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.
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