It is my sad responsibility to announce that there is a pandemic in this here country. It is difficult to say at such an early stage when this disease came to our brave nation, but our crack-team of psychologists and fatigued BBC News 24 viewers identify the most highly effected as being idle aristocrats, stupid Sports Ministers, and people who shop in Asda.

The inflicted suffer a dislodgement of the logicus, which escapes the frontal lobe and is painfully excreted.

But the after-effects are more serious than the first stage of the disease. Patients suffer a semi-permanent loss of common sense, co-ordination and judgement. Their speech becomes muddled, and their ideas confused. Examples of things uttered by sufferers of the bug include:

* ‘Building a few new sports stadia will really help the area.’ Of course it will, especially the residents, who will face a 66% in the cost of their housing, giving them the unparalleled joy of discovering another deprived area when theirs is gentrified.

* ‘Holding the Olympic games will be of benefit to everyone outside London’, yeah, particularly the rail managers in their lovely bucolic cottages, who will make a killing by applying their RAIL Congestion charge onto any sucker whose home is not near a tube station.

* ‘The prospect of there being games in London is sure to make every child into a top-of-the-field Olympian instantaneously.’ This is the one of the most common delirious utterings. Two people have said more, hysterically, about it:

• Lord Coe, in stage 5 of the disease, said that it will inspire the children to go for gold. After all apparently an Olympic Gold medal was nothing worth having to anyone but thousands of previous athletes when it was hosted in one of those nasty abroad places. Nope, children’s lives and abilities will be turned around by something seven Christmases away, and it won’t matter that this will mean more funding for exclusive stadia and less for schools. Miracles do happen, if you believe Labour, and pasta grows on trees.

• Tessa Jowell (stage 6) who calls children kids because she cannot get over the fact that some plurals have no Ss, has conclusive proof, and she thinks that Britain will do well, and win the European cup, the World Cup, the Confederation Cup, the Worthington Cup, the Negro League cup, and Aunty Mabel’s plastic cup from now on. She went to a school, and the ‘kids’ were so ‘inspired;’ indeed, all the six-year-olds said that they would be Olympians. It does not matter that they think that Olympian has something to do with hurting your foot; nor the fact that they would all agree to be gigoli and/or chestnuts if the job description were enticing enough; nor the fact that a very, very slim minority of people are good enough for the Olympics. Nope, they say that they’ll win the Olympics, and then conquer the EU.

As you can see, the delusion and psychosis of the patients is highly troubling, and is quickly spreading by the means of its carrier virus, ITV. The only antidote that be prescribed at the minute is a blanket-ban on all items of Heather Small’s discography.

Together, we can fight this.

Faithfully,
A.,
Director-general, Psychotic Aid Concern.

(Originally written – July 9 2005)

Translated from my original German

Where did you flee, my nervous summer? We have been here, in the rusty garden, searching for the coquettish sun, that has been extinguished like a feeble easter candle. We have spent all but three days in exile, in a rickety house with a corroded scrap of land. The rain has scolded us, as if naughty children, and the pitying angels have been covering the sky with their black mourning veils.

September is the starkest, most tenebrous month. The birches start to bow their heads; they are remembering their fickle, æstival lover. The heavy wind is whispering, ‘get away while you can! flee from the sadistic winter! He will eat you and the stars.’

I have tried my best. It was not sufficient, I cannot leave. I wrote a letter to the sea, but she never responded to my hopeful inquiries. She is always too busy, swallowing herself. Next summer will not lie in waste like this. I write this song of lament, lest we not forget.

Prancer, back with a vengeance: Unfortunately, the number of Prancer-related searches, after a month or so of having disappeared from my Webmaster Tools radar, are now increased. ‘Prancer getting f-cked,’ ‘prancer gettin f-cked’ and ‘prancer f-cked hard’ all appear on the illustrious list of searches which lead to this one here. Either this proves that homophobes are secretly self-hating gays, or – poor reindeer! If it is the latter, he will be joined in his tribulations by Santa. ‘F-cked up Santa game’ is what one reader so dearly wants to partake in. I think merely emulating Father Christmas by going down kiddies’ chimneys late at night is f-cked enough, you will find.

