The Year Of Living Rantily Pt.VII

Baps and Peepees!
Yaaaaay!
Old Dive's self-indulgent amble through the first year of the Small Glass Planet reaches February, 2007: Crazy Ame Hits Town!

Seen here finding the Holy Grail of Baps and Peepees on the same statue!

The Santa Clara Tornado hit Olde London Town and a splendid time was had by all.
Check out the link above to see the sights with our sunny California Girl.

I also posted a pretty travelogue of my lovely old home city.
Part 1 and Part 2 if anyone's thinking of visiting.

February also saw my lovely and very personal assistant, 外人ガール inveigle me into experimenting with wasabi chocolate. Yikes!

So let's kick off this nostalgia-fest with some good old ranting.
Dive was feeling particularly vituperative on Valentine's Day.
Here's the result:

"Ugh!

Yet another Hallmark Shareholders' Smirk Like A Twat Day.
A day when I'm filled with hatred and bile toward a disgusting capitalist shithole of a company that thrives on people's guilt.
Every year sees yet more spurious Hallmark Days where we are suddenly made to feel like uncaring or uncharitable asswipes unless we cough up and pay the cock-faced Hallmark tax.
Fucking hypocritical, profiteering, wank-brained, manipulative, thieving, shit-headed, emotionally blackmailing cocksuckers!

I make no apologies for the swearfest as it's been thirty years to the day since I received a genuine Valentine's Day card and I'm in a right strop.

I'm going to go home and slam all the doors."

My other favourite post from that month was another of my über-pedantic harangues on the abuse of the English language, which included:

"… Which brings my somewhat addled, Sunday-morning brain round to etymology. To the derivations of words. And way back in time to the first person who pointed to a hippopotamus after a long night's drinking and named it.

As my long term blog-sufferers know, I have a real bug up my ass about the use of language.
This resulted - some years ago - in the only letter of protest I have ever written to the BBC.
I was watching the news one night and the BBC's Washington correspondent (at that time the windmill-armed, jug-eared buffoon Andrew Marr) uttered the non-word "normalcy".

NOT IN THE CONTEXT OF A QUOTE!

I recall leaping off the sofa, spuffling and sputtering with indignant rage.
This was the BBC for goodness sake! We expect standards! We expect BBC English! What we do NOT expect is a BBC news correspondent speaking gibberish! The BBC's motto is NOT "Nation Shall Speak Gibberish Unto Nation".
At least it wasn't the last time I looked …

And so I rattled off a furious epistle to the Beeb, explaining the derivation of this obscenity and demanding summary execution for Marr (a course of action regrettably not followed).

This linguistic excresence had first tumbled clumsily out of the mouth of one Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty-ninth President of our lamentably lost colonies and the man who started the appalling avalanche of ignorance that has culminated in the present incumbent of that office being unable even to pronounce his middle initial: namely the monumentally incompetent George Walker Bush.

Even in Harding's own day his call for a "return to normalcy" was derided; not for its intent, but for its linguistic gaucherie.
Here is e.e.cummings on Harding's passing in 1923:
"The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."
And H.L Mencken:
"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Splendid!

The thing that most bugs me about "normalcy" however, is that the word itself encourages ignorance; it actually forces human intelligence to take a step backward.
"Normality" - the word Harding's floundering mind must have been groping for - is of course derived from the French "normalité". Not much of a leap there.
After the Norman conquest, a vast word-hoard of French was absorbed into the English language; already a melting pot of Celtic, Breton, Saxon and many others, with Latin as the written norm.
Language is a living thing and it evolves with usage, but the basic meaning of any word is revealed through its etymology. You can trace its roots back through English, French, Latin, Greek, whatever; eventually - in our case - to Indo-Aryan (I won't go into essay-length expostition here as you'd all bugger off down the pub).
When a word such as "normality/normalité" is altered, through ignorance or design, it loses part of its meaning. It has taken a step toward becoming a mere abstract symbol. An arbitrary amalgam of sounds to which nobody other than the person who produced it can attach any meaning.
This is the road to chaos. And it would render the Times Crossword even more mind-buggeringly difficult than it is.

The first words were felt as much as spoken. Burroughs posits that the first words were "sex" words and he could well be right. Some were undoubtably onomatopœic; hunter-gatherer words echoing the sounds of the world around them. The Indo-Aryan word "Ma" for mother occurs in almost all languages, whether they are connected or not. What I'm trying to put across here is that words that have evolved and adapted naturally still retain their essential meanings.
Neologisms: new words for new concepts are continually being brought into existence; the common example being John Logie Baird's coining of the term "television", from the Greek "tele" for "distant, and the Latin "visio" for "seeing". Some people even more pedantic than me insist that neologisms should only be formed from the same language roots, but even - like television - if they are not, then, like all naturally evolved words, some idea of their meaning can be still gauged from their roots.
The French suffixes "…ité" and "…cy" have historially derived and separate usages. Confusing them merely creates confusion and the nuance of meaning is lost.

