The Flozberks habitually wildly abuse language to craft a false reality

As written elsewhere here, my first heroes were overly based on marketing and popular culture. Then, I evolved and upgraded, with Mr. Spock on Star Trek taking the lead. His logic, precision, loyalty, discernment, and principles much impressed me. On Spock's heels were world-changing Louis Pasteur and Sir Brian May, who built his own electric guitar, then, playing that guitar with a sixpence coin instead of a proper pick, also changed the world.

This new lot was quite a step above mere Evel Knievel and Roger Staubach.

About then, word came from the school office that some tests I took filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil claimed I wasn't as much of a drooling moron as most of the other kids, so they heaved me into this thing called T.A.G. (Talented and Gifted). It was awesome. Unlike in regular classes, things like complex logic problems were the rule. I began to enjoy school more than ever and Mom about wore out her vocal cords bragging about her talented and gifted crotchfruit.

Yes, SpockTAG is a Thing
SpockTAG's devotion to rationality and accuracy created something of a monster, at least so far as the Flozberks were concerned, and said monster became further refined during decades of various pursuits requiring logic, original thought, and precision. Truth and logic themselves became my heroes, and thank goodness for that, for I was surrounded by hot air.

Well, hot air...and Dad, who was a sensible electrical engineer also vexed by Flozberk windbaggery. When electrical engineers think sloppily, things get ruined and people die, see.

Mom and I also watched lots of British comedy, further enhancing my skills in thinking more elegantly and countering loutish antics with wry, discerning humor. It's interesting that so many of the things she pushed upon me later came back to haunt her, but none of the lessons on logic I devoured had clauses exempting Mom from the rules, much to her eventual chagrin.

Heaving Rationality Under the Bus, All Over the Place
Damn, Mary Ann was HOT! After 8th grade school one day, Dad and I returned home to find Mom on the phone with Mutchie in a contentious, animated conversation. She kept yelling, "Noooo, mama" amid much spirited foreign chatter. Knowing to leave her alone at such times, grizzled veterans Dad and I toed the south perimeter to the kitchen. I made a snack while he hit the solitude of his garage workshop.

As I watched Gilligan's Island in the game room, Mom, riled up from yet another frustrating talk with her perhaps-Mother, intently marched by me to the garage to ask Dad something, then stopped cold on her way back through, eyeing my surroundings. Yep, here we go...

MOM: Why did you throw your things all over the place?

I looked around. My tray with empty dishes, cutlery, and feta cheese container sat to my right on the sofa. Two shoes and two socks were on the floor to my right, in front of the sofa by the organ and out of the way in perhaps 1.5 square feet of a 220 sq. ft room that Mom never used. I don't think I saw her sit down in there once. Perhaps when the furniture was delivered.

This was already shaping up to be a strange one.

ME: I did nothing of the sort. I placed some things on the floor next to me and set my tray aside after I ate. Apologize, you, for not being earnest.
MOM: (Pissed) How was I not earnest?
ME: I just explained that. Ya done screwed the ol' pooch on both the "throw" and the "all over the place" scams.
MOM: SCAMS?!?!? WHAT SCAMS?!?!?
ME: Twice in one sentence you abused language in order to create an alternate reality and dishonorably gain an upper hand .
MOM: ABUSED?!?!? WHAT DID I ABUSE?!?!?

Mom was pretty consistent in her methods of opposition when at an impasse. Her primary concerns here were that an apology was demanded of her and that the words "scam," "abused," and "dishonorably" were used in relation to her. It was no accident that I used those words - in trying to hold Mom accountable, I, rebellious and adolescent, was left flat by kid gloves. I just don't do sacred cows.

ME: You said "threw" when nothing was thrown and "all over the place" when "a tiny fraction of the room" was called for. Stop pulling stunts like that and git out da damn way - I think the cannibals are about to finally kill Gilligan!

Or, were they headhunters? Either way, Mom didn't give a damn 'bout no Gilligan.

MOM: (Incredulous) STUNTS?!?!? I PULLED NO STUNTS?!?!?
ME: You very much did. Didn't you learn the right English words to earnestly describe this simple matter?
MOM: <JUNGLE BIRD NOISE>

Yep. Wanna set Mom off? Play the goofy foreigner card.

