Brain Freeze

Friday, December 10, 2004

Mind your Language

Here's a rant. I am posting after quite a few days. There's a reason. Nothing has been happening in my life. No flying saucer has been spotted idling away above my terrace, noone has kidnapped me yet, and I certainly have not won the Nobel Prize for Literature.. Not even a minor storm...! That's kind of depressing!
What prompted me to take up the keyboard, (in a metaphorical sense) and type my usual quota of nonsense?
Well, for one, to inform certain people, that, in fact, I am NOT dead! Oh, you didn't have to groan THAT loud!!
Rub your noses in the fact that Exams were so-so!
Talk about my boring life....

Right now, I am reading the 4th part of the famous trilogy (!!) "HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Douglas Adams has the cynicism right down to an art. Marvin the Paranoid Android, if he were human, would be one of the depressed coves that slouch around, thinking about how truly sad their life is! (and whom we try to avoid best we can!)

"More than you can imagine," dreared Marvin. "My capacity for mental activity is as boundless as the infinite reaches of space itself. Except of course for my capacity for happiness"
Stomp, Stomp, he went.
"My capacity for happiness," he added "you could fit into a matchbox without taking the matches out first."
"Life, The Universe, And Everything: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

This almost-human outlook (except that his brain capacity is the size of a small planet) endears Marvin to the reader!

Besides reading HHGG, other activities that are engaging my free time are sleeping, seeing reality tv (the best kind right now) and dreaming!

Now we come to the crux of the whole matter.
One of the dangerous side-effects of commenting about any aspect of my very strange behaviour, is that I am very liable to write about it. So here are my thoughts about a comment I received some time ago!
The basic accusation was this:
I am trying to keep people from visiting my blog by making them constantly refer their Concise Oxford Dictionaries to find out what in the world I am saying!
This is my defence.
I was not aware of the fact that the first urge everyone has, when they see my 'creations' is to run for the nearest dictionary to find of what exactly the word, say "crux" means! Thank you for bringing it to my notice!
I never asked you to use (and abuse) the Concise Oxford Dictionary.. You're free to use Webster's, or Cambridge, or Random House or even the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary to clear your recurring doubts. I would recommend using an online resource like www.dictionary.com . It's easier to handle and saves on wear and tear of your feet, if you're as lazy as the archetypal 20 year old.. Oh wait... you might need that link RIGHT now! Go ahead! Click on it!
I plead guilty to two counts, though
1) of using starkly different construction to most people.
2) of trying to fit into one sentence, what could only be properly assimilated in three goes, thereby confusing anyone who reads it, till they either had to re-read the sentence to understand the meaning and context or giving up in despair of ever understanding the point I was trying to make with the whole mess! (like right now!)... I apologise!
The Thesarus is a marvellous, stupendous, excellent, magnificent, fantastic... book. But I really have used it only once. And what resulted from it was a poem of such a highbrow nature that I felt sick on reading it!

Any thoughts? Feel free to spit them out! Maybe my next blog would be about them!

Copy-write Shrutz :: 12:00 PM :: 1 Sneaky Remarks:

What would you like to do?

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