Exne Post 4.

Evening Strumpets,

Here's another Exne piece.

Have I missed a meeting? When did it become a necessity for everything to be done yesterday? What a madness it is which engulfs our species concerning making things happen quicker. When I was a child I thought like a child, but even then I could never comprehend how much of a rush someone had to be in to abbreviate the month “July” to “Jul”. When the World Wide Web initially announced its intentions to deliver knowledge, invention, and free porn sites to the world, I could never understand the longing to call it WWW, a phrase which actually takes longer to say than World Wide Web.

Zeitgeists in health become acronyms. “Yeah I feel really depressed” “Well we have available C.B.T, B.S.F.T, D.B.T, I.A.P.T, or C.A.T” “Sod that, I`ll just keep taking the happy tablets and feeling like a right T.W.A.T”. Celebrities become diminished sobriquets. No longer able to be addressed by their birth names, they become SuBo, JayZ, or JLo, who apparently is also just Jenny from the block. Yeah, and I`m just Chorlton from the Land of the Wheelies. How best to describe the constant half hour celebrity couples with half hour celebrity couple smiles? How about “Ben and Jennifer”? Have you been sniffing glue? That would take far too long to say, or God forbid, (or whoever you should choose to admire) write. Let’s just conjoin and condense, and it truly is a con by, and for, the dense.

And with this, there comes a whole world of rules regarding the abridgements. I was told a story the other day where a girl was sent a text on the day of her Fathers funeral which stated “thinking of you today, lol”. This you can imagine went down as well as a deep fried kebab bun at a Weight Watchers meeting. When she contacted the friend, in tears at her lack of sensitivity, her friend was distraught. Apparently lol doesn`t just mean “laugh out loud”, but also “lots of love”. Her mistake was in not capitalising the words. Who decided that? Who chaired that discussion?

I`m fully aware of the need for a language to evolve. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was more repulsed when anything remotely above average was described as being “genius”. Inside I screamed from the parapets of my blessed soul “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, IT ISN`T. IT`S INGENIUS!!!! GENIUS IS A NOUN, NOT AN ADJECTIVE”! However my internal turmoil never glimpsed the light of day, because I understood. I drive my wife insane, because I have an almost Tourette’s like incapability to let people get away with saying someone “hung” themselves. Actually they didn`t, they “hanged” themselves. Clothes are hung, people are hanged. But obviously when someone is describing a tragic event I do not correct them, well not all the time anyway.

I understand that we do not speak the same language we did a hundred years ago. But at least it is a language, and not just selected highlights of letters within words. We`re better than that. We can do better that, and Christ on a stick with holes in his hands we now have entertainment such as “OMG with Peaches” which merely seems to exist as a result of this phenomenon. Surely that in itself is a reason to go back to spelling and saying whole words, names, groups, therapies and so forth.

What do I know? Sweet FA, that`s all.

Till the next one, L.S.N.