Do you know this feeling when all of the Big Important Issues™ get to be all a bit too much? When your brain screams out for a break from pretending to give a damn about a world that has obviously gone utterly, stark, raving, bats in the belfry mad, a world that doesn’t really give a damn in return?
We do.
That’s when we indulge in an old cranky geezer hobby of ours, which is to provide our poor brain with that break through finding some incredibly minor, entirely unimportant issue that irritates us immensely and dwell on that instead. Yes, we’re strange. One doesn’t get to be Emperor of all of the Universe with outlying counties by being altogether normal, you know.
Today that was the use or, rather, abuse of the word “consume”, as in “I’m a big consumer of media.”
No, you’re not. Not unless you’re in the deplorably strange habit of, say, shoving back issues of Southern Living down your pie hole. Or old VHS tapes which do, after all, not have much use anymore. They also don’t have much by way of nutritional value, but at least they won’t be gathering dust and cluttering up your attic anymore.
You see, once you’re done “consuming” your medium, as the idiotic usage of the verb nowadays goes, it is still there. It doesn’t magically disappear or turn into something else. It is not taken up, which is the meaning of the original Latin.
If you don’t like to use “read” or “watch” because it doesn’t sound fancy enough to you, kindly do the sentient remnant of humanity a favor and make up your own damn word.
Thatisall.
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