My online friend NickM from the Counting Cats blog has anger issues.
When he is in full possession of his senses, I understand everything he writes.
But when Nick is truly outraged, he makes use of every British colloquialism, slang expression, and obscenity at his disposal. When this happens, I don't understand a word of it without making use of Google.
Please join me in asking Nick to translate this post into something resembling American English. Nick lived over here for a couple of years and I'm sure he can do it.
P.S. - I understand the part about the clawhammer.
5 comments:
What you need to understand is that Nick doesn't just use British colloquialism, he invents them out of whole cloth.
In this he follows in the steps of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Thank you Allen and Cats. But I am not an innovator. I am a memory sink. I rgurgitate stuff from Viz and from my Gran and from blokes down the pub.
Allen, I can't translate. Because the medium is the message. Anyway, When I was dating an Atlantan I hadda learn enough US English to know that in America bars have "restrooms" and not "toilets". I think you can do the same with late C20th/early C21st UK Anglo-speak.
I don't have anger issues. I am a very passionate guy. I don't lose my rag easily but when I do it's Ebola Gay.
Every single significant romantic entanglement in my life has involved doing it long-distance and by that I mean in one case trans-Atlantic. That learns you what an erstwhile flatmate once termed "lyrics". And that is what language exists for. It exists to woo women. It exists to get them to "do things". Things that sometimes their religions and general society regard as abhorrent, but I quite like.
Language exists to amuse. It exists for a very simple reason. You can laugh a girl into bed. Wanna know why? Wanna know the best pulling tactic short of driving something expensive and carbonically repulsive known to man?
Make 'em laugh. It is not so much that girls like a funny guy per se. It is that written into the female form on that second X chromosome is a knowledge that men will do anything, anything to make a girl laugh. Making a girl laugh is basically a way of saying, "I really, really, really wanna make sweet, sweet love to you" without sounding creepy or deranged. It's sort of stealthy because it's so deeply embedded into girls that they don't notice.
Example: Hans Bethe won the Nobel Prize for Physics for working out how the stars shine. Shortly after he'd figured this as a young man he had a date. His date said, "Hans, aren't the stars so beautiful tonight?". Bethe replied, "Yes, my dear and right now I'm the only man who knows why".
And he didn't even get tops and fingers even though he was telling the Gospel truth. He knew something which won him a Nobel. He knew something that I would chew off your leg to have been the first to know. And it got him a, "Don't call me, I'll call you".
Moving forward 70/80 years I told that story to a girl I was on a date with whilst looking at the stars.
We have been together now for nearly ten years and have been married for two and a half.
Life is sometimes bitterly ironic. Because, unlike Bethe, I got the girl but failed my PhD in astrophysics. Well failed is a bit inaccurate. More like abandoned.
NickM -- though we do not always agree on issues, I must say your gift for language never ceases to fill me with envy and admiration.
What an elegant reply.
Well said sir.
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