Eighteenth century author Samuel Johnson wrote of the business of making resolutions, “Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.”

In other words, give us enough time and even the more stubborn among us will come to understand that the definition of imbecility accepted down through the ages is repeatedly making the same mistake with expectations of a different result.

I bring up the subject only because the media feeding frenzy with New Year’s resolutions, and the folly thereof, is at full tilt. Most of us are probably not into making vows to better ourselves just because a bunch of ancient Babylonians and Romans dreamed up the idea during drunken orgies, as a way of paying the piper after their debaucheries.

Still, as one convinced that there is nothing so small that it cannot be blown out of proportion, should I ever get into the resolutions thing I suspect that my resolves would involve not the big stuff, but the niggling, nit-picking things that, left unchecked, can drive a guy nuts.

Were I in full resolution mode, for example, I might resolve to tolerate the unimaginative reporters and editors who never met the fire they couldn’t call a “blaze” in a newspaper story concerning the burning of something. That would, I suppose, be classier than refusing to read beyond the first “blaze” encountered in such a story or headline unless the item were to also refer to the people who fight the fire as “blazefighters,” or the vehicles they arrive in as “blazetrucks.”

As well, I might resolve to no longer allow the hairstyles of the interviewers and interviewees I see on television to divert me from processing the information being dispensed.

This would mean that in the case of CBS news reporter Seth Doane, whose close-cropped hair appears to be running madly off in all directions, I would actually consider what the man says rather than getting sidetracked by the image of him grooming his hairdo by sticking his finger into a light socket during his morning shower. That people actually pay big bucks to make their hair look like that would continue to confound me, of course, but it would not deter me from turning over my new leaf.

Ditto with the person – male or female – who is constantly clutching at loose strands of hair from in front of his or her eyes in futile attempts to anchor the mess behind one ear, in the process causing the viewer to become fixated on keeping score rather than on comprehending what is being said.

The reformed me would not have a seizure were I to hear someone who should know better speak of something being “very unique.” That they were absent the day the teacher explained that something unique is in a class by itself and therefore incapable of comparison would be of no more consequence to me than hearing one more sports announcer, jock or politician, declare one more time that something “is what it is.”

Having spent far too much time wondering just what that abomination is supposed to mean, I am sure of only one thing: The person uttering the phrase has even less of a clue about it than I do.

Last on my list of potentially unkept vows for 2008 might be one to not snicker ostentatiously when a compatriot in the newspaper business comes up with a clunker such as one pointed out to me by an alert Bangor Daily News reader.

The Associated Press story last week told of a Vermont businessman who had discovered numerous items of clothing in a climate-controlled vault concealed in the basement of a commercial property he had recently purchased. Reportedly, no one in town knew the vault existed.

When the buyer’s lawyer got into the act the story turned squirrely, as in this paragraph: “‘There are all sorts of things you would have to look at, and there is no simple answer to who has a title to what,’ said lawyer Ray Massucco, who had an office above the vault for 15 years but didn’t know it.”

We’ve probably all known lawyers who didn’t know they had an office, I suppose, although not knowing it for 15 years seems a bit of a stretch. But because I have mangled my fair share of sentences over the years and know that the reporter would love to have this one back for a do-over, the newly resolute me would cut the guy some slack.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.