One of the things
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Now that 2012 is over, perhaps we should reflect, soberly or otherwise, on its excitements before moving on. Who will ever forget the Olympics? Not only for Jessica and Mo and Andy and Danny, but for George Osborne being booed at the Paralympics? And what about the rain-drenched Jubilee pageant on the Thames, with water-logged singers and royals perfecting their stiff upper lips? But best of all, what could surpass for sheer, nail-biting tension the police commissioner elections in England and Wales? Wow!
Enough already. None of the above will be repeated this year. As we bid goodbye to 2012, I would like to suggest some of the things we would be happy to do without in 2013.
I begin with words. I was delighted when ‘omnishambles’, that wonderfully evocative invention of ‘The Thick of It’ writing team, was named word of the year. It will survive, unlike ‘chillaxing’, because it perfectly and succinctly says what it means as no existing single word does. American English has a cruder synonym and both reflect that most admirable aspect of English, its ability to change and adapt. Embracing such flexibility however is not the same as tolerating patently egregious horrors.
Could we as a nation learn the difference between ‘imply’ (the speaker/writer) and ‘infer’ (the listener/reader)? Could we learn how to pronounce ‘schedule’? I have two outright winners in the general category of crimes against the language. Both I suspect owe their ubiquity to the Olympics. I have lost track of the number of athletes/commentators/members of the public whose experiences were ‘unbelievable’ or its posher cousin ‘incredible’. Never in the history of human endeavour has a pair of intensives been so overused. Whatever happened to ‘wonderful’, ‘amazing’, ‘marvellous’, none exactly esoteric?
The second abomination is ‘literally’ when what is meant is its precise opposite. I end this section with two choice Olympian examples: ‘I literally hit the wall’ and ‘She’s literally making mincemeat of her’. I rest my case.
While on the subject of change and mutability, could we get rid of the notion that old is invariably better than new? My co-contributor to SR, R D Kernohan, referred to the films and books of 2012 as ‘intellectual plonk’, preferring the assumed vintage of the past. As a film buff can I suggest to Bob that in the 1940s for every ‘Casablanca’ there were 100 pieces of crap. Pick any topic from art to education, from music to drama, from TV to teenagers and there will be a talking-head pontificating about how things were better 20-30-40-50 years ago.
Chief pontificator is Prince Charles. When Oscar Niemeyer died last December, there were photographs in the press of his most iconic buildings, particularly those in Brasilia. I felt privileged that I had been fortunate enough to see them during a trip to Brazil 30 years ago. Meanwhile Prince Charles has given the world the abomination that is Poundbury (I almost typed Poundland). No reasonable person would claim that all that is new is wonderful, but the corollary is surely equally true.
Nevertheless the assigning of women to positions of inferiority is very real. The US elections introduced us to the concept of ‘legitimate’ rape and ‘god’s gift’ of a child born of ‘illegitimate’ rape and less seriously ‘binders’ of women in Mitt Romney’s HQ. Happily the proponents of such concepts were all defeated. In the UK we still have gross inequality between men and women in areas as diverse as employment and salary and representation on TV. In Cameron and Clegg’s New Jerusalem of belt-tightening austerity, it is women who will, overwhelmingly, be the principal victims.
However we are a model of enlightenment compared to other places round the world. Last year a young girl, Madala Yousafzai, lay fighting for her life in a British hospital, shot in the head for daring to go to school in Pakistan. As I write a 23-year-old Indian student has just died in a Singapore hospital after being brutally raped and beaten by six men in a street in Delhi. Only after a national outcry have the police arrested and charged the suspects. The great thing about the internet is that what happens in Delhi is almost instantly news in Moscow or Cape Town. Perhaps there is hope that the sense of outrage this crime has provoked worldwide will lead to genuine change.
Finally – and more in hope than expectation – could we do without the following:
Posturing politicians like Boris and Nigel primarily interested in self-aggrandisement;
Peter Hitchens and his alter ego Melanie Phillips;
Simon Cowell and dancing dogs;
Anyone in a dog collar not talking about religion or theology;
People throwing bombs or otherwise killing other people because they don’t like their religious beliefs.
Rose Galt is past-president of the Educational Institute of Scotland
