On Why I Love the English Language

“Owl, wise though he was in many ways, was able to read and write and spell his own name, WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”

~From Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

The English language is a marvel of malleability. While there are some who will rage over the inclusion of slang terms into the dusty old upright corridors of Webster’s Dictionary, I am not one of them. I take a perverse delight in the confusions that result from the fluidity of modern language, and in no confusion do I take more delight than the made-up word.

Probably the primary reason that I do not censure the made-up word is that I have discovered I use a few of them myself. For example, today the auto-dictionary scolded me with its censorious little squiggly red line for using the word “agreeance.”

Surely agreeance is a word. I use it all the time: “if so-and-so is in agreeance, we’ll move on this.” “Are we all in agreeance?” Et cetera, et cetera. Except agreeance isn’t a word. The actual correct word is agreement. And so I was forced to acknowledge my own ignorance and be corrected by that bloody Microsoft paperclip. Guilty as charged.

Another set of words which cause a lot of confusion, and which result in descriptions of physically impossible feats, are figuratively and literally. Literally is shorter and therefore easier to remember, so is often used both for its actual meaning, and when people really mean figuratively. Literally means it actually happened as the words say it did – if someone literally jumped out of their shoes then you have a human being who has just levitated out of their Sketchers, and it’s probably time to call Ripley. If they didn’t actually physically jump out of their shoes, but were very scared (and perhaps demonstrated other amusing bodily feats, like wetting themselves) then they figuratively jumped out of their shoes. But literally sounds much more dramatic, and is thus much favored in cocktail party conversations.

My other particular favorite is irregardless. That is definitely not a word, although Websters caved and decided to add it with the definition of “the frequently misused synonym of regardless.” I suspect this made-up word was birthed from regardless and irrelevant, like some freaky centaur of ancient Greece, and I love it. But for the record, it's just plain regardless.

This word is extra fun because it’s often used by pretentious people who are including it in their sentence to sound smarter...

...but who are really just showing themselves, in fact, to be Wols.


For my friend T, who knows irregardless isn’t a word, and gleefully uses it anyways.

On Why Kids Nowadays are Great Big Wussies

"The environmental movement of our times was sparked by the re-release of Bambi in the 1950s." ~Tom Platt, from Walt Whitman's The Last Days of Disco

Do you remember the huge brou-ha-ha that erupted when The Lion King came out?

First there was all the fuss over the word “sex” being subliminally inserted into a scene. A conservative activist even went so far as to ask for a ban on the film because he felt the intent of Disney was to make children sexually promiscuous (guess it worked, huh, Paris?)

Seems kind of argumentative to me, considering that kids have memorized every song from Disney movies and own the DVD before the thing is in pre-production. If you want a Disney movie to influence kids, don’t use a hazy word that you have to freeze frame the movie to find. Just have one of the lions tell kids outright to have promiscuous sex, for heaven’s sake. That would get it done much more efficiently. Only very, very nerdy children run through animated films in freeze frame trying to find hidden stuff, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they see messages telling them to have sex, because they are never going to get laid anyways. Freeze frame nudity is the only kind they’re ever going to see. Don’t take that away from them.

The Lion King was also criticized for being too “dark” for children. I guess the Nazi hyenas were pretty scary, but I don’t know that children are really grasping the fascist or genocidal undertones while they’re watching a hyena voiced by Whoopi Goldberg do a song and dance number. The dad lion did get trampled by a herd of buffalos, but that was far less traumatic than Bambi’s mother getting both barrels from that hunter. And Scar was a threatening character, to be sure, but if you’re looking for true terror in the form of Jeremy Irons, may I please direct you to Kubrick’s Lolita. That presents both Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffiths as sex symbols. Not for the kiddies. (Or grownups, for that matter, Mr. Irons, please put your pants back on.)

So what’s all the fuss these days? Kids are too sheltered if they think the African savanna is a place where zebras and lions hang out together and happily fulfill the socially dictated requirements of the caste system. Wait until they get into the corporate world. This is not a world we want children to go into unprepared for reality. Protected, yes; ignorant, no.

