Shock Ah San Goo

It was the goo at the end that clearly summed up the sentiment.  The part right before the goo was just a polite way of getting there.  This foreign-sounding phrase (possibly a Bhutan dialect or some other land where goo is all that was left after everything else is gone) was exactly what the doctor ordered when it was very important to be at least a little diplomatic… to shield a harsher opinion.  It was uttered when folks wanted to sound open-minded about something we knew they really didn’t care for at all.  A seemingly non-committal way of showing disdain without the messy details.

Nobody says it any more.  Much less goo, these days.  Or, maybe it’s just that tolerance levels have stretched quite a bit since the old days.  Anything goes?  Authenticity is winning  – as the March Hare once demanded:  “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”  And so the shock of the goo has retreated.   Gone with the shock and out with the goo!   Still,  I sometimes miss that quiet moment of reckoning — that effort to stay neutral before the unthinkable, shoulders shrugging, and then that gallant mishmash of syllables all about goo.    à chacun son goût…