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Repetitively Redundant Phrases That Should Be Drawn and Quartered

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  Let me confess at the outset: I love the English language. Not because it’s my native tongue, although that’s certainly part of its allure, but because its rich palette derives from so many other languages. Unlike any other language in the world, English is malleable, eminently fluid and versatile. Like any other language it has rules and it has exceptions to those rules. It has its variations, contradictions, idioms, dialects, and is utterly confusing with its hundreds of homonyms, homophones, and inconsistent spellings. Then again, like the artist’s palette that has many tints and tinctures of every color paint, the possible combinations of those colors is endless.    Words and sentences are my passion, my comfort; I dare not abuse them. They are my intellectual children. I feel protective and nurturing toward our language. For this reason I wrote a blog a few weeks back titled “Words and Phrases That Should Be Tortured and Killed.” It wasn’t an exhaustive list, but it got the trai
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Teachers — Locked and Loaded

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Maybe it began with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when they marched into Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, armed like G4S Security mercenaries and killed twelve students, one teacher, and wounded twenty-one others before, thankfully, ending themselves. Maybe it was the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that occurred on December 14th, 2012, when, for whatever deranged reason, 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into the school and killed 26 people, twenty of the them children between six and seven years old. Maybe it was the public outrage that at these and what seems like an endless stream of school shootings before and since. But somewhere in the reactionary cauldrons of American public rhetoric the idea of arming teachers bubbled to the surface. Put guns in the hands of teachers, proponents said, and any would-be assailant will think twice about entering a school, knowing that staff members in that building are also armed and can respond with deadly force.   They called it a det
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