Echolalia

"Echolalia' he told me. Then he referred me to Michael Leunig's comment. Echolalia is a psychiatric term referring to the meaningless repetition of spoken words. I found Watson's comments in the fly-leaf of his 'Bendable Learnings' - "Management speak has triumphed. It has made much of our everyday language dull, dimwitted and meaningless. .. Your words will be obscure and indigestible. You will conform to the new way. You will surrender the ability to write and speak with spontaneity or clarity and, with prolonged use, even your ability to think clearly."
Leunig says "I fancy echolalia could well refer to a condition in modern media and their captive communities. Like the compulsive rocking back and forth of the radically distressed, echolalia could be the name for the repetitious, unstoppable going around and around of dead or dying ideas in the culture; the boring babble and banging on in the vortex of tribal media chatter."

Praise be the non-celebrity

The moment at the end of "Middlemarch" ..
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Reminds me of Yevtushenko's poem "People" with the 'verse'
"And if a man (sic) lived in obscurity
making friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting"
I'm totally over 'celebrities', politicians & famous people. Give me some good ordinary folk any day.

Poetry

Poetry gets to the issues more than anything I know. I have never been in a church environment where there is the same level of truthful speech about the way things are. It's not that church isn't truthful. It's just that poetry is a different kind of speech. Many of the poets remind me of that sense you get of the prophets like Jeremiah who describes the word of God like a fire in his bones that he has to get out.
(from I can't remember, I just put it in the notes of my iphone)