The Badly Spelt: ‘I hate everything abau Youtube,’ proclaims one reader. There are a lot of things that I dislike about it, reader – but I also hate your curious glottalised and German orthography-style rendering of ‘about’ more than that. Someone else looked for ‘utube’ videos of ‘alexandra berk.’ The name is Burke, dearest, although I think I prefer your mispelling of it. Some poor illiterate continues to look for ‘brushiz’ – I hope your mastery of art is better than your spelling – but the one that takes the biscuit is the person who wishes to partake in the ‘Muddy Graw 2009.’ This is why everyone should have to learn another language. The name is mardi gras, which is pronounced as /maʀdi gʀɑ/, not /mʌdiː gɹɔː/. Oh dear.

In your defense, it must be said that some of your European cousins do not spell that well either. The Spanish have looked for ’sindrome dewn,’ ‘el gobierno musicar’, and ‘muchos combios en el mundo’ instead of ‘down,’ ‘musicaL’ and ‘cAmbios.’ The French go for the out-and-out incomprehensible ‘Paris Gural.’

Type in a weird female name, and my site comes up: There is an ever-increasing list of odd names that somehow bring the careless web user to this very website. ‘Shiela Heide’, ‘Christine Hensler’, ‘Daysi Muralles’, ‘Amélie Roduit’, ‘Damelie Turquoise’, ‘Joie Anacan’, etc. I cannot work this out. Maybe the said individuals are actually a few of my reincarnations, who are idly googling themselves while waiting to get a chartered flight to the moon/hoping that Ask Jeeves can tell them how to avoid the end of the world/eating a pear. Instead of finding themselves, Google mystically links them up to a former version of themselves. It is a nice idea. However, I am adamant that if my fate is to die and be reincarnated as some futuristic girl, my name will be neat and dignified; it will neither be fusty and German nor drag-queen style preposterous. I’m sorry if I hurt my feelings, but it had to be said. Es tut mir leid.

I had a very strange and, in part, unpleasant dream last night. I was in an open-air space strewn with metal chairs and tables, which resembled a restaurant. I was there with these people. Suddenly, I noticed that a bunch of my professors came into there and sat around a table. They were mostly ridiculous nuts that I detested, but also my old beloved Head of House, Mr. T-, with whom, lamentably, I have not spoken for many years, despite my great fondness for his company.

Well, I was mortified. I did not want to see half of these – or any of them; really, it would be much too awkward. These people, in turn, were completely horrified. They did not want me to be seen ‘in the state that I was in,’ and told me to get out of their eyesight, quickly, but would not permit me to leave the restaurant itself. I first hid below a table, but, when someone noticed me, I slid into a very narrow, very short hole until they passed. Unfortunately, they did not pass for hours, because they were having a three-course dinner. Soon enough, I found myself uncomfortable and constricted, made worse by the fact that these benevolent people found it amusing to kick my face and play equally kindly games while I was there.

I wanted to get out, but one of the people told me to be quiet, that it served me right for my ’sinful’ behaviour.  She said that she found my personal messenger conversations with K– posted by a third party on some travel forum. She said that I was a freak, and should stay there. But one can never tell my kind what to do. When she was busy listening to what her favoured children demanded for dessert, I slid as quickly as I could out of the fissure and fixed to run. By the time that they noticed, already was I gone.

I ran as fast as my legs could take me, I had no idea of the district that I was in, and little direction. I just hoped that, somewhere, I’d see a bus that would take me to the centre, and from there, I would leave the country. I stumbled through some dim, residential districts until I reached a metal stile that led to a park. Although it was certainly not the wisest thing to do at dusk, I felt impelled to go through it.

There was nothing much there that separated it from the normal urban English recreation ground: mud instead of grass; tracks driven into the mud by joyriders; a dirty pool full of sordid trash. But someone there stopped me from just quickly jogging through. There was a lady there, with  short, strangely coloured hair and an extremely thoughtful look in her eyes. She was stood there in contemplation. I was taken aback, and spent a princely amount of time looking at her in the weak light that the crescent moon struggled to break through the clouds.

Despite many of the forebears of psychoanalysis being unambiguously introverted (Jung in particular) and there being a direct correlation between intelligence and the percentage of introverts, introversion has been a stigmatised trait ever since the days of Freud – and in a society where both Self Gain and constant connection to the world beyond oneself are glorified, things are looking even grimmer for us, indicated by a surfeit of self-’help’ books which tell us how we can turn ourselves away from such ’strange’ persuits as quiet pleasures, privacy and reflection and towards the much more acceptable herd-minded hyper-sociability and wiling away the hours gossiping and small-talking with people for whom we care little. Here are the traits of a hyperverted culture which is not as healthy as its members would have it be thought.