We had now tweaked one another into a bad place, and it was gonna get worse.

Worser, Even
Mom advanced, leaning across me to grab, for whatever reason, the stuff off the tray rather than the tray and, consequently, the stuff on it. She growled something to the effect of my needing to be smacked, which was unlike her. Mom detested the beating of children and loutish hooliganism. In fact, she was pretty close to a pacifist, epic passive aggression notwithstanding.

I was quite taken aback by that and can't recall any other such utterance by her. Yeah, she smacked me a few times over the years, but always on impulse when I nailed her to the barn door in an argument. Never had she actually let loose an advance heralding of the act.

Taken aback, I made an unfavorable choice in my response. Having recently watched some dopey movie in which a guy and his old lady got into a huge fight and he dared her to rack him, I decided to parrot some of the guy's words and gestures in the pursuit of household bedlam:

ME: (Spreading legs slightly and pointing at crotch) C'mon, mama...give it yer best shot.
MOM: <JUNGLE PTERODACTYL NOISE>

We're way past birds now. I don't think she ever let one rip like that one, and about then she made with the ol' heave-ho with the kitchen stuff and chunked it all at me at once, breaking the drinking glass. I was flabbergasted.

Perhaps that's why she didn't grab the tray; it was a preemptive act of restraint! I mean, there's a humanitarian limit on how much stuff ya should throw at yer kid at once.

Dad heard the ruckus from the nearby garage and came to investigate.

DAD: What in God's name is happening here?
ME: Mom freaked out and threw dishes at me.
MOM: I was taking them to the kitchen and then he showed me his balls!!!
DAD: YOU SHOWED YOUR BALLS TO YOUR MOTHER????!!!!????!!!!?!?!?

I swear I thought poor Dad, caught between us yet again, was gonna kill me.

Aided by impassioned declarations that I was wearing securely fastened jeans at the time, I made it clear that no, I'd indeed most fucking certainly not displayed my testicles to my loon of a mother. Eventually, things settled down until the next dustup.

Hot for Teacher
Imagine if, on the first day of school, a familiar teacher uncrossed and extended her arms to give me a hug (it happened many times) only for me to later claim she showed me her titties (neither the claim nor the titties thing happened even once, for some odd reason). That is analogous to Mom's outrageous "showed me his balls" claim.

Who on Earth Doesn't Like Cereal?
Emotional abuse from the gamut of Flozberks was a staple in our family, but there was little physical abuse, at least in most directions. Dad hit me once with a belt when I was very young, raising a big welt. That and the bowls of makeup Special K we had after are among my first memories. Mom saw to it that such (the beating, not the cereal) did not recur (know that she didn't like cereal, though).

Neila laid The Sausage Pounding on Reagan in the late 70s. Mom slapped me a few times and threw those dishes at me over the course of several years. Mom threw a bunch of dresses at mortified Dad while screaming, "I HAAAAATE YOU!" on the hideous night she falsely declared she was going to divorce him.

That's about it...

...well, exceptin' fer hundreds of acts of violence by The Golden Psycho John, over 14 years my senior, against me. Dozens of chokeholds and immersions to the point of near-blackout, plus near-constant of poking and teasing. Yes, immersions. When a madman has a swimming pool at his disposal, the shortcomings of mere waterboarding are easily disposed of.

I was somewhat convinced by Mom that it was just boys being boys, but the more I considered it and I asked others of their sibling situations, the less sense her words made. People generally tell me that their much older siblings tried to protect and elevate, not destroy them, and, curiously, Mom had little tolerance for normal boys will be boys stuff and was pretty damn uptight...unless it was John wreaking havoc on me.

But, I digress.

The Spock Heard 'Round My World
While nowhere near our first fight over semantics, this was pivotal. I became very tight with being clear, precise, earnest, and accurate, and that ripple-effected the bloody hell out of those around me who were not too contaminated to groove with it. My brightest friends would start spouting off some rash, youthful bullshit, then catch themselves and revise. It was great, that war on crookedness.

