured it out. I recently saw the episode where his character is introduced. Quite seriously, if I had not had prior knowledge of his purported nationality, I would have been at a total loss.

First of all, it's not consistent. Second, it betrays a total ignorance of any British accent at all, adopting neither the vowels nor treating the consonants in the (admittedly strange) way that British people do. And by "British people" I mean "any British person who has ever lived," which covers an enormous range of accents, dialects, and sheer cussedness.

It is not his fault that Joss Whedon's consultant on British slang was either out of date or just tin-eared. Henry James, it is reported, had the same problem. But he doesn't even manage to sound like a bad stage Englishman. That, at least, would be amusing.

Why are the Dallas Cowboys so hateful?

I suppose that title rather begs the question, but seriously, why?

It's not that they're good and the Eagles aren't. That's a little bit true now, and has been extremely true in the past, but they were hateful even when the Eagles steamrolled them at every opportunity.

It's not the cocky receivers. I mean, we think Chad Ocho Cinco is cute and amusing, and that's even though he plays on a team of felons. So that can't be it, although it helps. TO would get his own post, but I can't see giving him the time of day.

It's not the Jessica Simpson thing, either. Romo could do worse. Tom Brady and Kyle Boller have both dated Tara Reid, which is much much worse.

It's the "America's Team" garbage. Seriously? No. There are 31 other teams. That's a whole Baskin Robbins of not America's team. Get over yourself.

Why was Diana Rigg totally wasted as a Bond girl?

Okay, so, it's the sixties. Diana Rigg is the sexiest thing going. The Bond franchise is great, but you've just lost Connery.

You're making On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's a great book, with lots of chances for Bond to be surprising, and for skiing stunts. Also, importantly, it's the one where he actually falls in love. Tracy is the Bond girl. She's the Bond wife!

So what do you do? You put George Lazenby in it. Unquestionably the worst Bond, he makes the film almost unwatchable. Diana Rigg as Tracy and Telly Savalas as Blofeld should make a stunning movie.

Tracy and Vesper are the only girls who really matter. Sure, Ursula Andress and Honor Blackman are quite memorable, and their films were good, but Tracy's film should be the best. And, for crying out loud, they had Diana Rigg. Way to go, guys.

Why do people mix brown and black?

It has always been my impression that small children learned at their mothers' knees not to wear brown with black. A similar injunction applies against the wearing of navy blue and black together.

There is, of course, the obvious exception of shoes. One may wear black shoes with just about anything, because when shoes are black they exist in a non-colored state, rather in the way jeans are not blue but just jeans. Brown shoes are always better with brown suits or other outfits, but black are not totally verboten.

It does not, however, work the other way. The other day I saw a young lady, walking. She was clad in a grey and black color-block Euro-sack-mini-dress-concoction-of-ugliness. She had set this off with opaque black stockings. And, the real pièce de résistance, a pair of brown slouchy knee boots. Medium brown, shading slightly to light. I don't know why I say this, except perhaps to remove the potential excuse of color-blindness. Seriously, people? This stuff is basic.

The plain, mad obtuseness of this outfit really floored me. I almost fell off my bike.

Why are undergraduates incapable of keeping off the grass?

On any college campus today, obviously excluding those with no green plots, you will find dusty or muddy paths worn across the grass. You will also find undergraduates who will complain incessantly that every green space on campus is in the process of being paved.

I, too, as an undergraduate, bemoaned the asphalt attrition and consequent vitiation of verdancy. I blamed it entirely on the administration and on insufficiently energetic groundskeepers.

Of course, I was wrong. Oxford, Cambridge, and the other British universities have had it figured out for a long time. You want nice, tidy, grassy quadrangles? Keep the undergraduates off them, with signs to start and afterward with dogs. And this even though the climate in Britain is rather more congenial to vegetation that of the States.

The complaining undergraduate ought to be able to realize that he is a cause and not a victim. Walking across grass wears it down. If the grass is already dying, do not walk on it. If you see an incipient path, make sure it does not become established. It will add ten seconds to your walk to class, but you're late anyway.

Why are there those commercials with talking babies?

The first ones I remember, although I'm sure they were actually not the first, were the Quiznos ads. There was a baby who sounded like an uncultivated middle-aged man, and he talked about meat a lot.

Now there are the stock-trading ads (I can't remember the actual firm, so...good going there, guys). In these, a baby trades stocks on his computer, and hires a clown or spits up on his keyboard.

The best part of the second kind is that the baby draws attention to the creepiness of the clown. I think this may be self-awareness on the part of the ad-men--they know that the baby itself is profoundly creepy, so they throw that into self-referential relief by pointing out the clown. The correct solution, of course, would be not having the creepy talking baby commercial in the first place.

It does not make it cuter or more baby-like for the baby to spit up on the keyboard. It merely makes the commercial gross in addition to being creepy. Well done.