Personal space is so 1600s: One of the most horrendous habits of the hyperverts is their continual habit of ram-raiding into one’s bastion of personal space. Whereas a more palatable extrovert may consider a  bus or such to be a communal space and may try to strike up a discussion, a hypervert will think of the entire bus as being an extension of his/her own space (or – more likely – will simply not think at all), and will enrage any sensible being by blasting profane and idiotic music, shouting incoherently with their ‘mates’, or entitling themselves to taking shots at and/or threatening innocent onlookers who are trying to go about their business. If you have never experienced this, you must be living – thankfully – in a slightly more introverted and civilised country than me, as I get this nearly every time I go on the bus.

The only problem is that what I do remember is either unpublishable on this hallowed log, or not nearly as startling as the visions that have flown away from my mind.

1) It was a curious flood, one that threatened to drown the entire city, and I had been entrusted with the noble job of buying fish fingers from a far-away dingy Iceland store. A very subtle way of telling me that I was not wanted, eh? Cue my usual bus-related dream particles: getting on wrong buses, buses changing direction without telling me, ending up at dead-ends. Eventually, after having located this terrible store in Castle Bromwich, I get into town – to the underpass that connects the University with the dreaded Dental Hospital. Not much has changed, apart from the fact that there are ONCE cabins all over the place. I saw two close friends, but then, the rain stopped and these strange, dark, featureless figures appeared on the horizon. My friends were able to fly off into the sky as if rockets by just running a bit… and within a few seconds, they were already by the University. Luckily, my grandfather and uncle appeared instead, and what I remember of the dream ended.

2) A majestic old University with hundreds of acres of rolling hills. All I remember is meeting up with my mother, bus rides (yet again) and spending hours in what looked like one of the most comfortable libraries I have ever seen.

b) A trip down to London… unusual glass boxes for buildings. We all had to peg our coats up on a wall, like in primary school. People kept on trying to sell a stupid magazine.

c) I was wearing what I was somewhat expected not to wear. There were this row of terraces – it looked like the 50s. My grandparents came out of nowhere. Out of embarrasment, I hid in an alleyway, and then jumped a fence into someone’s lawn.

In their intriguing imagination, Finland is Eastern European, and hostilities between countries like Russia and the Ukraine – and I am unapologetic about my use of the traditional definite article – or Hungary and Slovakia are unheard of. To the crypto-racists, they all compete to be Putin’s puppy by impelling their nation’s dunderheaded pre-teens who determine the winner to televote for their neighbours. This has nothing to do, of course, with the fact that perhaps, for instance, a Slovakian girl might like the pap produced by the Czech Republic more than the pap produced by the ‘UK’ (England?) because of cultural and linguistic differences? Or the sheer shittiness of the English entries?

Those of us before this brave new era remember a different animus that hung over each passing Eurovision – and this time, it was against those perrenial scapegoats, the Irish.

Although so many people seem to love Ireland and the Irish these days – perhaps solely due for the Guinness that loses its flavour as it crosses the Irish sea – I can tell you that when I grew up, I was brutally treated for my strong Irish connection. Maybe it had something to do with easy racism or Thatcherite propaganda – but perhaps it was due to these butch kids’ woeful insatisfaction that the all-singing, all-dancing ponces that the land of my grandparents chose to represent them flounced their British counterparts year by year. Poor things.

But even poorer Ireland. They had won the contest for the second time in as many years, and due to the considerable cost of hosting this musical human zoo, many argued that Ireland wanted to avoid winning again – the idea of which was riffed on by a magnificent Father Ted episode, Song for Europe. Ireland chose, perhaps as a consequence, one of the most un-Eurovision Eurovision entries of all time.

It broke so many of the rules. It used a male duo, which had never brought about a winning entry before. Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan were somewhat older than the usual inane boppers who took to their countries’ hearts. They delivered the first song without use of an orchestra and – unlike the flamboyant movers and dancers of previous and following years – they remained fixed in their seats, playing out their doleful blues on piano and guitar.

