"The Mother of All No-Brainers."

Headline for a David Brooks column.

I wonder how many other clichés from the 90s could be stuck together ridiculously. Maybe you don't remember, but "the mother of all [blank]" was ubiquitous after Saddam Hussein called the 1991 Gulf War "the mother of all battles."

I've never liked the expression "no-brainer," because I tend to picture things concretely, and the image upsets me. Anyway, it's particularly inapt with "mother of." You're combining extreme largeness with absolute nothingness. How big is zero? It's big! It's infinitely huge!

Researching this post, I ran into another expressions I thought you should know about:

tr;dl  

Literally: "too rambley; didn't listen". This spoken phrase is a take off of the popular "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read). Pronounce the letters, namely "tee are. dee ell". This verbal response indicates you stopped listening as the other person was blathering on for too long and you lost interest.

Sarah: So what do you want to do for dinner tonight? We can do Mexican, Italian or Chinese. I want to invite Steve and Kathy, but of course you know that Steve does not like Chinese and Kathy can't eat late. But the only good Italian place is really crowded so the wait would be really long early.. which I guess leaves either that burrito place.... or that not so good Italian place, where the waiter was rude to us the last time. So, what do you think?

Russell: tr;dl

Ha ha. So, hypothetically: you're Sarah. Do you laugh or get mad?

That reminds me, I didn't tell you what I thought of that David Brooks column: tl;dr