These ads are repulsive, spit-up or no. They make me considerably less likely to patronize any of the businesses. Probably a lot of other people, too. I mean, does anyone think they're cute?

Why do academics make up so many words?

I was reading a paper for one of my seminars. Its subject, it claimed, was "epistoliterarity." Okay. Not a word. I can figure out what it means, though, and it might be something one would ever discuss, and it's not particularly ill-constructed.

That word was in the title. From there, it went straight to hell. We were also given "letterally." This is also not a word. I'm not entirely sure what it means, although my best guess is "in a letter." Why could the author not just say "in a letter?" Because he's a pompous jackass who is too enamored of his own egregiously labored and purple prose that he can't resist either tricolon or alliteration, and thus we get asyndetic phrases like "literally, literarily, letterally." He needs a kick in the pants.

Of course, the way was paved for him by that paragon of putrescence, Hayden White. I once had to read his book Metahistory. Not a word. And, incidentally, also totally meaningless. But even "metahistory" is not a patch on some of the words he made up. "Emplotment" is a good one. "Metatropological" is another one I especially like, because it's not clear he knows what it means either. We must also reckon with his hijacking and perversion of actual words such as "metaphor," "metonymy," "synecdoche," and "irony."

Going back to our original author, the sin for which he must answer the most is "Romen." By this, he means multiple male citizens of the seven-hilled city on the Tiber. I know that he knows that "Roman" is not constructed in the same way as "Englishman." It's not cute. It's not clever. It's illiterate and nauseating.

It is entirely possible, and even likely, that the ideas that these men want to convey cannot be expressed except in made-up words that mean nothing. I submit that these ideas are not particularly worth the effort. In the words of Randall Munroe, "communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

Why are there roofed stadia?

Repeat after me: dome teams are sissy.

We all remember a few years ago when Indianapolis couldn't get anything done in the play-offs because, horror of horrors, they had to play outside. It was pathetic. So, to combat this problem, they have built themselves a new stadium. With a roof. Sure, the roof is retractable. However. The field has no drainage system. This means that the worst weather they'll face is a crisp autumn breeze, since the merest hint of foul weather will send the roof controller haring up to his magic button. Seriously. No drainage system. The word "effete" comes to mind.

The other side of this is the heat problem, although this is not such a concern in the NFL. Many of the stadia in Germany for the 2006 World Cup had retractable roofs. They were playing with them open, as it was summer. But the television people complained that there were annoying shadows on the field, and the roofs were shut, raising the temperature on the pitch, already in the 90s Fahrenheit, some five or ten degrees. We got to watch David Beckham vomit. This is what the roofed stadium has given us.

The NFL teams who might deserve roofed stadia are, as I see it: New England, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, Minnesota, and Seattle (because, although it doesn't get very cold, it does rain all the time). Maybe Pittsburgh. Of these teams, only the Vikings and Lions play in domes. It gets bitterly, bitterly cold in all these places. It snows. It hails. Their fields have not only drainage systems but heating systems so they are not solid blocks of ice.

So, who does have a dome? The Vikings and Lions, as I've said. Also: St. Louis, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Indianapolis. Seriously? With Atlanta and New Orleans, pre-season and September games are probably much less pleasant. St. Louis and Indianapolis get fairly cold and windy, but are they a patch on Buffalo? Chicago?

Garbage.

Why does Sam give that idiotic speech?

You know the one. They're in Osgiliath, because Faramir has brought them there, and Frodo has almost handed the Ring over to a Nazgûl. This, of course, is an appropriate time for Sam to give an inspirational speech, which, for your convenience, will also be a voice-over when the director cuts to scenes about which you actually care.

There are about a million things wrong with this decision. I'll go through a few of them just to get you started.

First, it requires total character assassination with regard to Faramir, so thanks very much. Here I was, thinking it was important to the plot that Faramir wasn't Boromir, but apparently not. Faramir wants the Ring, Faramir takes the hobbits to Osgiliath...

Second, the Nazgûl is about a foot from Frodo, and can see him. I can't believe that he is dissuaded from attacking by a stupid fat hobbit. There's suspense, Peter Jackson, and then there's cretinous implausibility.

Third, and worst, in involves speaking by Sean Astin. This is a thing to be avoided. His accent, as noted before, leaves something to be desired. And then he says all these soppy, maudlin, sick-making things. I am not inspired. I am nauseated.

I actually put the film on mute during this scene. I don't even do that when Viggo Mortensen sings.

Why do Faramir and Éowyn get almost totally ignored?

Let's review. You have two love stories (leaving out Sam and Rosie for the moment, because I don't care). One is incredibly dysfunctional, sixty years long, involves an unwashed loser, an absent lady, and her spiteful father, and is analogous to another crazy love story in which the hero barely gets out alive, with the cognomen "One-Hand." The other takes place in a reasonable length of time, is based on normal things like shared experience, physical attraction, and proximity, and is very sweet.