Musically, the country and western inflected blues that they played was unusual for a supposedly ‘upbeat’ and resoundingly pop contest; thematically, this quiet reflective song about lost love and past times is as akin to the Eurovision as a breakfast at Burger King is to the Queen. And the image of two men, one with wonderful long hair, looking at one another and singing ‘I was yours and you were mine/that was once upon a time’ was certainly enough ammunition to continental homophobes.

And yet, out of nowhere, the best song won, despite being calm, plaintive and unlike much that preceded or followed it that night. It managed to beat a squawking formulaic ballad by Poland, dressed up by a young woman in a very short white dress, into second place by 60 points, something that they are still complaining about on Youtube.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Kids is by far one of the worthiest winners of Eurovision. It has a certain country poetry to it, a type of verse that realises the eloquence of understated simplicity. To pack – without any feeling of haste – lost love, youth, musical connections, and disconnection with one’s children into 3 minutes with such dignity and meaning is quite an achievement. The same can be said about the inornate but expressive minimalist instrumental backing.

These days, after Ireland really went astray the following year, the country is forever relegated to the indecorous fate of being confined in the sprawling Semi-Finals, ever left behind in favour of inferior choices by more popular countries in the expanded and fragmented Europe. If RTÉ ever wants to hold its own against the pretenders to Ireland’s curious Eurovision crown, perhaps taking a page from ’94 and going against the grain will have this festival of musical wrongs once again come calling at Dublin’s door.

There have been lots of characters – good and bad, mostly bad – over the weeks. Despite this, we are left with the largely unmemorable Yasmina and the even worse Kate, two serial abusers of the copious abuse of the hideous interjection «ye’» (/jɛʔ/) whenever someone is making a point that they don’t particularly want to take in. But my support is with Yasmina, as she is less in need of an expensive personality transplant, provided by the best Swiss doctors money can buy. Kate is utterly unremarkable, an absolute backstabber, and not particularly stunning in any one way. And yet she has coasted here.

For once, I disagree with the Sugar, which happens not so often. Over the series, the last three times have been my disagreeing with him over firing Mona instead of James in Week 8, Kimberley being thrown out instead of Mr. Pantsman in Week 5, and the firing of Raef instead of Michael last season. But this time, I disagree with him entirely. In my mind, it should have been Lorraine and Debra – not the most likeable of the lot, but Debra showed a lot of talent on several occasions when she could get beyond the almost theatrical bitchiness, and Lorraine showed good instinct and common sense when others didn’t, and it would have been interesting to see whether this served her in a final where she would not be contradicted by others.

21:02 – One has to love the BBC’s seasoned comical juxtaposition skills. As the VO man goes on about ‘shining as individuals,’ Kate is there, mouth wide open as usual, playing a devolved cousin of the air guitar and unconvincingly claiming that she has such a fantastic time. It is followed by James – Mr. Weird Eyes – making another one of his classical ‘funny’ and incoherent remarks.

21:03 – Once again, we hear Debra saying ‘we’re going to interviews’ in that very odd sing-song intonation. Given the references she had, one wonders why she was so chirpy about it. I really don’t like that condescending Birmingham City woman, not just because I prefer Villa, before anyone suggests otherwise.

We see James leaving – how did he even get this far? – and Debra amazingly crying without rusting or having her circuits explode. And then there were two…

21:07 – Oh dear… the myriad Apprentice failures of this year are resurrected from the dead. Looking particularly pathetic are Philip, with a fixed gurn on his face, and Ben, who waddles in like a penguin.

KATE: Ben, Debra, Kim, Rocky
YASMINA: Howard, Lorraine, James, Philip

Rocky gets picked last. When you share a name with a chocolate biscuit bar, though, one can’t really expect anything less. Neither team is destined to set the world on fire.

21:08 – Kate is the only person I know who has a mouth that constantly looks like the triangular ones from South Park.

21:09 – G-d help me. When James and Philip are the idea engines, things aren’t rosy at all. Philip is insistant that something ‘fun and different and quirky’, without providing any ideas as to what this magical idea could be. Maybe the Pantsman franchise will branch out into the chocolatiering world?

