Thursday, January 31, 2008

Focus, focus, focus


The longer your parents are gone, the more the questions build. I have stored up bunch for my old man. Among the top five are: "You had money. Why did we have a monocular? Why not binoculars???"
If you've never seen a monocular it was because my old man bought the only one ever sold on the market. At any one moment in history, there are only so many one-eyed bird-watchers. But he had to have it. And it was a lot cheaper than the cheapest binocular set, which played to the core values of a man who, despite being wealthy, bought sport coats at K-Mart for $15. (The deal thrilled him, but it made my mom weep publicly).
The monocular: Undoubtedly it was designed by a German count who lost one eye in an artillery blast at Verdun. Everyone else in the world has binoculars, and while it's never easy to get each lens focused, you can at least at least try. With a monocular, you're squinting into the eyepiece and trying to determine if, yes, by golly, that is an ivory-billed woodpecker, or, more accurately, you're looking at an eyelash that's been permanently embedded in your cornea because you've been spending 20 minutes shoving your eye socket into the damn device trying to see something, anything.
Why, oh why, do I bring this up? Because I read constantly the construction "heavily focused" or "focused heavily." I Googled "focused heavily" in quotation marks and it returned 114,000 citations.
It's one of those phrases that drives ya nuts. Focus and weight do not go together the way that McDonald's and weight go together. In fact they don't go together at all.
If you want to modify focus, try "narrowly." But even then, why modify a perfectly good verb?
When it comes to good writing, the mantra is focus, focus, focus.

1 comment:

Jordan Guthmann said...

This brings to mind a great quote from Back to the Future. Marty McFly is constantly using the slang word "heavy" in his trip back to 1955, to which Doc Brown replies, "There's that word again, 'heavy'. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?" Priceless.

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