I was pleased to learn yesterday that some people who I admire admired my analysis here of a meeting I attended last month at University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
Now, what if I had delivered that to you with the verbal tics that we get from pipsqueak panelists on the left-wing and moderate cable news networks? My piece would have would have sounded like this.
[So] Even in a [sort of] simplified, America-centric version of the situation, companies and nonprofits are [sort of] standing astride a nation split in two [right?]—and taking fire from all sides [right?] in a kind of cultural and political and economic civil war [right?].
[So] Corporate constituencies have always had varied interests [right?]. But in the current context, they have dizzying and [sort of] contradictory claims on corporate loyalty. Groups of employees, investors, suppliers and customers are not only set against one another [right?] but [sort of] split within by differing and passionately held attitudes and values [right?].
So, these sort of prissy, smug, smarmy, pseudoscientific-sounding and presumptuous sort of verbal tics sort of reduce the most open-minded listeners, right?, to sort of curmudgeons, right?, who sort of wish the motherfucking speaker would actually take responsibility for the opinion, right? and let the listener sort of decide whether it's sort of—true or not, right?—without sort of sanding off all the edges and rhetorically dragging us along, right? so we sort of can't disagree in the end, right? because by not contradicting this sort of machine gun of rhetorical questions, right?, we've sort of been agreeing all along, right?
If the liberal-arts educated people aren't going to be dismissed as precious, overeducated douchebags, it's really important that we stop sounding like this.
Right?
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