Brave New Words

Language, of course, is an ever-evolving thing, with words added to the lexicon of life every day. Three such recent examples are below:

“Sharted” is a combination of “shit” and “farted”. While the concept is nothing new and “follow-through” has been around for yonks, it’s a neat way of describing a singular bodily action and is particularly applicable to small babies, of which we currently have one fantastic example. As in, “Oh dear, it sounded she’s sharted again, and her nappy’s only just been changed.”

The Apprentice last night included “Ideation” which, like “sharted” seemed to be a mashing together of two words, in this case “idea” and “creation”. I initially thought this was another highly objectionable example of marketing wankspeak, but a swift look online reveals the word to have been around for about 200 years (where to “ideate” is to undertake the process of forming ideas). Live and learn.

Another, less valid word was on Wedding Stories, where some hapless snaggle-toothed individual was seen tippy-tappying away on Ebay in an effort to obtain cheap and cheerful second-hand items for her forthcoming nuptials, one such search being for “wedding decoratations”. The programme never revealed what the search results were, but the irony is that if one person can mis-spell it, then so can others, so she probably got an abundance of unbidded-for stuff with which to decoratate her reception. Happy days…

My Big fat Greek Water Torture

I’ve seen the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding seven times - it’s not a statistic I’m terribly proud of.

It’s a result of travelling round Australia with my, then future, wonderwife (to clarify, she’s always been wonderful, the ‘wife’ bit wasn’t confirmed at the time), and spending much time aboard Greyhound coaches, each of which was equipped with a telly to amuse passengers as it whipped them thousands of miles across spectacular(ly featureless) countryside.

Traversing the country by making some 70 such journeys in a ten-month period, we watched a stash of on-board, (and I use the term loosely), “entertainment”, and were unfortunate victims of the drivers’ reluctance to change the video tapes. Our hearts would sink when the screen flickered into life and a jaunty Greek bouzouki twanged melodiously, heralding the onset of two hours of contrived gags and cutesy overacting. Being a captive audience though, it was as impossible to ignore as water torture.

That said, when I saw MBFGW was on TV the other night I couldn’t help but feel a warming sense of nostalgia and a peculiar bittersweet feeling as, terrible though the film is, it’s inextricably linked to an exceedingly happy period of my life.

It’s a pleasure/pain thing – probably much like listening to your favourite Beatles song being sung by a particularly untalented busker, or watching Caroline Quentin plunging over a cliff in your brand new car.

Other such cinematic porridge witnessed en route included Special Agent Cody Banks and some crap film with Paul Newman pretending to be a wheelchair-bound cripple. These films were bouzouki-free, though were still exceedingly kak.

Choclit Jesus

“One of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever” screamed Bill Donohue – head of The Catholic League which describes itself as the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organisation (now there’s an oxymoron). Rah, rah rah…

He was talking about an art gallery in New York which was about to exhibit a life-sized effigy of Jesus Christ made entirely from chocolate. In my view, any art is good art and should be seen, though this particular piece has the added bonus of offending Catholics (which in most cases is no bad thing).

Not sure what the official church line is on what Jesus can be made out of, but off the top of my head I’ve seen wood, ceramics, plastic, china, precious metals and a range of others; why not a bar of Dairy Milk or two? Why can’t Bill and his gang take a leaf out of other religions’ books, like Muslims who regularly see Allah’s name in bags of crisps and sliced tomatoes and whatever.

For all his ire, it might even have the opposite effect and even encourage people to return to church congregations, particularly women attending Holy Communion: “Take this, for this is my body. It’s made with a glass and a half of full-cream milk…”

Unexpectedly, it seems the good people of Wiltshire are far more open-minded than New Yorkers as the church of Bradford-on-Avon openly embraced exactly the same thing as part of the Easter celebrations.

Apparently, the New York artist, Cosimo Cavallaro, is famous for using food in his art, and once painted an entire hotel room with mozzarella cheese. That’s my kind of holiday.