Let’s look at what was put forward to my generation as good kiddie fare:

Watership Down. Made the year I was born, this featured a bunch of bunnies dealing with displacement and dictatorships, all in psychedelic animation and scored to John Denver. (No, seriously.) It depicted, in full colour no less, a rabbit getting its ears torn to shreds by the owsla, the rabbit secret police (cough cough) and a rabbit burrow being plowed over while the rabbits and their babies crush each other to death as they try and scramble to the surface. The climax features a rabbit being freed from choking to death in a wire snare, blood oozing down his throat, and one rabbit tearing another’s jugular out while it screams, backlit by lightening, and blood pours down its jaws. And these bunnies are the cutest things you’ve ever seen, all expressive ears and huge eyes. I remember walking home from school very, very slowly the day we all watched that.

Plague Dogs. This is another animated movie that ostensibly indicted animal testing, something I think all of us would admit is pretty horrible as subject matters go, but that really only served to scare the pants off the children that expected the “can’t we all just get along?” camaraderie of the Fox and the Hound. No, while this movie does admittedly have a fox-dog friendship, the two titular dogs start off trapped in an experimental laboratory in Britain. (Boy, the Brits are mean to their animated animals…and let’s not even get into the concept of Dalmatian coats.) The lab is a nightmare – it even has a gas chamber for kittens. They endeavor to shield children from this horrible concept by calling it..."the kitten gas chamber.” Well done. So one of the dogs has undergone brain experiments and wears a bandage over his exposed brain (not kidding) and the other dog, noble Rowf, has had rocks sewn into his stomach cavity and is forced to undergo tests where he swims in a tank until he drowns, and then is electro-shocked back to life to do the test again. Then the dogs escape, and you breathe a sigh of relief until half an hour later when the dogs are accidentally shooting a farmer point-blank in the face with his own rifle and eating the dead human corpse. The movie ends with the dogs being driven out to sea, and it fades away as they swim towards a hallucinatory island off in the distance but presumably drown, alone and terrified. Get the popcorn, kids!

The Secret of Nimh. Yet another animated feature showing cute animals having terrible things done to them and doing rather gruesome things to each other to the sound of synthesizer music. It centers around a brave little widow mouse whose child is bedridden and in the path of a plow that will crush their home (in case the children couldn't figure out what that would look like, the movie helpfully shows it in a flashforward.) Brave mother mouse, being romantically pursued both by a seagull and a libidinous secret police mouse, consults with a group of rats. These rats are shown in flashback to have been experimented on and injected, thrashing and squeaking, with all sorts of components, and as a result have developed superhuman intelligence. Nicodemus, a superintelligent rat who has visions and really creepy glowing eyes, is plotted against by a power-mad capitalist rat faction, which is eventually successful in crushing poor Nicodemus underneath a cinderblock. All of this takes place underground, in gloomy wet caverns, and drugs are featured all over the place: medicine for the baby, sedatives for the cat, psychotropics for the rats. Pretty far from the mousy frontier fun of An American Tale.

The Last Unicorn. This wasn’t so much scary as just plain weird. It was as if the producers at Rankin/Bass got together, smoked a few joints, consulted King Lear and a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and then decided to make a children’s movie. There are sexual undertones all over the place: the huge rampaging Red Bull forcing all those delicate white girl unicorns into submission and then drowning them in the sea, the tree that tries to date rape a magician, and finally, a man that falls in love with a horse. Might be a little touchy to replicate these characters for McDonalds toys, don’t you think? Not to mention some pretty serious violence: a woman is torn apart, screaming, by a naked-breasted harpy, a young prince is trampled by a flaming bull, said bull is dragged under the waves and drowns, a decapitated skull gets loaded on wine, and the unicorns rush the castle en masse, tumbling the old king to his death on the rocks. It also features a song with the following lyrics:

“...when the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain
and the last lion roars at the last dusty fountain
and it seems like all is dying and leave the world to mourn...”

