Time for some updates

The F-bomb, the movies, new words, and the climate catastrophe.

MY RECENT post about the F-word drew lots of feedback and caused one person to unsubscribe, but also half a dozen others to sign up. Sorry to have offended the sensibilities of the dropout, but that’s a win, no? And, I’d argue, further evidence of the ho-hum acceptance of the word in all but the most polite circles. Meanwhile, attentive readers pointed out a few uses I overlooked:

fucktard = fucken retard (doubly offensive these days, I know—glad the dropout won’t see it).

fuck ton = a whole lot (applies to everything from work to questions to dessert).

fuckster = not quite sure what it means, but if someone who hucks is a huckster. . .

Which reminds me of an F-related word-play joke that has something to offend almost everyone:

Q. What’s the difference between an epileptic oyster shucker and a prostitute with the runs?

A. The oysterman shucks between fits.

RECENTLY, I wrote about the inadequacy of the language that politicians use when speaking of the climate disaster. You’ll recall that the Paris Accord of 2016 committed 196 signatories to endeavour to keep the average annual global temperature to, ideally, no more than 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels by the year 2100. This was to be a concerted, coordinated effort to avert, or at least delay, a global catastrophe.

How are we doing, three-quarters of a century ahead of that deadline? Read this chart (from the indispensable visualcapitalist.com) and weep. Then send it to your MP and point out that “climate change” is in fact “climate calamity.”

IN RESPONSE to my post about the way word meanings evolve over time, an old friend and fellow writer, Wayne Grady, pointed out a category I overlooked: words that start as mispronunciations. Hussy was a corruption of housewife before it came to mean any woman or girl, and then specifically to denote an adulterous female. And bedlam, Wayne pointed out, derives from the name of a London mental hospital in the 1400s, St. Mary of Bethlehem. Today the word refers to pandemonium of all kinds, such as erupts between supporters of rival football clubs.

And thank you for begging the question when I asked why the pool wasn’t open.

KEN DRYDEN read my post about spending time with Gordie Howe, and my frustration at trying to get “Mr. Hockey” to say anything of interest. “As a kid, as an NHL superstar, and for the rest of his life, Gordie was just “good old Gord,” Dryden wrote. “That’s what he wanted to be, what others hoped he would be, what they loved about him. And he didn’t let them down. Lots of people can be talkers and explainers. What he was mattered far, far more than what he wasn’t.”

“Gordie looked like he could rip the old Manhattan phone book in two with his bare hands.”

I GOT SOME fun feedback on my post about corporate jargon, in which I tried to jam every single business cliche I could think of into a single speech. One reader emailed me: “USE CASE!! I hear it five times a day. What’s wrong with just plain USE?” Katarina Petruzzo has compiled her own list of business cliches—things people say at the office but nowhere else— including many I overlooked: thread the needle, boil the ocean, put meat on the bones, open the kimono, bleeding edge. . . I’ll stop there, before your ears start to bleed.

I WROTE about bullshit in modern life, and one reader emailed to say: “After seeing your article, I was buying paper towels and noticed one pack said “6 rolls = 12” and another said “6 giant rolls = 9.” Silly me, for imagining they were both just six-packs of paper towels. I also saw a TV ad for a product that “works 4 times harder.” For times harder than what?

FINALLY, my post about things movie characters do (and actual people don’t) prompted readers to point out that movie characters open doors to enter or leave a room, but never close the door behind them.

And, perhaps most glaring of all: “Nobody gets to within a few centimeters of another’s face unless they’re going in for a kiss or it’s a big bully intimidating someone. In the movies, everybody violates face-to-face personal space, I guess for the sake of close-up shots. Hope they have TicTacs on the set.”

I’LL BE BACK next week with a story about the irrational fear that a female billionaire struck in the heart of the American publisher who was all set to publish a book I’d written.

Over and out for now..

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