Right Now

Breaking news: Going out to walk the dog right now.

Do you not dislike it  when NBC’s Lester Holt (who, by the way, has a very slight lisp; check it out; he has prevailed against more than just the one challenge, of being black) says at the beginning of every “Nightly News,” “Nightly News begins right now”? Wouldn’t you prefer just “begins now”? Or, for a laff, “begins more or less now.” Even “begins now” seems a little melodramatic. I mean, what else is he doing there if he’s not about to begin the news? Why doesn’t he say, at the end, “Nightly News ends right now”? And another melodramatic thing: the newscasters are always saying that “millions of people” lie in the path of this or that tornado or flood or other meteorological threat. Well, of course it’s millions of people. Hardly anything meteorologically or even otherwise newsworthy can happen in this country of 330 million without affecting millions of people. “Millions of people” would have been impressive in 1950, maybe. I wonder how many millions of people are annoyed by this trope. Probably not as many as are annoyed by those who use the word “trope.”

This trope ends right now.