Not as catchy as Hakuna Matata, I suppose.

Old Yeller. "Ma? Ma...there's sumthin' wrong wit Yeller. Hey boy, who's my Yeller? What's wrong, Yeller?" Nuff said.

So after my generation survived all the fascism, rabbit capital punishment, kitten gas chambers, doggie vivisection, rat torture, and the forbidden love between a man and a tree, you’d think that Poor Mufasa’s off-screen trampling wouldn’t be considered nearly so terrifying.

Hiding anything scary from our children might be a bit of a worry. This is a generation, after all, that will have to live with environmental devastation, the continued ghettoization of the developed world, the poverty, insurmountable national debt, vicious civil wars and widespread epidemics of the undeveloped world, and Britney Spears’ continued moral decline.

They can handle a few Nazi hyenas.

For my sister A, who I remember being very scared by The Dark Crystal.

On A Bad Day at the Office

Firefighter: You wanna tell me what happened here?
Lance: Uh, there was a fire, I dunno, I came by and it's... checkin out the fire.
Firefighter: Well that lady uh, Mona? She said that you two were in the building together when the fire started.
Lance: Yeah, she's a liar, cuz I dunno her so whatever, whatever she says is a lie, so...
Firefighter: K, so you're saying you weren't in the building with that woman?
Lance: No, not I! Aright, she started it, aright? Because she was like "I hate my job, I'm gonna burn this mother down!" And I said "You better not... you better not!"
Firefighter: She said it was an electrical fire.
Lance: It was. It was a total electrical fire.
Firefighter: Why aren't you wearing your pants, Joe?

Ever had the kind of day when you just wanted to turn and walk out of your office shortly after setting fire to it? We all have.

Luckily, we all also have the capacity to overcome irrational impulse. After all, it’s not your office pissing you off. It’s really more the unnatural requirement for you to spend nine or ten hours a day cooped up in it, creating emails that just create work for other people in little offices across the street from you. These, I suppose, are the questionable efficiencies created by the Industrial Revolution, so I guess it would make more sense to torch the collective works of Charles Dickens than to go around vandalizing office buildings. No wait…Dickens exposed the harmful humanistic impact of the Industrial Revolution. So I guess you should light the iron plow on fire, or whatever.

I guess you really shouldn’t light anything on fire, because that doesn’t solve anything.

But still, sometimes you just want to burn that mother down.

On Why I Miss the Cocktail Hour

“The idea of drinking before dinner has its roots in the Prohibition era. When the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act were passed banning alcohol consumption, citizens would host “cocktail hours” or “happy hours” at a speakeasy (underground drinking establishments) before eating at restaurants where alcohol could not be served. Cocktail lounges continued the trend of drinking before dinner.

The push against drunk driving and alcohol abuse has curtailed the use of the cocktail hour to some extent. In the 1980s, bars started providing free hors d'oeuvres to lower the blood alcohol content of patrons. Glasgow has banned happy hours to reduce binge drinking, as has the Republic of Ireland. Even the U.S. military got in the act, when in 1984 they abolished happy hours at military base clubs.

Despite the controversy, cocktail hour still exists around the globe. Today in the United States, "Cocktail Hour" culture consists largely of junior and mid-level
professionals getting together for a drink to unwind after work.” ~from Wikipedia, bastardized

Not anymore. Bring back the cocktail hour, please. I wasn't able to drink in the eighties, so I don't remember it and thus technically I can't miss it, but I miss the idea of it. We won’t drink and drive, we promise. (Vancouverites never drive downtown anyways, we like to pretend we’re in Manhattan.) So give us back our after-work drinks.

I don’t know when this tradition died, but Vancouver, you are a city desperately in need of a cocktail hour. There are thousands upon thousands of randy young professionals with lots of money here. After all, someone is buying up $400,000 studio condos. In fact, 100,000 people live in the downtown core; that’s a higher population density than LA, San Francisco, and Manhattan. The only cities that come close to comparison are Hong Kong and Rio.

