Caution – Explanatory Aside!

 

There are lots of ways to tell you aren’t a kid anymore, and technologies to hide most of them, but none of us can evade the awful impact of the Explanatory Aside.

 

It’s how you at last must admit to yourself  that you’re older than dirt, which, by the way, is one of the phrases you should avoid using if you’re trying to pass as just yesterday’s dust.

 

The Explanatory Aside is a clever enemy, hiding in the grass of a lot of ordinary prose, waiting to deflate the self esteem of anyone who not only doesn’t see it coming, but doesn’t need it coming.

 

Here’s an example from an Associated Press report on an Obama administration tilt at the elimination of nuclear weapons windmill (italics added):

 

“In doing so, the White House official invoked the names of former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker, as well as former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga. Kissinger was in the administration of President Richard Nixon while Baker was in the administration of George H.W. Bush.”

 

Now the AP, in common with just about all other major media, writes for a mainstream audience, one that shares a common understanding. And the obvious assumption of the writer and editors involved was that mention of these two historical figures would require explanation, just like mentioning Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s longest-serving Secretary of War.

 

So if the mainstream audience needs a tag explaining Dr. K and Jim Baker, those of us who don’t must be. . .

 

Well, let’s not say it out loud. If we have to speak of at all, we’ll call it “differently mainstreamed.”

 

Explanatory Asides pop up all the time. Reading the Sunday comics a couple of weeks ago, I saw a panel take a moment to explain what a typewriter was.

 

It might have been easier if the artist just put a footnote inviting the audience to “Dial 1-800-SAY-WHUT, except another footnote would have been necessary to explain the verb “dial.”

 

Those of us with grandchildren can look forward to more footnotes explaining LP records, floppy disks, tape decks, video cassettes and why “Twist And Shout” was something other than a George W. Bush Administration interrogation technique. So here’s a suggestion.

 

Study explanatory footnotes as though you didn’t already know them, and make it a habit. It might help in later years when you have forgotten so much you’re actually mainstream again.

 

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