I don't know when this shit really took off - I think though that it was 2004, when the Monkeyface's putrid, inbred, diseased & fever-brained hatemongers started using the colloquial name for a fucking shower shoe to describe what they perceived as John Kerry's reversal on some issues during the travesty of what would eventually become the second obviously stolen election of my lifetime. Obvious, that is, to anyone with an IQ larger than that of your average kept household ferret or anything else smarter than most card-carrying Republicans - though I don't think they let them actually carry the cards anymore because GOPers tend to hurt their eyes and gums with hard edges of the cards. I think maybe it's a squishy elephant toy they carry now. Named Ronnie. Probably made in China. We can only hope there's lead in it.
But, to quote the illustrious Mr. Silverman, I digress.
Flip-flop. I fucking hate this, this childish shorthand, this fool's coinage. Every time I take a moment and listen to the chatter coming from my fellow Americans, it becomes more puerile. Just when you think it was safe to listen again - when the moronic fucking back-and-forth braying of idiots in the wind, on the networks, in the workplace, and on the streets wouldn't send you diving for stronger and stronger headache medications - you are once again lowered into a new and seething pit of disappointment, and informed by the trends extant in conversation that apparently, this relatively recent new stupidity is here to goddamn stay. Great. So we get the "flip-flop," the most recent perversion of the (supposedly sacrosanct to American born white people) English motherfucking tongue.
And both the big men have flip-flopped this week, so we get to hear about it some more: Obama turns down public funding from what he describes as a "broken system" after previously promising to go along with it, and McCain, who previously railed against offshore drilling now sees that it's politically expedient to be pulled along by Mr. & Mrs. Joe Motorist, and now thinks drilling offshore might not be such a bad idea. Obama wants the cash money, Johnny wants the percentage points. So they're a pair of flip-flops, I suppose. Gah, disgusting. Like pissing on real conversation. And apparently, there's nothing to be done about it, other than gouging our your own eyes with a pointed stick, and then going after your ears next, because they're going to keep saying it. Like lemmings, one of the media mutts has said it, the rest of them just dive off the cliff into the oblivion of meaninglessness.
English is supposedly one of the most complex systems of verbal expression on the planet, a living, breathing, changing, evolving language, that we, as the ones who speak it, are meant to use and modify, shepherd along into a new form and function. Instead, we boil it down into a tallow mass of catchphrases, redefining half of most people's vocabulary every half generation or so.
Bullshit. Poppycock. Fie on your fucking "flip-flop," establishment talkers.