Monday, May 24, 2004 :::
Cunt...Not The New Bitch.
The reality of our modern vernacular is that we all fall prey to fashionable phrasings. Fortunately, I won’t have to back this up with paragraph after paragraph of quotations from social science journals and noted linguists. I have only to point out a few trends in our past social speak.
Remember the Valley Girl phase when things were “to the max”; people were “gagged with spoons” and other random objects; “like” was the utterance of choice when pausing mid-sentence, sometimes inserted after every other word; and “totally” was used to express more ranges of condition and emotion than the Eskimos have words for snow?
How about when things were Radical (“rad” for short)? Or how about when Cats went with Chicks unless they were squares? Can you dig it daddy-o? Is it all groovy for ya?
While some of our adoption of new phrases come from our professions (shop talk), most of the new phrases we pull into our societal lexicon come from popular media like movies, television, or music. Right now across America as I write this millions of people (some of them teenagers, most of them white, and all of them of questionable intelligence) are telling someone about Fashizzoling their Nizzels!?! And why? Because a rap guy told one of his boys “Hey, watch as I make all the white kids sound like Stutterers having epileptic fits…”
Fact is we learn from what we seen in the popular media and we are inundated with popular media.
I have heard a new word being thrown about lately in movies and in interviews I’ve read with media types. It’s not a new word. In fact, I would say the word predates my life. And this word also has been used often enough to earn it the label by most women as being “the dirtiest word EVER!”. I don’t know why, no one has ever explained it to me, but most woman after hearing it shrink into this horrible ball of anger and disgust. Yes, I am talking about the word Cunt... capitalized for effect.
David Carradine pulls it off well in his line for Kill Bill Vol. 2. The stand-up comics have made it seem humorous in the context of their acts. But I don’t know. The word’s damaged goods. It has too much baggage. Too many guys like me have stashed it in our reserve file of only the most heinous words...filed in the "C"s appearing before both "K" for Kike and "N" for Nigger. It is a dirty word only to be used, if ever, in the most extreme of circumstances when hurt and shock need to be delivered with equal and unmitigated force. We can’t just start throwing it around willy-nilly. We can’t use it to the point where it starts to develop alternate meanings and usages. We can’t ruin it like we ruined Bitch.
Bitch used to be a good word, an all-encompassing word for when the female went haywire. But then it became a badge of honor. “I’m a bitch and proud of it” the t-shirts and bumper stickers used to read. And the current uses of Cunt... what are they using it for… AS A STAND-IN FOR THE WORD BITCH!
So, if you can control it folks I ask you to resist to temptation to adopt this one into your verbal rotations. Leave it alone. Let it sit in the Reprehensible Sub-dictionary of guys like me waiting for some Cunt to cut me off in traffic!
::: posted by Mike at 9:27 PM
Thursday, May 20, 2004 :::
Pretty in Pink… But Only A Little.
The city is awash in pink. From Park Ave. in the high fifties all the way down to the Village, there are solids and patterns, stripes, polka-dots, and plaids. All pink. The society women with the cash for real fashion, the hippie chicks in SoHo, the little tourist girls in the big city from Middle America: they are dressed from the tops of their knit Kangols all the way down to their Prada pumps. Even some men on Wall St. wear it in their power ties. Pink. Tons of it.
It was the other day I found out that pink was in. I don’t think that it was ever out… being “in” is more than emerging from the “outs”. My wife was turning through the pages of one of those celebrity mags and almost everyone was in pink. I asked why and she said- in that “where have you been you knuckle dragging moron” tone- pink’s in.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Especially if it's a pink thing. Pink is supposed to be an accent. Pink is supposed to be subtle, an extra on the scene of fashion.
I was walking across 55th today over to Broadway and the world was pink. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have. Things looked softer and more clean, sure, but there was a falseness to it that screamed fashion mag imitation.
I can’t wait until pink is out again.
::: posted by Mike at 5:24 PM
