A professor at Indiana University Southeast went on a mild-mannered rant one day, his attitude sharpened by a comment he had overheard in the hallway. “Have a nice day,” he repeated to my class of English students. “With all of the great poems and speeches available to us, the best that we can do is say, ‘Have a nice Day.’ How sad,” he finished with a sigh. I think of Dr. Brengle whenever I hear meaningless phrases like, “It is what it is,” and “I felt some kind of way,” or, “Me being the person that I am,” and “I’m only human.”
“I’m only human” seems to get applied to explain a person’s mistakes or failures. I have an illustrated book called “Humans,” by Mike Dowdall and Pat Welch. The book is written from the point of view of an otherworldly species about its contact with the weird species homo sapiens. The aliens are amused and puzzled by humans, finding it fascinating that though we “come in a variety of basic colors,” and we “make much of this fact among (ourselves,)” to the aliens, we all look alike. Which we should, for to them, we are all just “human.”
There is no credible evidence that aliens are among us (though I did speak to a person who fervently believes that) so, the statement “I’m only human” is puzzling. At birth, a human’s default species is, well — human. If one were speaking to a Martian, for example, one could easily make the case that one was, indeed, “human.” But to say that to another man or woman is to overstate the obvious: all men are created “human.” (And women. The Constitution was written in a time of male dominance; we’ve since learned better.)
A typical application of the “just human” defense might sound like this: “I know I shouldn’t have given that stranger on the phone my Social Security and bank account numbers, but he was appealing for a charity, and I’m only human.” Or something like this: “I know it’s wrong to hold up convenient stores but my kids were hungry and I’m only human.” What are we saying here? We would not have done these things had we been moon rocks, or butterflies or bovines? Every one of our inhalations goes into a human and a human exhales a portion of that which was inhaled.
When we say “It is what it is,” we say nothing. When I hear that, I roar “res ipsa loquitur,” a Latin phrase that means, “the thing speaks for itself.” And “me being the person that I am” forces me to craft an identity for the speaker: liar, loser, cheater, chump. Or more charitably, sad and sorrowful. And why say “I felt some kind of way” instead of “I was happy/sad/angry/hurt?” We have an abundance of verbs and adjectives available to us, things to help us describe what we are doing and how we feel about those activities. Poets and playwrights have spilled “oceans of ink” onto reams of paper and left us with many ways to express any emotion and describe any situation we might encounter. We do not have to go full-bore Shakespeare, with “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun!” For those un-Shakespeared, that can be as vague as “I felt some kind of way.” But we can still say, “When I saw Juliet in that window, I was as happy as a pig in slop.”
Had I not been human, I would not have been compelled to write this.