Officially Dead

The most overused phrase on broadcast news and on the Interwebs is “It’s official!” (More so than the single word "just.")

Stupid, ignorant, thoughtless, uncreative drones who want to say something cannot say it without first inflating their importance by saying, “It’s official.” Aside from the fact that nothing except a law or judicial order can be said to be official, the phrase just delays a reader from getting to the point and tells dear reader the author fell out of the cliché tree and hit every branch on the way down.   

It is not official when a baseball trade is made, it is not official when  Jonathan Pollard is given parole days after it was leaked that he would. It is not official when Apple releases a new phone. It is not official when some “on-again-off-again” thing is declared by a puerile news writer to be “on again” (of “off again.”) Things just "are" -- officially or not.

There used to be a silly little game teenage boys would play with songs on the “Top 40,” consisting of placing the phrase “between the sheets” after the title of each song. (Try it!)  Now, scroll to the next blog or Facebook post, look at a piece of junk mail, or God forbid pick up a book and randomly  find a sentence and put “it’s official” in front of it.   

It is is even more infantile for an actual writer who actually gets paid to begin a narrative with “It’s official.” No. It. Isn’t.  

And even if it were, the phrase is officially the mark of a tedious dullard.