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Naming the Important Things Posting Date: Jan 27 2008 8:28PM Reader Advisory: This SundayMonkey contains immature subject matter. Parental discretion is advised. Please call my mother for permission to read past paragraph ten.
Legend has it that Inuit have something like a hundred words for snow. This legend, in fact, is a little overblown, but it makes for a nice story and it also makes complete sense. If you lived where it snowed like a son-of-a-bitch, snow would be important enough for you to want a vocabulary capable of describing the various and numerous forms snow can take. I totally get it.
By this same logic, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the Anglo-Saxons of drizzly Britain had a whole mess of words for rain. The ancient Egyptians probably figured out a few dozen ways to describe sand. So if you look at contemporary North American English, you should be able to figure out what dominates our society simply by applying a formula of lexical frequency. By counting the words we have available to describe our various interests and ideas, it seems we can determine which are closest to the centre of our culture and consciousness.
I have completed just such an analysis and the upshot is that you may want to consider relocating to someplace with a little class. Contemporary North American culture doesn’t quite soar to the heights of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England or Florence during the grand patronage of the Medici. Actually, we barely measure up to Sweden during the ABBA years.
Judging by the percentage of vocabulary assigned to the entire spectrum of human experience, our culture is clearly focused on two things above all others – intoxication and masturbation.
When it comes to intoxication, we have an embarrassment of riches in the dictionary. Drunk, high, inebriated, smashed, stoned, buzzed, blitzed, hammered, looped, sloshed and schnockered are all perfectly good synonyms. We can’t forget ripped, bent, besotted, blasted, blind, blotto and bombed. You can go out tonight and get canned, clobbered, cockeyed, crocked or destroyed. A few more drinks and you’ll be fried, juiced, loaded, obliterated, pickled, pie-eyed, plastered, plowed, polluted or pissed. You could also be roaring, sauced and shit-faced. Don’t forget soused, sozzled, spaced, stewed, stiff and tanked. And finally, there’s tight, tipsy, toasted, twisted and threesheetstothewind which isn’t a word, but we’ll count it because it’s one of my mother’s favoured expressions.
It’s an impressive list. In fact, you can take almost any vaguely funny-sounding verb, turn it into a past participle and people will assume it means “inebriated.”
“I went out with the boys and got absolutely blended.”
“I was so leathered at the party, I lost my pants.”
“Two more drinks and I’ll be spackled.”
But when it comes to real linguistic artistry, we are at our most inventive when it comes to masturbation. The list of naming options for the act of self-love is numbingly long. If this were the adults-only version of SundayMonkey, we could reproduce the list in full, but even the following relatively clean sample is impressive.
For the ladies, we can rely on handy euphemisms like a night with the girls, checking for squirrels, dialing the rotary phone, hitchhiking south, paddling the canoe, riding the unicycle, teasing the kitty, surfing the channels, and doing your nails.
Switching over to the men, we can slink away to the privacy of our locked bedrooms for a little assault on a friendly weapon, batting practice, polishing the bishop, peeling the carrot or being your own best friend. Men can play five against one, hold the cards, pull the goalie or, yes, tug the SundayMonkey. Then, in the celebrity division, we can spend some quality time choking Charlie Sheen, pumping Pat Paulson, tickling Elmo, gripping Graham Greene, rubbing Rob Reiner or burping Billy Baldwin.
Clearly, language reveals that intoxication and masturbation are supremely important to our culture. Or perhaps their importance is directly proportionate to their associated stigma and shame. Maybe we’re just hiding behind the camouflage of colourful lingo. After all, no one is ashamed of playing tennis, so there’s only one word for tennis. No one ever says, “I need a shower. I spent all morning down at the club beating Bjorn Borg.” |