Having said that, dicking around with language is great fun. It is what writers and poets do. It is what the kid down the street does.
Language moves forward; meaning is refined and even redefined. This is a good thing. I myself have even been party to linguistic debauchery, having once been caught using the word "party" as a verb (yikes)!
"Normalcy" when used by a bumbling President is funny; when used by the BBC - arbiters of the English Language - it is a crime against reason. An irrevocable step down the path to ignorance. They now use it with alarming frequency; proof positive that accusations of their "dumbing down" are well founded.
Twats.

Okay. Mister Pedantic can go back in his box now. Just don't use "normalcy" around me unless you want a slap."

And sticking with the subject of language; I've said it before and I'll say it again:
English.
In England we speak English.
It is our native language.
We do NOT speak "International English" as the ignorant twats at Microsoft are deluded enough to think.
Listen up, Gates, you fucking moron:
There is "English" (spoken in England),
"American English" as mangled in the colonies,
and regional varieties such as "Australian, Kiwi, Indian or Canadian English".
As an Englishman I become apoplectic with rage when my fucking computer puts a red line under the word "colour".
Cease and desist or old Dive will get mediæval (that diphthong is called a 'ligature', you dumb fucks and it is required to correctly spell 'mediæval') on your asses!
Just so you know.

Also I love the word "diphthong".

Like all old folk I love complaining.
Today I'm complaining about "American English"; back in February I was fulminating about old ladies' wee and a whole lot more.

Including this …

February was a stunningly good month for strange-o comments from you bunch of reprobates. Here are some of my favourites:

Robyn:
"Chicken Pussy?"
"I kind of like having the image of Daphne Ellis Rubbernoids in my head."
"You know how much I love it"

Sassy:
"Here are mine. They're kind of silly."
"I'm a sleeze ball. Wanna see my gold chain?"
"Fuckity fucking fuck"
"My stomach just flipped."
"Of course, I had blisters like you wouldn't believe."

Rich:
"Ah, the broken heart of a man can only be mended by the soft hands of a young woman handing him a free latte."
"I absolutely LOVE Hillary's pant suits"

Vic:
"What about learning accordion?"
"I'm just rubbing it now."

Kate:
"Aussies are strange."
"Earrings and pants suits and cock rings - oh my."
"London has pink cabs? I want one."
"We have the big penis, you have its testicle."
"I'm such a blonde sometimes, aren't I?"

Ame:
"SHUT UP, RICH!"
" SHUT UP, DIVEY BOY!"
"DIVEY BOY...you're FULL of it!"
"I really should be polishing my fur-lined sink! "
"HEY! You forgot the handcuffs!!!!"
"LOVIES & KISSIES and Baps & Pee-Pees!"
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
"BAPS and PEEPEES you never looked so GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!"
"SHUT UP, KNUDDIE!"

Lynn:
"You clicked on Dive to make him biggy? Disgusting."
"Nobody but nobody is called fucking Rubbernoids (yes Lynn said fuck)!"

Old Kundsen:
"I only expect a ring from you, a cock ring."
"The Greeks … A dirty people."

Gaijin Girl:
"Bring on the hatred and bile."
"We so need to sort you a shag."
"Hahaha, that's the funniest thing you've ever said."
"Baby, you made me burn. I'm Green and Black all over."
"You big spunk."

Fresh Hell:
"I named a dog Cooder after Ry Cooder" Now THAT's cool!
"I can talk to some aquaintences about selling your soul..."

The Lovely Betty:
"Who needs to visit Thailand or New Zealand when you can go to Norwich?" er … Me?
"What is it that men do when they've got a bit of spare time to themselves and they're at home alone?"

Peahen:
"What are you doing to me, Dive?"
"What do you call 30 chavs at the bottom of a cliff? A start."
"Chav: lots of running gear, but not much running going on"
"The pic of Ame bending down to photograph the horseshit is a classic!"

Monsieur Benaut:
"What ever happened to the bloody von Trapp family and the lonely goatherd?"
"That's MY tiara and I won it fair and square!"

Mme. Benaut:
"Crikey!"

Dick Headley:
"French people and faggots."

Spinsterella:
"That's the best bit of swearing I've seen"

For sheer volume and outrageousness, this month's comments prize has to go to:
Dear Prudence:
"Harem huh! That would indicate you would chose one of us each evening to be your companion for the night. Now go ahead Dive, step in the middle of that big cat fight! Hee Hee!"
"Mix your own and peddle them to weemen!"
"Robyn, put the fork and spoons down and back away from the counter!"
"I downloaded Chicken Pussy."
"Everyone needs a firm hand now and again!"
"Rubbing in a circular motion!"
"A tall girl is always worth the climb."
"Did you get a big tent in your pants?"
"Cupping the peepee!"

Over and out.