Grossman IPA

A few months ago, I went down to London with a dear friend of mine to try to see Meryl Streep on her visit to the UK. Meryl crossed the Atlantic only to be slighted in favor of an inferior British actress, as is the custom at the Baftas; likewise, we found no luck in our pursuit for Streep, but made the most of the day, visiting Richmond, sheltering from torrential storms in tucked-away bars, and other such pursuits. At one point, after having had to lead some bewildered Dutch tourists to Bank Station, we got off at Covent Garden, which is unfortunately one of the busier stations and one of the stations with no escalators, just lifts and stairs.

Rather than attempt a tired night-time ascent of the 195 steps to the ground above us (to be used, apparently, only in the case of an emergency), we waited in line for a lift. Unlike most lifts, which – other than the intrusion of ‘going down’, ‘doors opening’ and the like being said by a condescending robot – usually respect the old British ideal of quiet in public spaces, this lift was different. It exploited the fact that thousands upon thousands of people, chiefly tourists, would be stuck there in what is quite a long lift ride every day. It had a message: welcome to Covent Garden station. Please have your tickets ready for inspection as soon as the doors open. Mind the step at the station exit and keep your belongings with you at all times. Turn left for Neil Street – turn right for Covent Garden piazza, the market, and one of my favorite museums, London’s transport museum.

My friend and I, and all those in the lift who were British or had lived here for a considerable time, instantly recognised that strange idiolect, with its curious vowels. It was a recording of Loyd Grossman, a Massachusetts man who came over here when he was in his mid-twenties and came to national prominence with shows like Through The Keyhole and Masterchef. Despite being incredibly succesful and something of an unusual national treasure, the one thing that makes him so recognisable – that makes him who he is, one may venture to say – is panned, satirised, and sometimes even virulently despised, even by linguists. His distinctive crossover accent.

In the public imagination, Grossman is a man who unsuccessfully impersonates the Queen’s English, ignorant of the substantial differences between Boston English and General American, or the idea of linguistic accommodation. Even scholars of linguistics, such as Paul Foulks, a lecturer in the University of York, are wont to ignore these important points in a show of unprofessionalism; the said teacher labelled his pronunciation ‘horrendous.’ In this post – which serves more as a casual discussion than an essay on the topic – we will analyse the sounds and principal characteristics of what we find to be a colorful idiolect that is not a sustained impression of the people of his adopted country, but rather a melting pot of American, Bostonian, British and idiosyncratic influences.

There was shock horror. Why? Because of the first appearance of a classical language on British ‘reality’ tv? Partially. But also because of his ‘weird’ pronunciation of said Latin saying. For Christian showed some erudition and pronounced it: /in ˈwiːno weːˈritas/. Yes, with /w/. And so, the tall poppies started getting cut and everyone without any schooling in Latin started bringing the intellectual down a peg. Did you see that Terry Christian? He pronounced a V like a W. He’s not as half as clever as he thinks he is – because a v has to be pronounced like an English V, doesn’t it?

Fail. V and U in Classical Latin were related to one another – and V was often used to transcribe even vocalic /u/. But this was of little consequence to those who unembarrasedly put their linguistic parochialism out to dry. Such a trait of Latin was ’stupid’ and ‘wrong’ according to spurious sources, and they heaped in some derision towards Latin and Old English for the hell of it. I just had to intervene and point out that they were used to the horror that was Ecclesiastic Latin rather than the proper, Classical Latin. Thus began a fight between those who realise that if you want to pronounce a language right, you don’t automatically apply the norms of your own language when pronouncing it.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there – so persuaded they were in their vendetta that they had to clutch at straws and claim that Ecclesiastic Latin was a better, more widely accepted variant. Ahh. Although /w/ eventually transformed to /β/ and finally /v/, much of Ecclesiastic ‘Latin’ is just an imposition of Italian pronunciation, especially the pronounciation of /k/ as /tʃ/ and the reduction of vowels. How is a version of Latin invented by non-Latin speakers superior to Latin itself?

Would, correspondingly, you put more faith in a ‘Church English’ invented by, say, the French in 1000 years time, where ‘heat’ would be pronounced /e.a/, and stranger as /stʀɔ̃.ʒe/? Or would you base your pronunciation on the speech and writing of the time that the real English was around? Gah!

I cannot bear Ecclesiastical Latin – even worse its cringeworthy Anglophied version in which excelsis becomes /ɛks’tʃɛlsɪs/. Horrifying.