Strange Conversations: Part One Hundred and Fourteen
Posted 9 April 2009 in Strange Conversations by Catriona
Just an ordinary Maundy Thursday conversation:
ME: Honey, did you put the meat in the fridge?
NICK: No, because I’m about to cook it.
ME: No, not tonight’s. The meat for tomorrow night’s dinner.
NICK: Oh, double plus [adjectival expletive] [expletive].
(Pause)
ME: You know, I don’t think George Orwell would approve of that.
NICK: Well, perhaps not.
Share your thoughts [6]
1
Drew wrote at Apr 10, 05:13 am
I came to the conclusion yesterday that Maundy Thursday is actually my favourite day of the entire year. I guess that resides in whether or not it’s better to have something or to have the expectation of something. Is Christmas Eve better than Christmas Day for example? Maundy Thursday means Easter is tomorrow and Easter (for Brisbane) means the cooler weather is arriving and the feeling in the air is just beautiful. But it’s also because Maundy Thursday means I’m picking Dante off the shelves again and it’s usually been a whole year since I’ve revisited him (though the DC is never far from my thoughts) and I get to reexperience him all over again. I’m not usually a fan of nostalgia but somehow literary nostalgia always gives me goosebumps.
On the Orwell reference, it’s high time someone invented a George Orwell Parser, software that scans political/economic/business/French Avant-garde doublespeak and tranforms it into plain, simple English. Sadly though, and of no fault of the GO-Parser, most sections of prose that require GO-Ping would probably translate as “Yes, I am a wanker.”
2
Catriona wrote at Apr 10, 06:57 am
At the risk of sounding as though I’ve had my sense of humour removed, I don’t think a parser would work, because software can’t parse language—that’s why grammar checkers are only occasionally effective and even then only when the rule is easily identifiable and applicable in almost all cases in almost all forms of writing (like a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence).
So sadly, writers will just have to remove their own gobbledegook, their own nominalisations, their own passive voice, their own jargon—in other words, do their own work in stripping out all those frustrating devices that make writing indirect.
Of course, many people writing in double speak do it deliberately, so that the writing is difficult to interpret: politicians, for example. If it were down to me, I’d make them all read Ernest Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words over and over again.
3
Drew wrote at Apr 10, 08:03 am
yes, sorry, you have completely lost your sense of humour. You will find it inside a chocolate egg on the end of your bed on Sunday morning. Exactly which egg will contain your lost SoH it is not possible to tell; you shall just have to eat them all as quickly as possible so that you don’t mistake Nick’s 8.15am pun for a declaration that he wants to spend the rest of day doing housework.
4
Catriona wrote at Apr 10, 08:11 am
I do love a man who uses the word “shall” in cold blood.
In my current humourless state, though, what I took from this comment is the sense that it’s in my own best interest to keep my sense of humour missing in action for as long as possible!
Nick may not thank you for that, though.
;)
In the interests of re-establishing myself as frankly hilarious, I have prepared a series of pieces for the long weekend on some of my weirder girls’ school stories. Will that help salvage my reputation?
5
Drew wrote at Apr 10, 08:37 am
yes I have read it. Your duel reputations as “frankly hilarious” and the collector of the English language’s oddest books are both alive and well.
6
Catriona wrote at Apr 10, 09:01 am
Well, that’s only the first! Wait until you read the others I have planned for the weekend . . .