I have finally found the latest shitburger that upsets me so much I cannot help but post an angry rant. For some reason, there are some words that have come through the long and hard process of developing some color, and our immediate response is to drop them from our language. Here are a few examples of words that are no longer usable, or whose meanings have been altered to make them difficult to use:
Factory-replaced by Plant.
Handicapped-replaced by Physically Challenged
Swamp-replaced by Wetland
What the fuck? Supposedly a “factory” suggests a building with looming smokestacks billowing forth vile and odius pollution. I don’t know if you’ve looked lately, but that’s what it is!!! A plant is a beautiful green organism that I have growing in my yard, how dare you defile such a pristine word with an image such as that!!! Changing what you call something ain’t gonna change the thing itself, and if people know better, it shouldn’t change how people think of it, either.
I looked up the definition of “Handicapped.” Know what it is? “Having a condition that restricts one’s ability to function physically” That sounds pretty close to “physically challenged” to me. If “handicapped” is offensive, how could “physically challenged” not be? How can it even be consitered changing the word if you’re simply changing the word to its definition?
The swamp thing arises from these environmentalists who are wishing to save these areas of wetness, and them not wanting to carry around signs saying “Save the Swamp!” Swamp apparently carries an image of a stinky, bug-ridden bog more than the desired marshland of abundant wildlife. …Fuck, i actually agree with this change. Probably should have thought ahead a little better.
Anyway, it still leads me to my point which is that just because a word becomes politically incorrect is no reason to drop it from our language. These words tie into us reading the book “1984″ for English class, in which the negative Utopian society tries to create perfection by writing a new language that inhibits independant thought in every way. Newspeak, the language is called, contains only words that are absolutely necessary to function, any words that express thought or feeling have been dropped. Personally, I’m all for getting my feelings across, and words that have a little emotion behind them assist me greatly with this. Down with Big Brother!
English is missing a word. I am always lost whenever I come to point where it would be necessary. When I do come up with a word, I never have confidence in it. And that sucks. It’s time for a new word to replace the void representing the third person gender-neutral singular. Here’s an example:
If an artist wants to be famous, ________ must have unique ideas.
Okay, let us examine the possibilities. If there is any context to suggest one gender or the other, you can use he or she with confidence. But if there is uncertainty, as there usually is, he is the correct choice of olde. I suppose that was the way things used to be. But as any language evolves, popular culture will change words and even the definition of correct grammar. He has become archaic, and even chauvinist. I suppose we have Latin to thank for that. Latin and its brood of romance languages use the masculine form, corresponding to he in English. But I think the English language has moved on.
Around the time of the Women’s Liberation movement, society decided that gender-specific words had to go. Equality for all words! Stewardess became flight attendant. Mailman became mail carrier. The replacement for he became he or she, or sometimes even the radical she. Using he or she became politically correct, and it still is today. It offends no one, it is neutral. But it still sucks. It is three whole words, for one thing. And it sounds very indecisive. The replacement also spawned a corollary, s/he. While you mostly see s/he in writing, it attempts to solve the three-syllable issue. But s/he suffers from a lack of eye-appeal and can take a second to pronounce. The quest continues…
The current trend is to use they, but that is by far the worst. They is just an evasion from the syllabic burden of he or she. It implies a plurality that simply does not exist. English teachers will not accept it, but most of my generation uses it without second thought. That could be remedied if a new word were to take its place.
So, what does that leave us with? We cannot use he, he or she, or they. That leaves us with precisely nothing. That is why I think we need a new word. It would solve all sorts of uncertainty problems. You could finally write in this situation with confidence, instead of rephrasing your sentences. I spent a little while brainstorming a word, and here is what I came up with: Shey.
If an artist wants to be famous, shey must have unique ideas.
It takes getting used to, but it works. It combines all the previous forms of he, she, and they. If someone can come up with a better idea, be my guest. But for now, shey is the solution!