So how are all these people unwinding at the end of a long workday? They’re rushing home, getting on their computers, pouring a glass of wine, and surfing through other singles online. Deliver me. We’ve allowed technology to transform our city into the ultimate high school dance where the sexes are lined up awkwardly against opposite walls. No, scratch that, it’s worse: we’re not even in the same room anymore.

Toronto has a cocktail hour. Manhattan has one. Why don’t we? I blame stratification. Left to pick between substandard sports bars and higher-end lounges that won’t get hopping until the weekend, most of the city’s best looking potential cocktailites are sighing in defeat and shuffling off to a sweaty 40 degree Bikram’s studio, mat in tow. There's no middle ground. What are the alternatives? Jostling arm-in-arm for bar seating with the mougars* on the roof at Joe Fortes? Getting peanut shells in your Steve Madden pumps at Madison’s? Suddenly sliding around in the sweat of 40 other people is looking more appetizing.

*man cougars

Bar owners take note: there are not enough good after-work places downtown. Women will not go to a place where there is carpet on the tables. Men will not go to places where their only drink options have names like “The Flirtini” and come in complicated glasses. And no one, male or female, over twenty-six years of age will step foot into a place where the bartenders pour shooters into people’s mouths.

A bar is a concept. It is not a club, and it is not a lounge. It has food, but it does not have edamame, or anything requiring a sugar cage or a reduction or even truffle oil. You can order beer, but they have wine that doesn't come in a tetra pak. There is a bar to belly up to. There are charming bartenders and cute waitresses to act as social lubricant for the patrons. And there are cocktails, not just sugary martinis. I'm very feminine, thank you. But if I want a Jack and Coke, I don’t want to be stared at as though I just crawled out from under a Chevy at a work-release program in the local women’s penitentiary.

Publicans: if you build them, they will come. If they come, they will mingle. I implore you, Vancouver, bring back the cocktail hour. We can handle it. I promise.

For my friend C, who remembers fondly with me a time when there was a cocktail hour, and even cigar girls.

On Why It's Important to Finish High School

Overheard at a Vancouver lounge on Saturday evening by two women exiting the bar to head to a nightclub:

Voice #1: "I had a really good time chatting with those people. I was talking to them for, like, an hour about Spanish."

Voice #2: "You're so great with meeting new people! People really like you. You're so, you know, personal."

Voice #1: "Oh my god, thank you! I really do feel like I have good communication skills."

Indeed. The word you were looking for, ladies, is personable.

You heard it first here, kids. Stay in school.

On Why You Want to be Single for Valentine’s Day

"Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl
But that was thirty years ago
When they used to have a show
Now it's a disco, but not for Lola
Still in the dress she used to wear
Faded feathers in her hair
She sits there so refined
And drinks herself half-blind
She lost her youth and she lost her Tony
Now she's lost her mind
At the Copa..."

~Barry Manilow, Copa Cabana

Valentine’s Day is not for couples. It’s really for single people.

Yes, there are plenty of single people who feel pressured or shamed about their status around Valentine’s Day. (These people are likely women, since it’s improbable that a man is going to call up his friends and say “I am just really longing for some old-fashioned romance, know what I mean, dude?”) But for single people in general, the weeks before Valentine’s Day can be a bombardment of reminders that other people are blissfully, deliriously in love and are about to engage in a veritable orgy of romanticism. Completely rational, fulfilled women start to fear that the latter half of their life will be spent alone, drinking themselves into madness a la Sunset Boulevard or spending Saturday nights lurching around a decrepid wedding cake and setting fire to themselves.

Except that the apparent romantic bliss culminating in the ides of February isn't real. Ask your couple friends; it’s more likely to be characterized by fear, paranoia, anxiety and resentment than moonlight and rooftop slow dances. It’s not the Summer of Love. It’s actually more like the Cold War.

