Not bothering with all this is clearly a no-brainer!!!

I know that there is no escaping the little irritants in life, like asking for ice in your Coke in France and getting a single ice cube; or the beeps and pings that now issue from every electronic contraption; or seeing a bottle of good wine emptied by some overzealous sommelier into four glasses filled almost to the brim; or losing out to the fine print; or being defeated in the quest to speak to a human being by some devilish labyrinth of automated responses; or having to listen to an explanation of why anyone would want a driverless car; or password hell; or just finding yourself in an airport alongside all the other suckers who know for a fact that whatever happened to Osama bin Laden was grossly insufficient punishment.

So it goes. You just have to breathe deeply and be grateful for the gift of breath. YOLO! Don’t get me started on that, either.

The English reflexive pronoun thing has not crossed the Atlantic, yet, but “no worries” has (having previously made the longer crossing from Australia). I’m just not in a space right now where I can deal with that. (“Oh, really, where are you then?”)

It may just be time to “offboard” as I’m not sure I have the “bandwidth” to be “looped” into a discussion of how anyone can say “no worries” at this particular moment in history, whatever side of the Atlantic himself or herself happens to be situated on. I mean that’s just beyond. What would be even the thematic tent poles of the debate? I can’t even!!

Let’s face it: “Does that work for yourself?” is never going to work in New York City, which would rather tell you to “drop dead” than adopt that affectation. So there are limits to the global homogenization of bad English after all. Neither deference nor pomposity is a New York thing. America is not classless; it’s just not class obsessed.

That in plain English will about do it for myself.