Last night, I overused words to ask this question on Twitter:
One of the first answers to that question was “love and hugs” and several of us used words to express our feelings that those words could never be overused.
Do you see any overused (or underused) words in today’s blog post?
.
Compliments may include overused words but I still recommend them.
Here’s what I find on YouTube when I look for “overused words.”
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. — Lewis B. Smedes
This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the land of the brave. — Elmer Davis
Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave. — Harriet Tubman
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. — Albert Camus
The highest a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. — Baruch Spinoza
I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. — Woodrow Wilson
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power and, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free. — Jim Morrison
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. — James A. Garfield
Those who are free from resentful thoughts surely are free. — Buddha
I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally. — W.C. Fields
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. — Albert Einstein
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. — Michelangelo
Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or a good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again. — Maya Angelou
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain’t no free rides, baby. — Ursula K. Le Guin
Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses. — Leonardo Da Vinci
I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I think, and out of all that I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. — Marquis de Lafayette
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have. — René Descartes
Philosophy is common sense with big words. — James Madison
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18. — Albert Einstein
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. — Gertrude Stein
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. — H. L. Mencken
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. — Clive James
Do you seen any common (or uncommon) sense in my photos from yesterday?
Was it common sense for me to invite people in a therapy group last night to express what makes them cry and what makes them laugh? I didn’t have the common sense to photograph more things on my list of what makes me laugh.
In yesterday’s blog post, Day 459: Time and space, I may have misled my readers about something.
As I’ve written about before, I love clearing up misconceptions and errors, as soon as I realize them.
I may have misled my readers in yesterday’s post, regarding numbers. As I’ve written about before, numbers can give me some trouble, especially when they’re big ones (for example, the numbers I need to keep straight when returning phone calls at work).
The misleading info from yesterday’s post was in a paragraph that — oddly enough — already related to numerical errors and confusion, regarding my friend Jeanette:
I tend to think that Jeanette’s birthday is April 6. It’s not. It’s April 9. 9 is 6 upside down. For some reason, I’m topsy turvy about Jeanette’s birthday. Perhaps that’s because things felt turned upside down for me, when Jeanette moved away from Boston, several years ago.
When I wrote that yesterday, I almost added, “I think Jeanette moved away 6 years ago. Or, maybe it was closer to 9.
I was aware, when I was writing that paragraph yesterday, that I had no real concept of when Jeanette had left Boston. I just remembered the feelings, related to that. So instead of quantifying the time with a number, I used the phrase “several years.”
How many years might that imply, to you?
I’ll wait, while you think of a number.
Do you have a number in mind?
Okay!
When Jeanette — who is spending a getaway weekend with me, right now, in New York City — read yesterday’s post, she pointed out that the actual number was larger than “several.” In actual time, Jeanette moved away from Boston in 2000. That means it’s been 14 years.
I don’t think “several” really captures that, do you?
So what is my point, on this fine morning in NYC?
As this man
pointed out (many more than several years ago), time is relative.
According to that Albert Einstein quote, above, everybody’s a genius, so here’s Ann’s rule about relativity, right now: Time is relative, in our memory of important things.
Time has definitely made it to today’s post. How shall I include Space, before I end this post?
How about this: Yesterday, after I had traveled the space from Boston to NYC, Jeanette and I were waiting in a subway station. This was during rush hour, on a Friday afternoon in downtown New York. So we were standing in a very crowded space, as you might imagine.
Soon, I realized I was hearing something very familiar: a saxophone, playing one of the Karaoke tunes I had committed to practicing on Day 422: Singing out loud — “Cry Me a River.”
For those of you unfamiliar with that song, here‘s Barbra Streisand singing it, in 1963:
When I heard the unmistakable strains of that much beloved song in that subway station yesterday, I turned and saw this man:
I think Leviticus (for that was his name) could tell I loved that song, by my reactions.
And guess what? In that crowded NYC subway space, he and I did an impromptu duet. With Leviticus on soprano sax and Ann Koplow on vocals, it wasn’t a perfect performance. There were a few errors, since we’d had no time or space for previous rehearsals.
I have no idea how many people were in that subway station audience yesterday. As I said earlier in this post, I have trouble with numbers. But whether it was dozens, scores, or hundreds of people, nobody seemed to mind. Including Jeanette.
It just goes to show you: Anything can happen, when you feel safe, in any particular space.
Thanks to Jeanette, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, Leviticus, my entire captured audience at Penn Station Subway Station at approximately 6 PM on April 4, to all performers and audiences over time, and to you — of course! — for being here, today.
