Notes of
Concern…
…Jackson Blair
Kerfuffle
I think there are
some wonderful words in our language. Many of them get very little attention.
One of those is
“kerfuffle.”
A “kerfuffle” is
described by most dictionaries as a disturbance or a fuss.
Synonyms for
“kerkuffle” include:
ado, alarums and excursions, ballyhoo, blather, bluster, bobbery, bother, bustle, clatter, clutter , coil, corroboree, disturbance, do , foofaraw, fun, furor, furore, fuss, helter-skelter, hoo-ha , hoopla, hubble-bubble, hubbub, hullabaloo, hurly, hurly-burly, hurricane, hurry, hurry-scurry , commotion , moil, pandemonium, pother, row, ruckus, ruction, rumpus, shindy, splore , squall, stew, stir, storm, to-do, tumult, turmoil, uproar, welter, whirl, williwaw, zoo
Now you have to admit that “kerfuffle” pretty much covers
the territory and it has such a fantastic sound.
We seem these days to be involved in a lot of kerfuffles
nationally and internationally. There are disturbances breaking out everywhere
and certainly there are more fusses than we could possible enumerate.
There is the kerfuffle in Egypt. This is a kerfuffle of our own
making. We involved ourselves in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, in the
election of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and shortly thereafter in his
overthrow.
Why do we need to get involved in these things?
What a kerfuffle.
In Massachusetts the gas tax went up 3 cents recently, a
change that put Massachusetts amongst the states with the largest gas tax.
What a kerfuffle this tax has become.
The President announced that the head of the Federal Reserve
had stayed overly long. Then he added that he was trying to decide between two
people as replacements. This put in motion an entire kerfuffle over whether a
woman deserved to be the next head of the Fed or whether the former president
of Harvard University deserved the job.
This was a kerfuffle that could have been, and should have
been, avoided by a practicing politician.
Recently Rolling Stones Magazine attempted to hold out a
Boston bomber as a nice young fellow who was led astray by his terrible brother
and by a dysfunctional family.
Yep, another kerfuffle.
The Patriot’s efforts to take some good young men with bad
records and make them into football professionals took a nosedive with
Hernandez.
Big kerfuffle.
George Zimmerman shot a man. The police did not want to
charge him. The FBI told the justice department there was no evidence to uphold
a charge of racial profiling. A jury found the man innocent. And the country
erupted.
A kerfuffle of huge proportions.
The world that we love has a lot of kerfuffles. In fact,
hardly a day goes by without another kerfuffle.
It can only be a matter of time before TIME or some other
newsmagazine labels this the Era of Kerfuffles.
In the meantime, I hope each of my readers can master the
kerfuffles in his/her own life and manage to bring order to the chaos.
