Karbaashing With Style

[WiglessBidaar]

The creeping numbskullery creeps on creepishly. The outrage of the month: In a Skype chat with a young lovely on this board she told me off for asking if her mate who sometimes thrust herself into the frame was "moronic". Can you hear that distant sound? Out of the way, it is the wailing siren of the thought police. Gulag here I come. Could I, spat the pretty young thing, not employ such abusive language? Bosh!

Foolish is the person who employs that word pejoratively. A moron, the common usage notwithstanding, is not a term of abuse. It describes a medical condition. With the runaway debasement of the English language it, along with thousands of finely nuanced words defiled by the unlettered, has been slowly burlesqued out of all recognition. A competent physician straining to avoid giving undue offence may opt for colourful euphemisms to express a benighted mental state, but how this rebranding helps the afflicted is not immediately clear.

One sees this debasement of language everywhere on display. A thousand times these kids on the board inform us that some hapless public figure is an "attention whore". Uh-huh. Two points are in order: A public persona trades in his visibility. The vital giveaway here is the descriptive adjective "public". More to the point, what is every man that speaks and writes and inflicts numberless platitudes on the interwebs but a semen-guzzling attention whore who spreads his bottom cheeks for the priapic shaft of publicity? Otherwise let him keep his mouth firmly sealed.

Consider too that highly original phrase used to register personal dislike: You're an asshole. Fascinating. What's wrong with assholes? The rumour is that a great many people have one, sometimes gaping and not always wisely used for natural ends.

Let there be no misunderstanding. I don't inveigh against abuse. No conversation is complete without a brilliant shower of invective. Lovemaking neither. Lord, may it never stop raining. One needs to hone the art of discharging rounds of shrapnel at enemies. I have amassed a great stockpile in my time. What I decry is the steady debasement of the language, the hollowing out of plain words of their age-old meaning, the frontal assault by men too far gone in their cognitive deficit to realise and much too lazy to care on the art of feuding. In sum, my plea is for a war against the enstupidated. Curse the day a fine word like moron was moronically vituperated.

Is this a generational thing or what?

[Kukri]

Now there you are me ol'china.

lol

[WiglessBidaar]

Are you an attention whore as well my kindred?

Call me an old man, but I never understood the concept. Much can be inferred from the defective cognitive powers of the type who use that putdown. Nobody goes on a message board except to train the spotlight on himself. What is every man who takes up a keyboard and pushes the ill formed thoughts rattling inside his skull on the sons of Adam but a publicity seeker? If you can find anyone who thinks the best way to evade the public gaze is to register on a public forum and share their life story with faceless strangers then you can do something I cannot.

Yet how many times do you hear that deployed as an insult? In my salad days nobody would dream of uttering such a thing because we had class. God help us. No one else will.