Dead Serious

I was having a conversation the other day with someone of no importance to you, and I realized that there's a phrase that people use a little light heartedly. We were going deep into conversation about some pretty serious stuff - like how important my blog is to the American civilization or something about ninja babies - and I caught myself using a phrase that contains a deep dark underlying: "dead serious." Let's break down this phrase shall we. Dead - no longer having or seeming to have or expecting to have life. Serious - concerned with important matters rather than play or trivialities. Now then, to put this on a 3rd grade level, the phrase dead serious is implying that something is so important to you that you are comparing it to death. I've stood firm on some pretty serious issues, but there's possible only 3-4 issues I would actually die over. I really want to know why the person that came up with that phrase chose death as the most serious topic to compare. It seems that death isn't really the most serious thing that comes to mind because a lot of people mock and make fun of death these day. I would think that something like Aides, starving African children, or kittens being stuffed in coke bottles would be way more serious of a topic than death. When you look at the crazy things humans do to their bodies or try to endure just to get a rise out of themselves, it actually seems like some people have a complete disregard for death. All the same, I am going to stop using this phrase of death in such a frivolous manner, and I am only going to use it when discussing a topic that I would actually die over. And instead of using unreal terms to express my sincerity on issues that I feel strongly about, I am going to replace it with phrases that would hold an actual equivalence to the matter in which I am discussing.



For instance, Dude-whom-I-am-conversing-with, my son's going to be in the NFL someday, I'm as serious as Aids.