There are many thankless jobs out there, and if you’ve ever experienced the joys of refereeing you know exactly what I am talking about. The job itself is simple enough–run around and make sure the game goes right and nobody starts pulling nasty tricks (or in my case as a sideline ref stand there and point the flag in the right direction.) Most of the time the ride is smooth and nobody gets too mad, but then there are those coaches who seem to take certain pleasure in making the referee miserable. It doesn’t matter what the calls are or how the game is going, the ref is always biased, alway negligent, always a complete idiot. Their player trips over their own feet…”Are you watching the game ref?!” Their player plants an elbow into an opponent’s side…”What kind of penalty is that!!?” Their team is awarded a penalty kick…”That should have been a red card!!!” Oh yes, and yelling is a necessity. It doesn’t matter if the yellow shirt is five or fifty feet away; all accusations are at the top of their lungs. I should know this type of coach well; I used to have one. Being on the team of a coach like that is scary enough, but being the person holding the flag or whistle is even more unnerving. At our own Memorial Park, next to the high school, at a U-10 (!!!!) game, a referee was pummeled by an unsatisfied coach (maybe parent) for following the rules and not letting the team play because half their players were overage. (When you have 9 year old boys, one year makes a big difference size-wise). Thankfully I’ve never been in a situation that rough, but just getting yelled at as a sideline by an unhappy coach is bad enough–and that has happened to me.
Two weekends ago I worked at the Nevado Classic Youth tournament. Most of the games were very clean, easy to ref, pleasant to watch. There was one boy’s game, however, in which one team was very fond of “flaking,” which is exaggerating a fall in order to get a free kick, and the other had a coach who was, to say the least, verbal. A player would pull a spectacular dive off the ball and this coach would grumble and rumble and yell at our center about how he can’t let the other team “play him” like that, and this was after the center had warned the player who had played up the foul too much. It isn’t just the coaches who are unhappy, the parents as well get into the act, though usually not as openly. (However in the game afore mentioned, a parent had to be kicked out of the game due to some vulgar language directed at the other sideline.) Parents won’t yell at the ref as much as the coaches will, but every time I would trot past them, flag in hand, they would be commenting on how the ref is soo biased, how he doesn’t know what he is doing. I know that it shouldn’t affect me as much, I’m not the one being commented about, but it still is biting to hear my coworker talked about like that. These parents don’t realize that we as refs are doing the best we can and that their childs team is not in the right all the time. You’d think that these people would be a little more grateful that they have refs in the first place; their teams wouldn’t be able to play if they didn’t.
And what’s funny is that the people who seem to get riled up the least are the players themselves (though, especially in the case of a bad ref they will…first hand experience), it is mostly the coaches and parents who whine and complain and this is what, if anything, gets the players riled up. Referees just aren’t appreciated…fact of life. We are the enforcers, so as a result anything we say will fall in the wrong with someone or another. Perfection is expected, so every little wrong call is pounced upon while the right ones are overlooked. Such is the life of a lawkeeper…and it’s a good thing I get paid for it.
You’ve always wanted to be on reality TV. You sent applications to TV networks, but never got accepted. You just have to get on TV and make a fool of yourself, but you haven’t gotten any acceptance letter from Big Brother yet. What is a Middle America Television Slave Zombie to do?
Hire a consultant to get you on TV. That’s right, pay money to make yourself look like an idiot! Woohoo!
There is a new site that, for $25 a year, will try to get you on TV. Just jot down all your exotic qualities (TV likes people who have nipple piercings) and a bunch of execs will comb through the database of applicants for the right kind of idiots. You know, one black guy, one jew, and twenty blonde retards. Then they’ll contact you and get you on TV. Nothing could be easier!
Millions of Americans apply every year to be on Reality Television for personal fulfillment, to find love, change careers, or simply to experience a once in a lifetime opportunity. RTVStar.com provides you with the most simple, yet sophisticated, way to pursue your RTV dream.
HA! How very sad.
I heard another great reason why creationism still blows today.
Okay, so a common argument for creationism is to look at how well a complex organ such as the eye functions, and to speculate that something so complected and perfect could never evolve naturally. But further examination of the eye shows that this organ is not in fact perfect. In fact, it’s fairly poorly planned out. An omnipotent being would not make such a simple mistake as this.
So here it is. The retina, which receives the light entering the eye, has hundreds of little sensors that turn the visible light into nervous impulses. All these receptors connect to nerves which all twine together behind the eye to form the optic nerve. Our intangible creator needed a place to put it, so he decided to make the beginning of part of the retina. That area, called the optic disk, cannot have any light receptors due to the fatty nerve that’s in the way. This creates a blind spot that we usually don’t notice, right, because we have two eyes. But if you have one eye closed, there will always be a spot in your near peripheral vision that cannot be seen.
No problem, right? I mean, it’s not like I walk around with one eye closed all the time, right? Well here’s the kicker: This supreme power actually fixed it once! Octopi have there optic nerves attached to the backs of their retina. They have no blind spot. Their eyes are the perfect ones. Ours still have flaws. He decided that we weren’t good enough to have perfect eyes.
