Thursday, December 22, 2005

You're Leading Me Towards A Mr Whippy

The Daily Misanthropy! I.e. a pet hat – people who do NOT WASH THEIR HANDS. You know who you are you oik.

Why doesn’t oik pass the spell-check? It seems like a perfectly good word to me.

Today is my last day before what I suddenly discover we have to call Winterval. I should get upset about this but it does in some way reflect the idea that the Christmas week has so little to do with what it actually purports to celebrate for most people that it has become like the Japanese version – an excuse for consumerism and other excesses. I know it’s a cliché but it is still true.

I have been re-reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat AND listening to a tape of Alan Bennett’s Diaries in which he mentions Oliver Sacks going to Japan to see how Tourette Syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourettes manifests in a culture without expletives. I think I have always been aware that Tourette’s is not just swearing as some people just don’t. It reminded me of the many parenting shows on TV these days where 2-year-old children can make the winner of the Joint Services Swearing Award look positively restrained. Where do these little darlings hear the words they use? (I was going to put in a “clever” sentence with lots of asterisks but it didn’t seem that clever really – and certainly not big.) I assume that the Japanese do swear now – they just use imported words – unless of course the problem is the actual concept of swearing. Maybe the Japanese would ask you why you need to swear or even wonder why some words are so shocking when said. Actually, I sometimes think that. Why should something which is just another combination of sound waves have the value it has? To me, the use of such connecting phrases as ‘yer know’ and ‘err’ (which I admit I use- it is easy to criticise someone on TV when you are at home – I would be jelly in front of a camera) are just as irritating as punctuation cursing.

Kenneth Williams Ending Goes Here

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