Those coarsened by The Flozberk Way, though, have been a different story, being high priests in the dark arts of exaggeration and the abuse of superlatives and other stark absolutes. Ruthlessly windbaggy Mom, Mutchie, John, Neila, Ryan, and Tiffany have blown more hot air out of their busy asses than I could begin to describe, with more level-headed Dad, Reagan, Langdon, and I, among some others, getting dragged along for the wacky, grueling ride.

The Junior Basics
Our superb language gives us ranges of words with which to craft thoughts into utterances. Some of them that describe frequency or quantity are:

No/none few some many half most almost all all/every
Never rarely sometimes often usually almost always always

The only absolute or precise words there are those at each end (plus "half"). The rest cover the ranges and are most useful in the human experience. Despite how painfully basic this is, people too often leave them in the box and just shoot from the hip with the extremes, revealing sloppy, childish, dishonest minds and often inflicting bigly ungood results.

Being on the lookout for those shabby minds is itself a game. Abuses explained here, plus things like redundancy and superfluous words, can be quite entertaining to discern and discuss, and boy, are they ever rampant. That's a shame, and a serious concern, for disearnest and sloppy communication causes enormous damage from ruined relationships to loss of touch with reality to wasted resources to massive numbers of deaths.

Behold some examples of wild abuse of the starkly absolute from customers interviewed in the hilarious "He shot my arm off" video that went viral in 2023:

- The criminals are in control of everything right now.....
- Everybody is brazen and thinks that they are owed everything and that they can do whatever they want

Wowzers! THREE in one sentence. Score one Windbag Hat Trick!

How utterly absurd, and people often say such things. No, criminals are not "in control of everything." Nor are they in control of most things. Or even half of things.

And no, not "everybody is brazen and thinks they are owed everything and that they can do whatever they want." Relatively few such people exist, and those that do tend to be much closer to the top of the ladder than the howling buckshot recipient in the video.

The world those two excruciatingly stupid women have dreamed up does not exist, thank goodness. It would be unlivable. In that dream world, going the liquor store would be the least of their concerns, assure you. Those people are existing and voting based on woefully invalid positions and it's not hard to figure out on which side of our sociopolitical fence those insufferable windbags are plopped.

Rasheed Gets a Piece of Da ActShawn
Amusingly, the unfortunate, shrieky robber also was a windbag who abused a starkly absolute term, and did it at least four times! No, he did not shoot your arm "off." He shot your arm. The arm did not come away and, despite being seriously injured, did not require reattachment. After medical attention, it remains attached to Rasheed DaShawn Lee Belvin as he serves his prison sentence.

RIP to the badass old dude who fired the shot: Aptly-named Craig Cope died a few months after the incident.

The Big Four
There are only four reasons people abuse starkly absolute terms:

- Ignorance. They're fuckin' primitive.
- Idiocy. They're fuckin' stupid.
- Insanity. They're fuckin' crazy.
- Dishonesty. They're fuckin' crooked.

That's it. If you see someone engage in such abuse, one or more of those exact four things MUST be the reason.

I suspect all fuckin' four have been fuckin' factors during the fuckin' Floz reign of terror, but I'd bet my last nickel that "crooked" takes the trophy, with "primitive" and "stupid" just behind in a dead heat for second, and "crazy" a length or two back, but still in the race.

High Practitioners of Low
The worst charlatans best most bewared are those who preface the abused terms with "literally," capitalize them, use multiple abuses in one sentence, or offends many times in a brief period. Those escapades are right out of the Flozrat playbook.

Such people are simply untrustable.

Triggered Neila once sent me this text regarding Dad:

You've never cared about any of his doctor's appointments up to now.

That statement, further explained HERE, was so outrageously invalid that it pissed off mild-mannered Dad something awful, racking up yet another exasperated "God almighty!" from him. Two starkly absolute terms - "never" and "any" - are abused in one sentence, and very badly so, for what we call a Double Dip.

Beware that author. She is not an earnest, honorable person. Period. End of story.