We didn’t evolve from Octopi, so we didn’t get the non-blind eye that evolved after our common ancestor (probably a jellyfish, or something).
Three kids run around screaming while Mommy and Nanny go out of their minds figuring out what to do. Three high-school seniors stand sweating at podiums answering biology questions (which weren’t hard at all…) in a spelling bee style while about 10 others sit in the stands scrutinizing them. One hundred volunteers rush at a house towing wrenches and hammers while the owners ride away in a limo. And all this happens on the couple square foot LCD screen that we like to call the television. The other night I was busy at being the lazy bum on the couch, flipping the channels mindlessly, when I realized that on just about every channel there was another reality TV show. Maybe it wasn’t every single channel, but I don’t have cable, so when two or three channels play the same sort of show, every channel is playing that sort of show. My point is, REALITY TV IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD!!! Not quite, but I’m sure you can see what I’m getting at.
It used to be that when one thought of reality TV, Survivor or Big Brother would come to mind, but now we’ve got new breeds such as Super Nanny and Extreme Makeover. Where reality shows used to just take a bunch of random people and stick them on some random island or in a single house, they are now taking on every aspect of US life and twisting it into something the we Americans somehow find amusing. We’ve now shows for singles, shows for those who want to improve their looks, shows for parents who can’t control their toddlers, shows for parents who can’t control their teenagers, shows for high schoolers who want to get a scholarship, shows for wannabe divas, shows for fixing up the house, and even a show (which I heard about in Chem class) that has to do with putting weird stuff on and in a car to make it …cool… NOT to mention all those that were already in existence, shows that test fears, shows that race around the world, and shows that stick you in a house or on an island to test your people and not-going-insane skills.
Why are we so attracted to this sort of entertainment? Why are these shows that pose as a representative of real life so successful? I’d say there are many reasons. One is something I’d like to call the point and laugh factor. Anyone who’s ever watched Survivor will know that the producers always stick a couple of wild characters together, and this inevitably leads to various upsets and havoc and downright stupidity at times. And when this happens, us viewers at home have nothing to do but laugh at them, or get mad at them, or feel sorry for them, or cry with them whatever the case may be. In this way, these shows create a mini-reality for the viewers. An artificial reality, but something the viewer can connect with yet remain distant from. Of course, other typical TV shows like comedies or soaps do the exact same thing, so how are the “reality” sort different? It has something to do with the unpredictability, the fact that these are actual people and not actors reciting lines. Maybe real people don’t come up with as funny lines all the time as our favorite characters, but real people just do the most random and crazy things sometimes that we are kept entertained anyway. There is also a certain appeal to the, “what would I do in that case…” scenario. It’s much easier to imagine yourself into arguing with your boyfriend while catching a train to Beijing (though it’s unlikely to happen) than into some pretty, well set scene from, say, Less Than Perfect or Friends. It’s a bit easier yelling at the screen at someone voting the wrong way on Survivor than at an actor spewing scripted lines.
I admit, I watch these reality shows from time to time and am amused by them. However, I am starting to also get really disgusted. A good example is a show that hasn’t gone on air yet but has been being promoted everywhere, Brat Camp. If your kid is horrible…forget military school, send them to Brat Camp, where instead of just being humiliated in front of their teachers and classmates they get to be humiliated in front of the entire nation. What I really want to know is what sort of parent would subject their kid, or themselves to this. Doesn’t the fact that their child is so out of hand shout out to the world what kind of parenting they’ve done? I’m sure it will be entertaining to watch these monsters turn into kind, loving members of a close community that will come home with hugs and kisses for Mommy and Daddy, but the whole concept still sets my eye twitching with the whole…hmmm…something is wrong here…feeling. The same concept goes for Super Nanny which I have watched and then wondered why I kept watching it. Parents send out a help cry and Super Nanny comes and saves the day. In the meantime we see all the parents faults and tribulations. It’s a bit perverted watching people in pain for amusement, but we do it anyways. Watching this particular show might even help some poor parent who was dealing with the same problems as the hour-long stars. However…to open up your life to anyone in the US or beyond who has a TV…igh…
Reality TV…not really reality, but we still flock like the ducks to the bread crumbs those cute little toddlers throw in the pond. Anything seems to do nowadays…wheat bread, white bread, pastries, rye… And it’s all out there. What will they think up next, a reality show for pets? (if that hasn’t been done yet…)