Tuesday, March 20, 2012

20 March 2012 Spring hopes infernal…



          Tapping a large and ever increasing list of Spoonerisms, Malapropisms, Freudian slips, and just plain verbal short circuits and overloads offers all manner of malformed and misdirected overshots and short-rounds.
          Garbled language can be harmless or it can be serious enough to wreck one’s chances of obtaining the particular goal they are seeking.  George W. Bush was notorious for linguistically booby trapping himself.  JFK, intending to declare solidarity with the citizens of West Berlin, proclaimed his self a jelly doughnut.  For reasons apparent at the time, Bush had his grammar handed to him in a hat; while Kennedy drew a pass and was regarded as an excellent orator. 
          I had a close encounter with a helicopter yesterday afternoon.  As I pulled into a parking lot across the road from a hospital heliport, a medevac airship pulled up and went into a brief hover directly over us.  I knew what it was but couldn’t visually acquire it and didn’t want to drive into its potential landing zone if it pulled up short or lost power.  It was hot and humid yesterday and those factors in combination with altitude do odd things to helicopters.  I had a brief view back in time to seeing people carelessly walk into rotor blades.   It’s much messier than you might think and happens in just a blink of stupidity and/or lost concentration. 
          Once I got a visual fix on the chopper, the moment passed.  It has been a long time since I’ve found myself in the glide path or in the LZ of a helicopter.  Sound is a powerful memory initiator. 
          I have trouble with the current descriptor, “life flight” for medical helicopter transport flights.  I knew them as “medevac” or as “dust-off” flights. 




There’s a reason for the nickname.  There is a helicopter inside that dust cloud.



No comments:

Post a Comment