Just what the world needs, another maniac RANTING ON THE WEB!
Really, I was hoping to join somebody else's rant already in
progress, but I just couldn't find any suitable right one right off
the bat, SO I STARTED MY VERY OWN. Thank you, Google!
First, “Pretension”. Today's pretentious word is “haptic”.
Huh? WTF, over? I finally read it enough times to look it up, and
what does it mean? Adding the usual dictionary folderol, we have “of
or pertaining to the sense of touch”. OK! And where does this
wonder word come from? From the Greek for “touch”! Amazing! We
already have an English word for touch, and it's spelled T*O*U*C*H .
We even have a fancier English word for touch, which is “tactile”.
It comes from the Latin. But no, that's just not good enough, is it?
Tactile is still a common enough English word that the average
speaker would know what you were talking about right away. No
scholarship pudgie for the pretentious nerds there! They have to use
the GREEK word, so they will get a pudgie every time they say it or
write it, and remember how much SMARTER they are than everybody else!
But why stop there? Every educated person used to study ancient
Greek! – why not Ugaritic, or Sanskrit, or Hebrew? Huh, smarty
pants?
There is something about stupid-minded pretension that pisses me
off even worse that ethnic cleansing or environmental disasters or
any of the usual suspects we are supposed to be f*%#% pissed off
about (hardy Anglo-Saxon expletive). But let's move on... EUPHEMISM
is a close relative of pretension, since it means using something
other than the plain English expression, so that only those in the
know are going to understand, combined with a healthy pinch of
church-lady-ism. And what euphemism REALLY PISSES YOUR WRITER OFF
today?
“Child Grooming”.
Ugh! I had been idly scanning stories from the BBC for several
weeks, and I noticed a continuing one about five men accused of
“child grooming” in Oxford. Finally the case closed and the men
were convicted, and EVERY DAMN ARTICLE monotonously referred to
whatever the men had been doing as “grooming”. OK – any fool
could take an educated guess what they were doing, but I had to make
sure: yup, what it means is they were part of a ring promoting CHILD
RAPE. Now, here is a news service presumably written for adults, in a
country where Rupert Murdoch's rags show naked titties every day on
page three, and evidently these adults are too namby pamby to call
child rape “CHILD RAPE”! Looks obscene in print, doesn't it?
Well, it should: it's a nasty business – but it's not the words
which are obscene, but what those men were accused of DOING to those
children which is obscene. I'm sorry, I know prejudice and group
judgment is a BAD THING, but this story leaves me with a general
dislike for the English people – the BBC presumably knows their
audience, and they must deem that what the English man in the street
requires is schoolmarmish euphemism and sugar coated obscenities
rather than the blunt description, which would be just too unrefined
for afternoon tea.
OK, maybe I'm wrong. I mean, if somebody thought the New York
Times was written for MY tastes then they would have a much lower
opinion of me than I think would be warranted: the mass press is
writing for the lowest common denominator – even the great BBC.
There must be English citizens repulsed by this euphemism as much as
I am, and well, there just may be computer NERD^H^H^H... err, I mean
“IT Guys”, who groan inwardly when they read “haptic” five
times in a paragraph just as I do. But damn it, CALL A SPADE A SPADE.
The Plain English words are "TOUCH FEEDBACK” and “CHILD
RAPE”. We should be proud of our Anglo-Saxon English heritage –
every other group in the world is supposedly proud of their heritage
– use plain speech where plain speech is indicated, and make Mark
Twain proud.
And no, I am not a verbal Luddite. I have no problem with a large
vocabulary – vocabulary is a good thing. But it should used be with
flair, as a piquant seasoning – not a monotonous drone of the
phrase du jour, like a cook whose spice rack contains only one spice
at a time, which he just can't seem to use enough of. If Mark Twain
were alive he would add this idiocy to “The Literary Sins of James
Fenimore Cooper” - and if Cooper didn't do it he probably did
something else just as reprehensible, so the punishment would only be
polemic justice.
Thanks for reading; and if you think I used TOO MANY CAPITAL
LETTERS, I warned you it was going to be a rant, didn't I...?
