"This is it!"

Does anyone here NOT have a cold?



I've got one.

Actually, I think I've got two at the same time, as my yearly cough has just set in (you'd think by now he'd get the hint - after all the cough medicine I've poured on him all these years, but no.)


I've got three weeks until I lose my singing voice - another week before I lose my speaking voice, and then I won't be able to sing for another three months.



Life can be somewhat unfair.


Now, while I've covered 'like', 'rhetorical questions', and 'y'alright', I've decided to look at 'This is it!'


If you're Scottish, it's "Is that right?" in a very Scottish accent, or American, it's quite surely "For Real??"


I stand in a charity shop, day in and day out and hear



"She wasn't even busy, she was standing there filing her nails and didn't even call me up to have me hair done for another twenty minutes"



And the sympathetic listener says:

"I mean, this is it!!"


Or

"British Heart Foundation prices are extortionate. No wonder every time I go past them they don't have anyone in there"



"This is it!"


This is what?


Is it some type of strange language that I don't understand?



Is it a code word that no-one has bothered to tell me about??

Or is it frightfully old-fashioned, and therefore way behind my time?


After much umming, awwing, checking my Dictionary.



Then my Thesaurus. Then my French Dictionary, German Dictionary, Dutch Dictionary, Spanish Dictionary - you catch my drift - I decided that 'this is it' is something that is said that translated means this:


"I haven't heard a word of what you are saying. I wasn't listening. But if it makes you feel better, I'll agree with you"


I think I've got a headache.

I'm off

xxx

Cleverness?

It's quite a relief to be clever at times.

Not that I'm stating out blank that I am clever, I'm merely pointing out what philosophers have been pointing out over the last few centuries.

There are many people who one can keep up with, in the event one is clever, (I do not profess anything of the sort) - and one can follow all kinds of witty conversations.

Now and again though, those of us who are quite clever - er, I mean those people who are quite clever (I'm saying nothing :-) stop to talk to someone, who turns out to be somewhat cleverer than they are!

I know from experience - Of course, I mean I've read somehwhere - that this is decidedly unpleasant. Suddenly I - um, the poor person, is reduced to a quivering mass of humiliation (It's gotta be Shakespeare - Or Dickens??)

In a terrible twist of fate, I am --- cough, 'they are' practically begging for someone to speak in proper English.

I am (they are!) used to using idiosyncratic words themselves (having looked them up in a dictionary and painstakingly added them to their vocabulary - not that I know this, I just have heard it.)

I/ Hem, they, are being insulted so subtly that they wake up at three o'clock the next morning and realise it (these things always occur at three in the morning)

This never normally happens.

Can anyone recommend cleverness classes? Or maybe a brain transplant (installing brain with higher I.Q) would help.

Then again, someone once remarked to me that if I thought there was such a thing as a brain transplant, I would need one.

:-)

TNT

xx