You know how you hear a new word and you know the basic meaning of it by its usage?
Well, today’s words are: vapid and vacuous.
You see, we turned on Letterman the other night and he was interviewing Paris Hilton. He kept asking her about her prison stay until she was getting upset saying she wanted was there to talk about other things, not her prison time (“It was so long ago” I believe were her words). She then said she was sad she came on the show.
But she showed almost no emotion! She appeared to be on some heavy mood altering drugs…or maybe that’s the way she always acts: very soft voice and a clueless semi-smile on her face. The hubby suddenly said he now knows what the word ‘vapid’ means. And I followed that with the word ‘vacuous’.
(The full phrase that actually came to my head was a line from Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins where John Wilkes Booth calls Lee Harvey Oswald a “vapid, vacuous, non-entity.” The third term also describes her, too. So maybe Paris could be compared to a presidential assassin.)
Mountain Cabin 