December 14, 2017

If you're going to do grandiosity, go big.

You can't do modest grandiosity.

People may admire modesty and humility, but that does not pair well with grandiosity.

With grandiosity, you've got to go big.

The other side of that is if you're choosing to go with modesty, you can't be grandiose about it. Grandiose modesty? That's even worse than modest grandiosity. Much worse!

22 comments:

Meade said...

I don't mean to brag but I've won every humble pie-eating contest I've ever been in.

MadisonMan said...

Some of my neighbors think this, with respect to Christmas lights, and I appreciate their efforts.

rhhardin said...

Rush does modest grandiosity. He adopts a larger than life persona but as self-deprecation.

In the contradiction he gets room to say stuff that's true against PC.

That would be the old Rush.

When he's doing morality he's no good because you can't do larger-than-life morality and he's not modest about it. He goes dogmatic.

There's more of that recently so he's not as good as he once was.

Humperdink said...

Go big or go home. I thought it was a NASCAR term, but alas, I was wrong (maybe).

From the Grammarist: Go big or go home is an exhortation to go all-out, to put all of one’s effort into an enterprise, to experience something to its fullest, to be extravagant. Go big or go home is a philosophy that encourages one to be bold. The phrase is said to have originated as a sales slogan in the 1990s. A motorcycle parts company in Southern California incorporated the term go big or go home in its packaging for some oversized Harley Davidson pipes. However, there are some who say that the term was derived from the jargon of the sport of mogul skiing in the 1980s. According to this origin story, skiers taunted each other into more and more spectacular skiing runs with the terms go hard or go home and go big or go home. Others believe that go big or go home originated in the sport of surfing. In any case, it is probably safe to assume that the idiom go big or go home came out of Southern California in the latter part of the twentieth century. The idiom is hyphenated when used as an adjective before a noun, as in go-big-or-go-home.

Tommy Duncan said...

Mediocrity, on the other hand, knows no bounds.

rhhardin said...

Rush does modest grandiosity. He adopts a larger than life persona but as self-deprecation.

In the contradiction he gets room to say stuff that's true against PC.

That would be the old Rush.

When he's doing morality he's no good because you can't do larger-than-life morality and he's not modest about it. He goes dogmatic.

There's more of that recently so he's not as good as he once was.

Meade said...

Cock a doodle shhh.

Ann Althouse said...

"Mediocrity, on the other hand, knows no bounds."

I once sent the New Yorker a sentence I found in a book about the artist George Grosz:

"His limitations knew no bounds."

The New Yorker published it (you know how they used to publish screwy little things to fill the column at the end of an article).

tim in vermont said...

Is this advice for wannabe trolls if they really want to spice up the comments here? We do miss Titus.

Ann Althouse said...

"When he's doing morality he's no good because you can't do larger-than-life morality and he's not modest about it. He goes dogmatic."

Because it's obvious that he doesn't believe it and has no interest in devoting his life to it in any way. He's passing along material that he hasn't internalized first. Hasn't gone through the digestive process. Not good bullshit.

What he's good at, and he knows it, because he consumes it massively, is how liberals think and why it's so devious and stupid and bad.

The liberals are grandiose, and he punctures that. He's modest in doing that, because the role of puncturing inflated people is impish. He really isn't grandiose when he's at his best. He's saying I know these people, I've figured out what they're doing, and I want to tell you about it and make you laugh and make you see how small they really are. We should all be small. You, me, the liberals, and the government the liberals want to make big. It's all about smallness.

And the man who called him a "big fat idiot" got so inflated he popped.

Meade said...

"The New Yorker published it"

They did? Wow, I'm impressed. Just one more example of how you tend to hide the light of your grand successes under bushel baskets of half-read New Yorker back issues.

tim in vermont said...

Speaking of grandiosity. I never had a Mac before, and this will probably be the only one I ever buy, it is slooow! Anyway, this MacBook seems to have the vocabulary of an ESL dropout, but it still regards itself as qualified to silently correct my spelling and replace words it doesn't know with words it does, which more often than not ends up with some pathetic autocorrect malapropism. (Hey! It knew that word!)

rhhardin said...

To do the liberal accounting, Rush has a larger-than-life persona.

sparrow said...

I actually enjoy the tongue-in-cheek version of grandiose modesty (ie Meade). When played for laughs, it's fun.

sparrow said...

Remembering that old movie "A funny thing happened on the way to the forum" where the centurion sings "I am my own ideal."

Amadeus 48 said...

Speaking of the New Yorker, James Thurber once wrote about Harold Ross's hatred of the overuse of "pretty" and "little" as adverbs:

"Once, to bedevil him [Ross], I used them both in a single sentence of a Talk piece: 'The building is pretty ugly and a little big for its surroundings.'”

TrespassersW said...

Chuck Norris is modest in a grandiose way.

He also can take close-up photos of the horizon.

Amadeus 48 said...

The centurion was named Miles Gloriosus.

Ann Althouse said...

"Anyway, this MacBook seems to have the vocabulary of an ESL dropout, but it still regards itself as qualified to silently correct my spelling and replace words it doesn't know with words it does, which more often than not ends up with some pathetic autocorrect malapropism."

You need to uncheck something. I finally figured out the box I needed to uncheck after letting myself get annoyed (and accidentally publishing idiotic things, like Franzen for Franken, 1000s of times).

Go to "Preferences" (in the apple menu), then Keyboard, then Text, then uncheck the box "correct spelling automatically."

Known Unknown said...

GO BIGLY.

eddie willers said...

GO BIGLY.

Or go homely.

Dave D said...

I'm so confused.....