You see, the entire Valentine’s Day industry is sold to women as a romantic holiday. An opportunity to cherish the unique aspects of your relationship with your mate by doing something special and out of the ordinary. Like what? Well, like doing exactly the same thing or getting the same thing as every other couple in existence on February 14th: a dinner out and flowers if he’s unimaginative and classy, and a dinner out and edible chocolate body paint if he’s unimaginative and really, really not.

So what happened? The clever folks at Hallmark, Hershey’s, and FTD teamed up and got busy building women up to expect something truly romantic on that fateful day while simultaneously encouraging the male contingent to do something classically romantic and thus missing those expectations by a long shot. For women, romance is when their men demonstrate that they truly appreciate the myriad ways that they are different than any woman who came before. For men, it’s sold as an opportunity to buy something or do something to make up for 364 previous days of perceived un-specialness. Caving under the immense societal pressure, men revert to the tried and true: chocolates, flowers, or dinners, which unfortunately is exactly what they gifted every woman that came before. But if they don’t do this at all, then it ends up being what they’ll gift every woman that’s about to come, after the current one dumps him on February 15th for being insensitive.

Women, too, are left mystified as to how to mitigate the pressure. Have we been together long enough to celebrate the holiday? Do I get him a gift? What if he doesn’t do enough, or worse, what if he does too much and then I didn’t do enough? What if he gets me a watch and I made him a macaroni angel? It’s like a Mexican standoff…him, her, and the VP Marketing for DeBeers.

The single, meanwhile, get to lean back and just enjoy the carnage. If anything, Valentine’s Day is a great reminder to them that the truly romantic times in a relationship don’t usually come in the form of socially dictated dinners and birthstone pendants. They come at the beginning, with those little initial discoveries that are so precious and exciting (long before they start driving you absolutely crazy.) The first kiss, the first time you get to see where they live, the first sleepover, the first breakfast, the first trip away. The first time she realizes he puts hot sauce on everything, and the first time he realizes she hasn’t put oil in her car for two years. Single people know that those magical times are still ahead of them.

So take heart, Lonely Hearts. If you weren’t taken in by the AbFlex, then Valentine’s Day is nothing to worry about.

On Why Marketing Executives are Overpaid

When one watches television and one sees a commercial for tampons, and the commercial tells you that the particular tampon in question comes with "three specialized features standard," one must shake their head and admit that things are getting a little out of hand in the G7. Let us never be so civilized that we lose the capacity for recognizing the ridiculous.

Features?

No. A Mercedes-Benz comes with features. Leather detailing is a feature. Heated and cooled cup holders are a feature. Tiptronic transmission is a feature (and a pretty fucking cool one.)

Tampons do not need to be differentiated with features that come standard. A Mercedes-Benz is a piece of fine German engineering. Tampons, essentially, are a cottonball on a string.

Life is getting too complicated.

On Technology and Relationships

It’s always astounding when something as un-organic as technological developments can have such a huge impact on something as organic as human relationships.

The first big development, according to National Geographic historians (those champions of the gratuitous naked-boobie photograph) occurred some 45,000 to 80,000 years ago when some intrepid heavy-browed cave dweller tied a sharp rock to a stick and threw it at something. The spear brought about not only more clearly delineated gender roles, but separated us, behaviorally-speaking, from the apes by introducing the concept of foreign relations. Are you listening, Dubyah? Apparently this is something that even someone lacking a frontal lobe can grasp.

It went something like this: prior to the invention of the spear, skirmishes between clans were relatively harmless. They consisted mostly of posturing, grunting, and occasionally a punch or two…not much different than you’d find between rivaling fans during professional sporting events nowadays. The invention of the spear, however, suddenly required clans to make treaties and negotiate peace agreements; it was one thing to bonk Oogar on the head, and completely another to turn the holy man of the tribe next door into a fur-clad cave-kebab. Peace ruled.

The spear also rapidly accelerated the differentiation of gender roles. Prior to large hunts, people mostly got by through scavenging; in other words, picking things up off the ground and eating them. Both genders were pretty good at that, so equality was the order of the day. But it was quickly discovered that their larger, heavier musculature and better-developed spatial capabilities meant that men would naturally be better at spear-throwing. So began thousands of years whereby men honed their focused throwing skills, and women refined their abilities to work in groups, communicate effectively and multi-task. It explains why to this day every man has a dartboard that he bought for his first apartment and why women can have a cell phone conversation while driving and applying lipstick.