You're Peter Jackson. Do you a) make the first story unrecognizable, b) ignore the second one completely, or c) both?

Faramir and Éowyn are normal, and nice, and you can relate to them a little bit, because they're not insane, and they don't have Destinies. And yet, in the theatrical release of Return of the King, all you get is that moment during Aragorn's coronation when they smile at one another. Seriously? I understand that a lot has to happen in that movie, but that's all I get? Why not just leave them out entirely?

"But it's in the extended edition!" I hear you cry. Yes, it is. However, I shouldn't have to wait for what are essentially DVD extras in order to get the whole story. That's laziness and poor film-making. I would be less angry about the omission, too, if the film didn't contain random made-up garbage. The list is long, but every scene with Arwen is favorite, excepting the end.

You can either leave things out or make stuff up. Both is unacceptable.

Why don't the Corsairs worry me?

The first time I read Lord of the Rings, the battle of the Pelennor had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. I suppose in the back of my head I knew that the Orcs weren't going to win, but it didn't seem guaranteed at all.

The important thing at the beginning is that Gondor seems screwed. And then the Rohirrim show up, and everything is peaches and cream.

Except. The Rohirrim have driven a wedge through the armies of Mordor, only to find, coming down the Great River, a fleet of black-sailed ships. It's the Corsairs, and everything is ruined. It's a moment of gut-wrenching horror.

Or it should be. But Peter Jackson figures that everything that doesn't need to be explicit should be spelled out, so he can skip things that actually matter to you. Every little moment of the story of the cursed dead is on screen, except for the Dunédain, because they're actually interesting. There's no suspense, and no particular interest; there is only an opportunity for Peter Jackson to exercise his low-budget horror film chops.

The Corsairs come down (up? let's go with along) the Anduin, and all you get is that kind of neat moment where the Orcs go "Oh, yeah? This sissy boy and his tall poncy and short smelly sidekicks? Seriously? CRAP!"

But that moment doesn't compare at all with the scene in the book, where everyone is panicking, and then the banner of the King is unfurled on the ship. That's actually dramatic, and makes you want to cheer, and is a relief, and doesn't involve an asinine attempt at comedy. But noooo.

Why do they toss Aragorn off a cliff?

And, having managed to do that, why do they not make sure he stays drowned? I mean, I figure that's the only reason you'd do it in the first place--Viggo Mortensen was driving you nuts, so you pushed him off a precipice, done and dusted. Requires a little re-writing of the rest, I guess, but you're Peter Jackson; re-writing doesn't scare you.

Shoving Aragorn off a cliff is a big fat waste of my time. I pass over the battle of Helm's Deep, which takes about six pages in the book but forty minutes in the film. I pass it over because it is awesome. Except for the elves (I mean, the dude who played Haldir isn't even famous, why do you need to give him more screen time?), because that was totally made up.

There's no suspense in it. There's no way in the world Aragorn's going to be neutralized by some random Orc with metal strips nailed to his head. Yeah, Orlando Bloom gets to look all soulful and contemplative while gazing at Arwen's stupid sparkly necklace, but, really, that just makes me spit.

And then, while we're drumming our fingers, waiting for Peter Jackson to stop jerking our chain for no reason, we get more Liv Tyler! Why? I am not watching this film so I can see Viggo Mortensen and Liv Tyler make out. I never want to see that. It is utterly unappealing, even aside from totally lacking the kind of aloofness and class I expect from Arwen. And then she turns out to be a horse anyway! Awkward, and gross.

Oh, yes, and then Aragorn is magically fine for the battle, even though he fell off a cliff into a river and was all bloody and staggery. Legolas remarks on it, as he hands over the sick-making sparkly necklace. You want him to be fit for the battle? Maybe throwing him off a cliff isn't the best strategy.

Why does Gondor try to sabotage the White Tree?

There is a tree in Gondor. It's dead. But they keep it around in hopes that it will not always be dead. The whole king thing, you know.

Except not in Peter Jackson's Gondor, where they are the worst gardeners ever. You have a grass sward with a court and a fountain in the middle of it. Do you plant the mythic tree of your city a) on the grass, like a normal person, or b) on the stone edge of the fountain?

Now, if they followed the book, it would be largely irrelevant. The tree is actually dead, in the book, and Aragorn finds another one, since it's clearly too easy for the Tree just to come back to life. He's only been toiling and working for sixty years in which everything possible has gone wrong. No need to throw him a bone. (Also in the book the fountain is in the middle of the grass plot, and that's where the tree is planted. Because apparently Tolkien was, you know, basically familiar with how to grow things. In the ground. With soil.)

However. Peter Jackson decided that cinematically this would be garbage. Maybe he's right, although his judgement in other cases makes me swear and vomit, so maybe not. At any rate, in the film, the tree--the old tree, the one in the Court of the Fountain--blooms again. Even though it's planted on rocks.

It's like they're not even trying.