Consider the following exchange:

First student: Hey, man. What’d you do this weekend?

Second student: Not much… we went to Brooklyn. You know.

No, I don’t know (and chances are good that I don’t want to). So stop fishing for me to ask what an “eclectic” weekend you had. Because do you know what? You don’t sound as cool as you think you do. You sound like another goddamn hipster Columbia student. (It’s the sense I get.)

Why? Because when you tell me, “We went to Brooklyn,” you haven’t told told me anything.

This is because the phrase, “We went to Brooklyn,” doesn’t convey whether you cut lines with your feces-artist friend in his Bed-Stuy garret or crunched kale with your Lit Hum classmate’s parents in their $3 million Park Slope townhouse. Both of those obnoxious possibilities are contained within the phrase, “We went to Brooklyn.”

This is because Brooklyn is not a neighborhood. It is a borough.

So, please: shut up about “going to Brooklyn.”