(I think this might also have been where the three-day rule came into play; that was the typical length of a mammoth hunt. Thus was forever cast in stone the appropriate length to wait after a date to make contact again.)

So if the spear was instrumental in establishing traditional gender roles, it wasn’t until the 1940’s that the next tool would come along to completely turn them upside down. Yes, a little pink pill finally broke 75,000 years of “is he going to call?” and ushered in the sexual revolution.

For the first time in history, women were able to reliably control their reproductive cycles, Coca-cola douches notwithstanding, and the major motivator of forming relationships (orgasms) suddenly was no longer tied to the major detractor (screaming baby.) Finally, sex for sex's sake. In economic terms, the cost of sex plummeted and, as we learn in first-year business, the demand skyrocketed. It was the advent of Sexual WalMart.

It also meant that marriage was no longer the required or even desired outcome of a relationship. Religion aside, the purpose of a secular marriage had traditionally been that the man was obliged to keep paying the utility bills, so to speak, if his woman got knocked up. With the introduction of the pill, woman didn’t have to worry about pregnancy, and so she was free to take her time and date until she found a man she liked for his personal qualities rather than just his earning potential. (Which, I dare say, just might explain why women are now single for a whole ten years longer than before.)

Thus 'modern' dating began. People could date more than one person. They could sleep together, live together, try each other out for 30 days like Ginsu knives. Consistency dissolved. Ambiguity ruled. A multi-million dollar industry in self-help and relationship books blossomed in an attempt to make sense out of the new ‘no-rules’ rules. Even a blowhard like Dr. Phil was able to secure a living.

All because of something that looked like a TicTac and made of horse pee.

And what is the latest device that has reshaped the old “boy meets girl, boy spears things for girl, girl is able to decide her reproductive fate” story? The cell phone. For better or for worse, that little pink Razer has had a pretty significant impact on relationship behaviour.

Entire relationships, I suspect, owe their existence to mobile technology. The thing about mobile technology is that it’s mobile. Your phone, and thus your ability to communicate with your love interests, gets to go with you wherever you go. That opens up a whole new world of bad judgment calls that we simply didn’t have the opportunity to exercise before. Now our phones get to go out for cocktails with us.

The booty call, for example. Were there booty calls before cell phones? I don't remember, but I don't think so. There have always been pay phones, and answering machines that you could call and check. But never was the booty call so widespread as today, when an assignation can be instantly arranged while miles apart. Before, the booty caller had to go home before making the call to the booty callee, taking away considerably from the charming “I was just doing a tequila shooter in the bar off the waitress and thought of you” spontaniety of the whole idea.

And then there's the text message. Entire relationships have been conducted largely through this medium. It combines all the best parts of the email (elimination of rejection, ability to write and rewrite message before sending) with the best part of the phone call (immediate receipt.) It’s much easier to send a cheeky note through text messaging than it is in person. Have you ever called someone at their office, said, "hey u what u up 2 what u doing u want to see me l8er?" and then hung up? No. And the technology is new enough and unstable enough that text messages, if unwanted, can be safely ignored (“…oh you sent one? No, I didn’t get it…my carrier is just awful.”)

With cell phones, we can all reach each other at any time, so it’s no longer necessary to make dates long in advance of their happening. Relationships, particularly new ones, are more fluid than ever before. Formality dissolves, and a whole new paradigm takes place. The digital relationship. New challenges, new opportunities.

So here’s to the big three. Without you, we’d have much more clarity about whether or not our boy/girl friends just aren’t that into us, but we’d still be having ten babies, eating things we find on the ground, and using *69 to see who called while we were out. And I’ll take the single life, foie gras and caller ID any day.

For M, who still can't use her cell phone, but who has a great relationship anyway.