Common Ground

A fundamental assumption I make when beginning any commentary or essay is that my reader and I share some common ground or interest that may unite us for the few minutes it takes to read my thoughts. 

 

The forum I use is the now commonly-used term ‘blog,’ though as I expressed in an earlier essay, I try to avoid the term finding it to be an ugly word, discordant to my ear. However, I do sometimes worry that the form, as I use it (being unadorned with nice pictures or arresting artwork), may work against me because it is admittedly not attractive and because of that my thoughts might be entirely dismissed even before the reading.

What I do not want to have happen is to have my reader dismiss it for some more substantive reason (other than cosmetics) such as considering it to be sheer bloviation.  (If nothing else comes from this rumination today is that a new word has been added to your vocabulary: ‘bloviation’ means speech or writing that is wordy, pompous, and generally empty of meaning.) 

An example of a nationally known figure of my grandfather’s time who was said to be a ‘bloviator’ was United States President Warren G. Harding.  His middle name being Gamaliel perhaps portended this inclination.  (Gamaliel was a doctor of the Mosaic Law, a Pharisee, in the time of Paul the apostle.) A campaign speech Mr. Harding gave in 1920 was reported to have this sentence in it:

            “America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” 

Though Harding expressed these thoughts in words and structure (alliteration) that I, personally, do not mind, and a viewpoint with which I can largely agree, I can see the problem.

  

What gives me some hope, though, that my thoughts however expressed may be useful to someone, is that I am assuming we have some common ground that can be built upon to mutual advantage. 

Now, after all the bloviating of the previous 336 words, I come to my thought: the advantage of always looking for some common ground in interactions we have with others.

Well, not so fast.

Alas, having just re-read the bloviating that just occurred I find that I must postpone my thoughts on ‘common ground’ until later lest I stand on ground that is, truly, ‘the road less traveled by’ (Robert Frost), i.e., less common,  simply because I have few, by this point, to stand or travel with me.