Middle names

It occurred to me, when writing a recent post, that Snoop Doggy Dogg has dropped his middle name in recent years, and is now just known as Snoop Dogg. I suppose lots of people have embarrassing middle names. Luckily his first and last names are fairly innocuous.

Slipping into Work

For around the past two years I have a recurring paranoid thought on the way to work: am I wearing slippers? Because family life results in a bit of a morning rush, there is a need to be mentally on-the-ball, and I know one day I’ll forget to do something fundamental. I’m convinced this will be not changing out of casual household footwear into a sensible pair of shoes/boots.

The paranoia can strike at any time between leaving the house and arriving at the office and I have no choice but to check my feet whenever the thought occurs.

If walking, a swift glance down at my feet will go relatively unnoticed. If on a train, I can pretend to be momentarily fascinated by something on the floor. As I drive to work these days though, it requires taking my eye off the road, if only for a second or two, which is potentially hazardous. Maybe the answer is to set up an elaborate system of mirrors just to put my mind at ease.

Gin & Juice? Milk & Cereal…

“Come on Britain,’ Snoop Dogg embarrassingly implored in a TV interview yesterday after being told recently that he wouldn’t be allowed a UK visa, ‘we let in the Beatles, how about letting me in?’

Hmm, it’s not the best comparison. To my knowledge, John, Paul and George never had weapons and drugs charges filed against them in the US stemming from three separate arrests. Ringo however, has been guilty of heinous crimes against singing and has never been fully punished.

His (Snoop’s, not Ringo’s) spokeswoman said he was "mystified" at the decision, which has resulted from violent disorder and affray at Heathrow Airport. There’s nothing overly mystifying about. From what I understand, it’s resulted from violent disorder and affray at Heathrow Airport.

For me, there’s something about Mr Dogg which has always made him look a bit like the “school spanner” in the Academy of Gangsta Rap. His weedy likkle frame is somewhat at odds with his muscle-bound, testosterone-oozing absurdly-tattooed chums. With his sullen cheekbones and gangly arms, he looks more like one of those weedy kids who got picked on in the playground, despite sitting on his own and minding his own business, munching a lunchbox full of cheese sandwiches. Or in his case, maybe a nice juicy bone.

That said, he has tried his best to keep up with his peers, even to the point of being held on suspicion of murder. It seems you get a better class of celebrity murderer in the US. Over there you get Snoop Dogg and OJ Simpson, whereas all we can offer here is Lesley Grantham and possibly Barrymore (though manslaughter doesn’t really count in my eyes).

Incidentally, Mr Dog was chosen as the new name for Caesar dog food a while ago. Whichever marketing genius thought more people were likely to buy a product that sounded like it was the idea of a particularly unimaginative six-year old child was sadly mistaken. It’s like when Coco Pops were foolishly (and briefly) renamed to Choco Crispies in the mid ‘90s. The advertisers couldn’t even be bothered to alter the jingle to account for the change in metre: “We’d rather have a bowl of Choco Crispies!” What? There’s an extra syllable in there, has no-one noticed? Rubbish…Consequently, there was uproar from chocolate cereal munching lobbyists who promptly demanded that it was changed back again. Which it was.

Now what was I talking about? Oh yes, Snoop Dogg. Don’t let him in, his music’s kak anyway.

The Good Life

We recently moved to a house with a garden and, like good little Tom and Barbaras we also have a composter into which we throw all kinds of decomposable stuff (including the vegetables that we’re not that fond of which live in the fridge until time’s winged chariot renders them inedible).

We don’t pretend to know much about green-fingered shenanigans, though our position as novice 21st century gardeners was never more apparent than the other day when my wonderwife tossed a whole broccoli floret into the composter despite it (the floret) being still in the vacuum-packed cellophane at the time.

Maybe by sprinkling the resulting mulch around the vegetable patch we could have produced some pre-packed runner beans or ready-chopped bagged salad. It’s such a hassle doing it yourself.

[disclaimer: just to clarify – my wonderwife is aware of the non-decompositional qualities of plastics, and neglected to remove the cellophane because she forgot to, rather than thinking it was okay to pop it in. But that’s not as entertaining a story.]