It’s Not Art…

…if you call it art. Subsequently, you are not an artist if you call yourself an artist. You are however more than likely a bit of a tosser and have your hand firmly on it.

‘Artist’ is a title like ‘Doctor’ or ‘Engineer’ and titles are conferred by other people, thus only other people can decide if your creation is, as Zoidberg would put it, ‘an art’.

Painter; Writer, Seamster, Creator of Work: only other people have the capacity to say whether or not your work is that of an artist.

A reasonably good sign is if someone tries to buy it from you. A somewhat less reliable indicator is if they try to hang it on their walls. But the most surefire way to know that you are an artist is if other people start calling you one – preferably lots of them.

It is at this stage that you have an important choice to make, because if you personally adopt the title then you are essentially putting your hand on it, in a way very similar to the one mentioned earlier in the piece.

Buckets and Sticks

There are no conceivable cuss words that do not benefit from the suffixes bucket or stick.

In other news, I will be registering ‘beer’ with the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (www.bipm.org) as the new international standard of time measurement, a move sure to thrill scientists and lovers of infinity alike.

And finally, I leave you with a question: perfect strangers, what are they so good at?

The past tenst of twitter

is twat

Spellchecker cunt, I mean can’t…

I must admit that me and irony have a checkered past.

You see, apparently, I often mistake coincidence for irony.

The only noteworthy thing about this is that apparently (again) so many people do this that we might just better off swapping the definitions of irony and coincidence. Or calling ironic things, dark coincidences, or something.

The latest thing that I thought was ironic was the fact that the facebook spellchecker spell checks facebook (as a word) but not twittering. (apparently also, she sells seashells by the sea shore)

Maybe it’s not ironic, but it is odd.

Not as odd, however, as the hidden stash words that must be lurking within a hidden folder of Microsoft word.

I refer to the FUCK/CUNT spell-check conundrum.

Fact 1) Spellcheck does not suggest fuck as an option if you mistype it fack

Fact 2) Spellcheck does not put a red squiggly line under fuck if you get it right.

Fact 3) Spellcheck does put a red squiggly line under cunt, when you get it right.

Fact 4) Again, spellcheck accepts clit but does not suggest it.

So what’s the deal? There’s a hidden cuss folder but they left cunt out?

I mean come on, Queen Victoria had a cunt before she had a vagina!

And also, Kanye doesn’t get irony

This boy gives a whole new meaning to the term nuwave-post-neo-luddite.

“I DON’T HAVE A F—ING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE.,” West wrote in an anti-Twitter diatribe on his blog.

What he should have done was post a link to his blog on his official website, denying the existence of his twitter account.

Succumbed – Succambe – Succame

Every time I hear the word ‘succumbed’ my brain cringes.

To succumb is to give way, yield, submit and/or die. These are all rather emphatic things to be doing and I get that giving up, yielding and/or dying is quite well alluded to by the firm and final sound of a -d.

But I think this misses the point, a lot like SBS missed the point when I rang up to ask them if they were truly serious using the phrase ‘possibly immanent’ on live TV.

I get that succumbing is final, but the whole point of succumbing is the fact that you have resisted the giving way, yielding, submitting and/or dying, for what was probably quite a considerable length of time.

When it finally happens it’s not going to be sudden or unexpected. More than likely it’s going to wash over you like a warm and bloody wave: slightly metallic in flavour, if the written accounts of the taste of blood are to be believed. Which leads me to the question, why don’t they ever describe metal as tasting like blood?

Anyway, should you ever find that I have given up, yielded, submitted and/or died, know that I succambe.

Fit, Fits, Fat

It really is that simple.

Fitted – pffft.

sneak, sneaks, snuck

(they do allow this, but they are trying sneaked where ever they can)

Regular Verbs Suck Arse

Irregular verbs: those few remaining doing words that have stood up to the word fascists and kept their random and bedraggled little endings intact.

These poor little buggers are hunkered down in some 18th century fort taking hits from every side by people with rulers and powerpoint presentations.

In their defence, I am going to turn the bureaucrats’ ultimate weapon back on themselves – a list!

HenceForth!@ I am going to create a list of all the verbs that have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, shamozzled and straight out bumjacked (yes, they even let you regularise verbs you make up – fuckers) into the sordid and dreary world of the bureaucrat: which is French for people with little or no imagination.

I’ll start with ‘glide’

If gliding made a sound, I’m willing to bet my shiniest five yen coin that it would go onomatopoeia on our asses.

Glide just glides. It glides so well it almost slides, but has a neat little ‘gl’ up its front stop it from doing that.

So here’s what’s essentially a perfect verb until you get to it’s past tense

Glided!

What The Fuck?

Glided, for the love of all that is filled with tea! Any kind of awesomeness your glide may have had just got spear tackled by a streaking heckler.

Whichever retarded linguist/author/queen’s good man decided to whack two consonants onto the end of this thing should be taken outside and forced to learn Estonian.

Did you slided? No, you slid. & I glid.

Onomatopoeia ?

There is a word out there. I was tempted to say lurking, but it’s not, it’s out there and it’s just that I can’t see it.

It’s out there like fractals are out there and it just took that hairy little Swiss Yoda guy and a dot-matrix printer to start seeing the edges.

I’ve seen the edges, because I know what the word means, I just don’t know what it is.

It’s the one that describes word that don’t sound like what they mean.

Take Sanguine, for example.

This little fucker means ‘cheerfully optimistic’, but it doesn’t sound cheerfully optimistic. It sounds dreary and mean and sad and hopeless and lost and unfound.

Even the most optimistic champion of the language couldn’t argue a case for anything stronger than a contemplative, mellow, warmish sort of half-glow leaning towards a tepid glass of stale chai tea.

Now I’m not one to argue with etymology and the route from the Latin for blood to the flushed and rosy cheeks of the eternally joyous is painfully clear, but it doesn’t change the fact that the word is just wrong.

Obviously, not being the boss of common usage, I’m in no position to do anything other than point out the absurdity of hanging on to language that’s clearly on the wrong side of the zeitgeist.

Anyway, I seem to have wandered slightly off topic.

There’s a word for words that sound like how they sound: onomatopoeia and I want to know what to call words that don’t sound like what they mean.

???