Watch Your Language
Watch Your Language, Lady
There was a girl at a party in Bevendean. She was beautiful. I noticed her talking to some people on the other side of the room. After an hour or so of preparation I made my move. Assuming the guise of a normal person I casually strolled past, pausing at the sink. Then, whilst casually staring at a nearby kitchen utensil, I pricked up my ears. The purpose of my plan was to merely hear her speak. I was curious to hear what she sounded like. I was hoping, perhaps, to overhear the tail-end of some charming anecdote – or at least catch a snippet of whatever mellifluous sounds were blossoming from her perfect little mouth.
“When I’m in Primark I literally go insane.”
A second later I had run away. She had blurted it out with a kind of giggling gusto that appalled me. It sounded like a punchline to a joke, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I tried for a while to think of what build-up such a joke would require, but I was stumped. Something about a massacre in a mall perhaps? I realised it wasn’t a joke, just a banal comment about shopping. The inanity of it depressed me threefold. Not only does this beautiful creature shop at Primark, she feels the need to talk about it at parties – and also gets so excited by said department store that she actually has a psychotic episode.
a semi-corrupt quasi-fascistic system of linguistic repression is preferable to overhearing pretty girls talking crap about Primarks
But, of course, she didn’t mean it. Not literally. Presumably she meant: “When I’m in Primark I get somewhat enthusiastic about the prospect of purchasing clothes”. Phrasing it like that, however, would have merely compounded the utter naffness of what she was saying. So instead, this milky-skinned princess decided to pep it up a little by comparing her Primark-induced experiences with the onset of mental illness. Fair enough, compare high-street shopping with madness if you must – perhaps there’s a kind of political subtext lurking in there. But it was the word ‘literally’ that bugged me most. She could have settled for ‘virtually’ or even ‘almost’, but no, she had to insist on going all the way with ‘literally’. This golden-haired goddess thus overstepped the mark, and, in addition to labelling herself a shopoholic nutter, had succeeded with a mere eight words to say something equally inane, untrue AND naff. Needless to say, I lost interest at that point.
I only care because using words inappropriately means you’ll run out of decent ones when you really need them. If you call your mate a cunt for eating your Frazzles, what are you gonna call him when he fucks your girlfriend? It’s akin to the way horror films need to be more gory than the last to elicit any response from our cynical psyches – like notching up the voltage up on an EST machine. But horror films are nothing compared to nightmares. All the stuff that frightens you in real life is in there, all mixed up, which makes it even more fucking scary. Like just when you’re being chased by a manic killer, suddenly there’s your mother being shafted by an alien with an elderly, diseased version of your own face. With that in mind, would you care to rephrase your anecdote about not being able to find somewhere to park?
“It was a total nightmare!”
Was it? Is the fact you missed the train to London really comparable to the terrifying twisted imagery of a subconscious mind that is able to shit you up precisely because it KNOWS YOUR EVERY FEAR?
At least rappers and chavs have the audacity to make up words when they need them. It seems to work quite well up until the point where everyone else catches on and starts trying to sound ironically cool. However, not only do they supply the rest of us with a fresh stream of words, they also serve to resuscitate old ones (like bad, wicked, sick, etc). This is a fascinating but little-known scientific law. When enough rappers invert the meaning of a word for long enough, it is pushed in the opposite direction, undoing the effects of its prior exaggeration, thus leaving it fit for use once more. At which point the rapper will move on to something else, having performed his civic duty.
But it’s not enough. Language shouldn’t be bastardised in the first place, let alone de-bastardised. To rectify this problem I have taken it upon myself to devise a meritocratic system of language redistribution, which works as follows.
Every few years the Post Office will issue everyone on the electoral roll with a ‘permit to speak’. Those who have suffered genuinely traumatic experiences would be allocated a certain quota of suitably extreme words which could be used at their discretion – like high-scoring Scrabble letters. And vice versa. Thus someone who had lost their family in a shipping accident and been stranded on a barren island for a decade would be awarded 800 uses of ‘terrible’, ‘drowning’, ‘crazed despair’ and ‘aching loneliness’. Conversely, someone who mislaid their car keys for half an hour would get two ‘peeved’ and one ‘mild frustration’.
In addition, to ensure the permits were not abused, a small fine would be incurred if the survivor of the shipwreck ever spoke of their ‘crazed despair’ upon realising they had been overcharged for a carton of soup or that they’d left their scarf at the dentist. There are other foreseeable problems, of course, such as the likelihood that some of the more potent adjectives would find their way onto the black market. But even a semi-corrupt quasi-fascistic system of linguistic repression is preferable to overhearing pretty girls talking crap about Primarks.
Tags: Beachdownwriter
What's on your mind?
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February 20th 2009 | 1
Avangelist says:
I am terrified by the literal insanity of the female shopper. Walk through any ladies clothing store and you will find the same pattern of destruction.
Clothes are grabbed, pulled and stretched and then tossed aside like chip papers when they prove incompatible or inept at the task at hand.
It’s like swimming in a sea of half-cut cardigans, leggings and Alexa Chung’s hand-me-downs as I get dragged through H&M with the missus on a Saturday, desperately trying to see the bright lights of Game, or Early Learning Centre – you know, MAN shops.
