Re-defining Exclusive
I get sloppy with meaning sometimes, maybe you as well. Advertising makes me inaccurate and we're drowning in advertising. Exclusive, through over-use by Madison Avenue in defining almost anything they want to sell by that term, has the scent of desire built into it. Cars and perfumes, clothes and even coffees carry that dewy-eyed, full-red-lipped, youthful image of exclusivity.
Google exclusive and you get 444 million pages for that one single word and nearly all are product.
But this present administration, indeed this entire government of both political parties, has come to be exclusive in the most elemental definition of the word. It ain’t pretty.
A casual brush with the dictionary describes the word as “not divided or shared with others,” going on to elaborate, “excluding much or all; especially all but a particular group or minority.” It bugs me when definitions use exclude to define exclusive, but even so, it’s pretty easy to catch the drift that dewy-eyes and red-lips aren’t as c…