Semantic Tricks

I guess this must be a Nobodies Anonymous meeting, so: "Hi, my name is Sallie, and I'm nobody."

You see, there are quite a number of people around the world who have no idea that I'm nobody.

In starting this meme off by referring to our Fearless Leader Allan Jenkins, David Murray violated one of Jeffrey J. Fox's key rules of rainmaking: "Everybody is somebody's somebody." In other words, deal politely and respectfully with everyone you encounter, because you never know when the bratty teenager is going to turn out to be the nephew of the CEO whose business you're desperately trying to get. (Of course, one could also phrase this as "because a duck could be somebody's mother.")

If this is true, then nobody is "nobody", because everybody is somebody. And, in fact, "everybody" and "nobody" might be semantically equivalent in this situation. If you're just like everybody else, then you're nobody special.

But remember just how useful it was to Odysseus to be "Nobody" when he encountered the Cyclops. Think about how many companies, committees, and projects suffer from having too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

This business of being a nobody could be pretty valuable, when you get right down to it. You could even say that being nobody is my business. A big part of my job as a ghostwriter is to let another person be the "Somebody" while I remain invisible behind the scenes. Maybe I'll take that as my new elevator speech: "I get paid to be nobody."

Comments

[Eileen Denz]

Just an FYI - one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems is about being a nobody:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.
-bartelby.com