Profoundness For Dummies

Or,
How To Be Taken More Seriously Than You Should Be

Who does not want to be able to say: When I talk, people listen! Sadly though, True Wisdom is a scarce commodity and is hard-earned. But here's how us lesser mortals can do it too, nice and easy!

profound: Showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth
nonsense: A message that seems to convey no meaning

The techniques expounded and formalized here will, hopefully, enable everybody to become oysters of insight and come up with 'pearls of wisdom' . Yup, this is your TravelCard to free-tripping on the Profound Non-Sense network!

Use these tips, at your own risk of course, to create your own quotable gems! Or, alternatively, you may use these to identify formulaic crap and also assholic™ people...

1) Mystic Capitalization
2) Adage Extension
3) Kennedy Inversion
4) Reference Quotation
5) Random Punctuation
6) Typical Enumeration

BLOW BY BLOW
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1) Mystic Capitalization
This technique is extensively used by spiritual Gurus and also by management-gurus. Words like you, the, he etc are prime candidates. Adjectives are Great as well! If the split words have more than one obvious meaning, then that'd be Great as well!

(a) Take a statement.
(b) Scan it for words which are splittable and capitalizable.
(c) Split splittable words, and capitalize!

Examples:
"Ask yourself this." ==> "Ask your Self this."
"Do you get time?" ==> "Do you get Time?"
"All that glitters is not gold" ==> "All that glitters Is not Gold"

2) Adage Extension
Stand on the shoulders of giants! Add to what they have said.

(a) Take a proverb.
(b) Take a suitable question tag-word or exclamation.
(c) Insert tag-word after proverb.

Examples:
"Slow and steady wins the race. Let's slow down steadily."
"All that glitters is not gold. Why not?"

3) Kennedy Inversion
John F. Kennedy (or his speech-writer) was a great exponent of this technique, hence it is named eponymously. Two of the examples come from his speeches!

(a) Take a statement.
(b) Logically invert it.
(c) Grammatically connect both.

Examples:
"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!"
"All that glitters is not gold, and all that is gold does not glitter!"
"Let us not negotiate out of fear, but let us not fear to negotiate"

4) Reference Quotation
The more reliable the source of your quote is considered to be and the more uncommon the words in that are, the more seriously people will take you!

(a) Take a quote from an authentic source.
(b) Say whatever you want.
(c) Pepper what you say with words from the quote, repeatedly for added effect.

Examples:
The introductory section of this post uses the dictionary variation of this.

"All that glitters is not gold" - Gold, Encyclopedia Britannica pg 172
Glittering is a phenomenon..blah blah...Gold is a macroeconomic quantum...blah blah...Hence, gold does not glitter. Blah Blah.

5) Random Punctuation
Commonly used in poems to create sentimental trash. If you are talking, you can just pause all of a sudden in the middle of a sentence and then resume.

(a) Take a sentence.
(b) Insert punctuation marks at random, unobvious points

Examples:
"The train came on time" ==> "The train came, on time"
"All that glitters is not gold" ==> "All that glitters, is: not gold"

6) Typical Enumeration
Last, but perhaps the most important and the easiest technique, is the bulletization and numbering technique.

Examples:
This was it, dummy! :)