Home

A recent Marist College poll found that the most annoying word in American conversation today is... "whatever."

"Would you prefer seafood or pasta tonight?"

"Whatever."

"I really loved that Sherlock Holmes movie."

"Yeah, whatever."

"Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?"

"What-ev-urrrr."

See? It gets more annoying all the time. Personally, I find the word exasperating because it conveys a sense of indifference to something that might concern me, an irritating lack of commitment to a choice. And we certainly have no lack of lack of commitment all around us. Take marriage for instance. I'm not talking about the divorce rate, although we know it's horrendous. This is something more imaginative: a few years ago, the New York Times reported that three couples in Manhattan wanted what I will call a "standby divorce": In planning their weddings, they asked their clergyman if, instead of including in their marriage vows the phrase, "...until death do you part..." he would substitute, "...so long as your love shall last."

Apparently, they didn't want to make any promises they couldn't keep. But the minister wasn't having any of it and advised them to find someone else to do the service. The article didn't say whether or not they succeeded and are living happily whatever after. Cohabitation is popular as an alternative to the commitment of marriage among some divorce-averse folks. It seems the best defense against divorce is not to get married in the first place.

Of course, marriage isn't the only social contract suffused with a lack of commitment. There is also vegetarianism. Many people pursue vegetarianism as a way of life out of a sense of morality toward animals or for what they consider a healthy diet. And so they will not eat meat or fish -- except when they will. I imagine most vegetarians do not lapse, but there are people who adopt the title who relish a bit of steak (beef or tuna) occasionally, or maybe a nice plate of cabbage soup with flanken on a cold winter's night.

Fortunately, these partially committed vegetarians have been given a name all their own: the wonderfully descriptive, "flexitarians." The American Dialect Society thought so highly of the term that they recently named it as one year's most useful new word.

Note to Dialect Society: I feel a little left out here, because there does not seem to be a catchy word of the year for people like me, who eat lots of chicken and fish and the occasional steak or lamb chop, but prefer an all-vegetable meal now and then. Can't I be a flexitarian, too? And what ever happened to the word "omnivore"? (For the word-minded, you can see previous Words of the Year and follow balloting for the 2009 Word, and even the Word of the Decade 2000-2009, at the Web site AmericanDialect.org.)

Lack of commitment dwells not only in the hearts of people, but also in corporate marketing offices. We all know that corporations and employees, with rare exceptions, gave up on commitment to each other a long time ago, but I am thinking of something more insidious here: the corporate cost-saving strategy known as the one size fits all garment. They don't want to commit to the expense of manufacturing and stocking a variety of sizes for, say, a bathrobe, so they produce one size that will "fit" anyone.

That means it has to be able to envelop anyone from a jockey up to an NBA center in terry cloth warmth. Indeed, my comfy robe is roughly the size of a basketball court. OK, I exaggerate; it only wraps around my average body one-and-a-half times, and hangs down to my ankles, so I guess it fits me all right. My petite wife tried it on and went missing for three hours. Our thanks for the quick response from the rescue squad, who pulled her out from under the robe unharmed.

Manufacturers of electronic devices use the same one-size-fits-all strategy for the instruction manuals they include with their internationally sold products. My camera came with a 200-page manual containing sections in six languages, including Arabic. Hebrew is not among them, but that's another story.

However, it was nice to discover that I only had to read one-sixth of the 200 pages, even if the English text is only loosely connected to English: "Pressure the turn-on feature located on the upper top place of the unit." Well, their English is certainly better than my Japanese. I could complain to the manufacturer, but it probably won't do any good. Or maybe it would. Whatever.

Bernard Jacks is a freelance humor writer who lives in Marlboro. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.