Tag Archives: businesses

Appalling

dictionary with letter A

Appalling: (adj) greatly dismaying or horrifying

What is appalling?

I would think that our value and service to humankind is based upon our ability to discover what is truly appalling instead of what we promote as appalling.

For example:

  • It is not appalling that young people want to have sex with each other. It is a healthy situation demanding wisdom.
  • It is not appalling that people make mistakes. What we should be teaching in our schools is gracious repentance instead of clumsy denial.
  • It is not appalling that people don’t believe in God. God knows He’s hard to understand–that’s why He keeps sending people to simplify Him to the masses.
  • It is not appalling that politics has degraded itself to a mockery. What is appalling is that we don’t seem to be able to have any statesmen step out of the shadows to represent the common good anymore.
  • It is not appalling that men and women, and people of different races have some natural conflicts. What is appalling is the idea that this is irreversible and should be accepted rather than addressed.
  • It is not appalling that businesses cheat and sell inferior products. No need to get your ire up, just hire more competent laborers.
  • It is not appalling that people want to do away with unwanted pregnancies. What is appalling is the hypocrisy that allows for one form of termination of life while promoting another.
  • It is not appalling that the Jews and the Arabs are at each other’s throats. It is a family squabble, and only appalling if we think we can resolve it.
  • It is not appalling that in the long run we do need a savior to rescue us from our inconsistencies and sins. What is appalling is keeping people weak to constantly remind them of those inconsistencies and sins.

If you’re going to use the word “appalling,” you should shrink it to cover less and less variety of subjects.

For after all, the only thing that’s truly appalling is that after all these years, we still don’t understand that if we’re going to survive as a species, it is a necessity that we “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

 

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Adjacent

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Adjacent: (adj.) next to or adjoining something else.

It was a big chunk of three-story, square brick building, sitting right in the middle of our little town, holding within its confines a trio of completely unrelated businesses. The only thing they shared in common was that they were adjacent to one another.

The building looked like it had been constructed by about forty-five Amish men with only a break for lunch in between bouts of mortaring. It was simple.

My parents’ little loan company was located in the center, with a hardware store to the right and an optometrist‘s to the left. Our eye doctor fellow only showed up two times a week, driving in from Columbus to take care of the bespectacled in our community.

The hardware store was always open, but never busy. As a boy I often wondered how they stayed in business. It seemed the only commerce was the pop machine in front of the store, which was frequented by everybody on the block, since such contraptions were a bit of a rarity at the time.

Directly across the street was the town green, wherein sat another brick-chunk building, dubbed The Public Library.

For many days and in many ways, this little parcel of business and commerce was my stomping ground, playground and home, as I patiently waited for my parents to finish the dribble of business they did, often loaning money to people in our burg for anything from motorcycles to stud bulls.

Beneath this massive construction was a basement that connected all three businesses, and when I y worked up my courage, I went down to the spider-web-infested terrain, hoping to discover some treasure I might be able to sell, in order to acquire enough coinage to stroll up the street and visit the local Five and Dime for treasures often beyond my comprehension.

The town was so small that actually, everything was adjacent to everything else. And like so many pieces of my life, the older I became, the more it seemed to shrink and become insufficient to my expanding boundaries.

But Samuel’s Hardware and Bremen Optometry will always be in my mind the quintessential definition of adjacent.