Princess Corn Log would not be left out, though. In her fascinating epic mini magnum opus of windbaggery "Monster," she went slap nuts with the sleazy crookedness, unleashing a rampage of semantic chicanery:

- My mom always tries to protect me
- You are the most dangerous type of narcissist
- the only people who think so highly of you are yourself and Lisa.
- keep yelling about how terrible all family members are
- incessantly talking about how wonderful you and Lisa are
- demanding anyone willing to listen to believe it
- care with more love and compassion than most people ever receive
- relentlessly degraded her on her deathbed
- strong presence and incredible care giver
- you and Lisa are incapable of caring for another human being
- you have never even come close to half-assedness in your care for him.

Dang! All that from one short page! Each statement is ludicrous and reflects a forehead-slapping divorce from rationality. To say they pissed off Dad and smashed the Flozberks' standing would be a grand understatement. It was most helpful of Tiffany to write it, yet it's very sad and revealing. The mind that wrote that turd was in desperate need of guidance and ripe for the picking by a much more ambitions charlatan than any of the shabby Flozberks.

Do not trust the wanton mind that wrote that vicious mess.

The one thing her outburst was not is surprising. Tiffany spewing "like"- and "literally"-laced hot air, especially when she'd get crocked on ethanol and whatnot, was old hat to us. May she someday pave the way to a shot at a pure life by leaving that swamp behind. That journey can be a very hard one, for a long-clutched security windbag can be quite the shield from the chill of hard truths.

It Just Keeps Coming
When The Golden Psycho didn't get his way with Mom in his greasy quest to exploit The Sultan of Sodomy and my parents even harder than his equally-greasy pseudo-twin The Sue Chef had managed, he blew his top and screamed at her over the phone that she never loved him. That was after she adored and woefully overvalued him for over a half century. I recall the outburst was on Mother's Day and part of a nine hour tantrum.

Later, he swore under oath that my parents never gave him any money when in reality they had given him a literal fortune, chunk by chunk, for years.

Mutchie offended similarly, sometimes complaining to Mom that she was unloved and that nobody ever did a thing for her, both claims criminally untrue. She actually got in my face once and told me that she always took care of herself and nobody helped her. That was outrageously untrue, but I just smiled and agreed. Her rap sheet as a mutator of fact was nothing short of galactic.

Ryan could spit out staccato abuses of language like a damn Gatling gun. He was one of the most fanciful speakers and sloppy thinkers I've ever known.

Mom said that when married to Aydin, his melodrama was often stunning. Later, Mom would, ironically, behave similarly more times than I could ever recount. Really, it seems impossible that the products of her and Aydin's genetics and upbringing would not be nine kinds of fucked.

Along for the Ride
But, Dad, Reagan, and Langdon...not so much. They ran on a much more even keel with Langdon complaining bitterly about the Flozberk Way before getting swallowed up by it, long swallowed-and-digested Dad coming to understand it and finally feeling safe daring to talk about it in his final months, and gentle, cowardly Reagan keeping his mouth shut like a bear trap 'till the cows come home and beyond.

I'll be damned if I ain't seein' a sort of pattern here. Those with blood from across the pond have a bum gene that spurs them to act as they do while lacking a gene and the environment that foster the character to fight off their natured and nurtured demons. I'd bet my life on it. That biochemical curse can be overcome, though.

Teach. Learn.
One should be taught to exhaustion by their elders to live by the basic standards of good faith, but, failing that, they can instead find enlightenment through various paths, and it's never too late.

Many never do, though. Garbage in, garbage out.

Exaggerating, abusing starkly absolute terms, and slanting language poisons life when used against those who deserve better. Choosing to stoop to lying when one damn well knows the earnest words escalates and broadens conflicts. If allowed to go haywire as seen here, it props up a culture of dysfunction that can get baked in to forever chip away at existence.

We have a duty to our families, friends, and general others to proceed in good faith. Others are dealt with as the situation demands, and there are always exceptions, but the bottom line is that we have a dire obligation to try our best to be earnest, accurate, and precise with our comrades.

And, since we are only human, when that doesn't work out, we have an equally dire obligation to man up when called out after we fail, then resolve to do better.

The Flozzies massively suck at that whole damn kit n' kaboozzle. The ongoing cost has been far beyond what they are willing or able to grasp.

Return to Appendices

Where the Cold Windbags Blow