Re: A Good Man, Food for thought...
Click Here. It means he is the master of a household. Since this does not refer to you or I, and quite a few of my friends, I have had to try and determine new meanings.
I hear the term so often now that I refuse to use it anymore. "He is good people" has lost most of its glamour, as well. I just don't like these descriptions. So many apt descriptions are just no good anymore. Take for instance, "She is a yellow-cake spy." Or, "He shotguns lawyers." Or, our friend is an "airport bathroom reacher-under and one hell of a good national leader!" To refer to a friend as the "king of pop" isn't good anymore. "Moron raper" does not go as far as it once did, "he's for change" isn't cutting it, "not really a Silver Star recipient" changes ones opinion, and even "senior executive" implies that one is making 4,000 times the salary of the average worker. Forget "bank president." It says a lot less about a member of your community than it once did...
I have also noticed recently that some of my friends refer to any people younger, or junior, to them as being "really, good kids." "That battalion that just returned had some really good kids in it." Huh? I don't get that. Were they really playing in a sandbox?
Sometimes, I just say, "he is a friend," but never, "He is an integer," being that it is the root word of integrity and implies whole man. I have quite a few friends missing pieces.
Whenever someone says integrity, I immediately ask them about someone I know they do not like or respect. If they are polite in their answer and dance around the emotional response they would like to provide, I immediately know they use tact, which is a synonym of spin, or lie. Tact and integrity are constantly at war; although, I, like many of you perhaps, have been taught that some things you just can't say.
On multiple boards I was asked about leadership traits, so sometimes I just made one up. "Stoolnosedness" is one that really got me in trouble when I tried to explain that some people do very well by keeping their nostrils far up into the intestines of their seniors. Another that caused a SgtMaj to wig out was "yessiredness," which I pronounced "yeecerdness," which is the tendency of some people to always agree with the boss no matter what (and laugh too, at the end), kind of like McMahon to Carson, "You are correct once again Sir! hahaha...!" That trait always stands out.
Tell them what they've won....(deeper voice) you've won a side-by-side washer drier...
It just bothered me that I always answered "loyalty" and was always corrected that "integrity" was the right answer. In my mind, I was being loyal to my values by not using tact to lie about the answer, since, "You old bastards have been married 14 times between the 5 of you, 2 of you crashed at the barracks last friday night and lied to your wives about it, and all of you have seabags full of extra gear that you are not signed for so my answer to your question is integrity" would not have went over well. "Hookers" might have sufficed, which when pronounced very slowly sounds like, "who cares?" since most people know the 'right' answer in advance.
Like the goodman governor said in "All the King's Men," Everybody has something.
Later, sitting on boards, I tactlessly asked the same question about good leadership traits. The respondee that answered, "integrity" always got my second and third question, "who do you think is the laziest of the people running this board and why?" Most chose not to answer.
These days, I tend to just say, "he is the greatest of all-time" about someone I know and trust and consider a friend, or
1 and
2 (click 1 then 2 closely together) to describe someone that not only do I know, trust and consider a friend, but also would drop all tact and honestly tell me what they thought about something important, like whether they think I am being honest or not...
...that's loyalty.