“Words mean things until they don’t” edition, composed in the spirit of George Carlin, the best language arts teacher anyone ever knew. WARNING: I’m wading into issues from the online culture wars on this one. Time to flex.
THE HEAT IS ON: Baked, fried, blazed, etc.: In the 1970s, high school students smoked marijuana to get “fried.” For the last 20 years or so—I wouldn’t know when this changed, only when I saw the first reference—the term for cannabis intoxication has been “baked.” It does seem healthier. Baked is always better than fried, right? Well, not if you’re on a keto diet...anyway, to “wake and bake,” to smoke immediately after rolling out of bed for the day, sings a cheerful rhyme.
Furthering the cooking metaphor, to say one is flambéed would mesh nicely with the other word for intoxication, blazed. For all we know some bourgie kids in a gentrifying neighborhood are already using that for their slang to distinguish them from the commoners.
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| Maybe we should call marijuana dispensaries “baking supply stores.” |
CLOWNTOWN PRONOUNS: I’m a blissfully aged old man who has led a blissfully sheltered existence. Although I’ve seen more than most, it’s enough to know how fortunate I am for what fashionable madness I’ve managed to avoid. One hundred miles from the nearest interstate highway, in a small town surrounded by many square miles of farms and ranches, I see all I need to see of the world on this 26-inch monitor.
It’s only been in the last few years, not even the last ten, that I’ve read of this much mocked and derided (yet still bizarrely accommodated) phenomenon of “genderfluid” people who have special pronouns they insist you use for them. A young woman of my acquaintance whose work takes her to Denver described separate encounters with two such creatures, so I know they exist outside of Internet clickbait/ rage-reading. How widespread this actually is, however, remains to be seen. I know some newspapers like the Los Angeles Times make a point of “respecting the pronouns” but no one respects the media much these days, if they read it at all, so there.
The pronouns in question for the pathological narcissist who wishes to make everything about them (that’s all this is, after all) are often “they/ them,” as if to acknowledge the legion of annoyances these people are capable of creating if you are foolish enough to engage with them. In other cases—but I suspect they’re extremely rare—you get oddities like “xir” or “zir.”
The funniest thing about all this is that to use anyone’s pronouns, one has to be talking to someone else about the pronoun’d person in question. Unless you’re writing for a blog, newspaper, etc., the only person who would know which pronouns you’re using is the person you’re talking to about the special needs nuisance with the pronouns. “Special needs nuisance with the pronouns” is a bit harsh, so I’ll use the more accurate, “that pathological narcissist.”
That is, if I must talk about this person at all. Narcissists thrive on attention, even (and sometimes especially) negative attention. It’s best to not even let on that you’re annoyed.
The sensible course of action when approached by the kind of person who introduces him or herself as, “Hi, I’m ________, and these are my pronouns” is to say, “Pleased to meet you, ________. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really have to take this call. See you around!” Then ghost out of there to take that imaginary phone call. And by “ghost,” I mean, “go home.” Back to your hotel room, or into your car driving far, far away.
What are you doing in a place where people like this are roaming loose, anyway? That’s on you, son.
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| “When you’ve got vocabulary peculiar to your in-group, it’s fun for the in-group, but drives off the normies. One word or many words, it doesn’t matter. You end up looking like a bunch of propeller-hat nerds with decoder rings whispering over comic books in a backyard treehouse.” Or these people. |
MEMBERSHIP BADGES AND DECODER RINGS FOR PUTATIVE GROWNUPS: Certain words have become useful markers for identifying someone’s political attitudes. The left has quite a few of them. To avoid a bunch of quotation marks littering the page, I’ll put what few I can think of in bullet-list form:
- problematic
- systemic
- intersectional
- cissexist (“cis”-anything, another neologism from this decade)
- supremacy
- dismantle
- decolonize
I wonder if all these are going the way of “male chauvinism,” a phrase that was often used by the “women’s libbers” in the early 1970s. After much overuse “male chauvinism” became a ridiculous, meaningless phrase associated with ridiculous people who could do nothing but complain. Feminism had to re-brand to survive as a serious movement in the public eye. A big part of that was ditching that strange, clinical-sounding term that blamed men for everything.
That, and the bra-burning. Yes, kids, I’m old enough to remember when feminism nearly died of its own silliness in the 1970s. We’re seeing the same thing happening today among the modern left with the above words. They’re killing themselves with their own vocabulary, and it’s not gone unnoticed that there are often disingenuous amendments of meaning among their lexicon. Consider the evolution of the word “racist,” for instance, and how it’s now impossible to be racist towards one group because of the amended meaning. These people will tell you it’s always been thus, too, when you know it hasn’t. I did not use the modifier “disingenuous” because I’m biased.
Meanwhile, it’s harder to peg people on the right side of the aisle. If they deliberately employ politically incorrect terms for groups of people and their ideologies, that’s one thing. There is one, and only one word, though, that let’s you know you’re among the hardcore: “degeneracy.” It’s an apt descriptor for what they see about them in popular and social culture—and although it is just one word, it would be good of them to dial it back.
When you’ve got vocabulary peculiar to your in-group, it’s fun for the in-group, but drives off the normies. One word or many words, it doesn’t matter. You end up looking like a bunch of propeller-hat nerds with decoder rings whispering over comic books in a backyard treehouse. Or worse. “Oh, look, it’s the old people complaining about ‘degeneracy’ again.” “Oh, my goodness, what now? Did someone see a cartoon they didn’t like?”
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A brilliant MS Paint-created meme, the text of which employs the most commonly used words and phrases by people of a certain political persuasion. |
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