Severn Gurls

I thought, given that Katy Perry is signalling the death of postwar western civilisation through her evil song _California Gurls_, that I would try to persuade myself and anyone who wishes to read that life goes on. Building, making things, creating families goes on. Even after Katy Perry and her festival of zero.

Well, to be honest, it's not easy.

Because sun-kissed skin so hot it'll melt your popsicle, even though or perhaps even because it's so self-contradictory, so utterly meaningless given its stated objective, its clear innuendo-meaning - because that is so shit, language seems to have been finally shat out after a 50 year curry and 50 years of crap, factory made lager; because, ultimately, even pop music has conflicted itself in its own greatest exponents, and they, as they speak, have called for erectile dysfunction in the midst of "undeniable" hot sex teenage girls -

because of all that, meaning has now finally been flushed down the karzee.



Meaning has finally, thankfully, been disowned. We no longer need a word or a phrase to correspond to an idea.

Think about it, you twats, think about it: a pop song asks to you want to fuck teenage girls. Then it tells you they're so hot your popsicle will *melt*. You will just go soft, just sort of being there.

I really don't think that it means you will come in your pants.

Really. I don't.

It means the literal opposite of what it intends to mean.

Language is dead. Words have no purpose.



Katy Perry killed language.

Dante is too dead to save it; Chaucer too ironic; Shakspear too involved in non-existent persons;Pope too into the sounds of words; Austen in ghastly inter-human relations;Dickens in the...the...play of words, pictures and sentences. After Dickens everyone is toying with their own history. Plath is killed doing it, Hughes after having sex with words; Larkin hates words too much; Roth just has too many of them. Orwell thinks words mean something, for fuck's sake; Hardy thinks they are about how there is no God (probably) and Amis (jun) veers from the play of words to the play of his memories.


Shit.


Language was killed by Katy Perry. She sliced it open with an auto-tune.

Open and its guts spilled into the air, to be eaten by the Eagles and vultures and Beatles and flies and Airplanes and to be left alone, token gut by chitterling, to fly away.



Fly away.

Pronoun Note

Norm:

Here's another of those traditionalists decrying the use of the singular 'they'. As far as I can tell, his objections are: (a) that he doesn't like it; and (b) tradition. I've nothing to add to what I've said before on this. I do find it interesting, however, that he seems also not to be comfortable with using 'she' where you mean 'he or she' (or, indeed, the singular 'they'). What possible objection could there be to doing so, when 'he' was so long used in this way and still often is? Mix it up, that's my view: say, now 'she', now 'he', now 'he or she', now 'they'. It will help to end such pointless pedantry.

I'm not a big fan of "they". While it works, and does the job reasonably well, and can even sometimes be elegant, on the whole it clunks a bit. But Norm's suggested solution, to mix up the pronouns, is an excellent idea and one I use a lot (not necessarily here). If nothing else, it keeps readers on their ideological toes. It also keeps you, the writer, on your aesthetic toes, because in different sentences, contexts, the different pronouns will have varying effects. So, following Norm, - try them out!

Words Fail Me

Actually they don't. There is more than enough variety, shade and connotation in this language more than adequately to express opinion, belief, logic. Mathematics is more accurately descriptive of the real physical world but language has been able to help build civilisations and destroy them. The demagogue can do almost as much damage as the tank. It helps if you have both, of course. Language can evade meaning and justify anything you like. When words fail us it is because our thinking fails us. We are struck by rage, sometimes, but more likely sheer incompetence is what prevents us. We blame it on words, but the tools are there. So we stay silent, or we just roar - using some words, a few words, as surrogate screams. Their emotional content, their - shall we say - friction, bluntness,sibilance - their history, renders them less a comunication and more a howl. This is why the wild humans at the end of Will Self's Great Apes cry "fuuuuuck offffff" in the distance. It was the call of the human.

When words fail us we let things happen. Shouting sometimes reinforces the evil: it convinces the demagogue that his (or, increasingly often, her) shouting is just, and that of others proof of reactionary or disturbed tendencies. Words become our own jailors.

Words fail us because the thinking has failed, because we no longer recognise the tools we have and we have forgotten how to use them. The concepts we used to use in those words have been overhauled by something else and we have yet to create a new vocabulary to express what is, in fact, a very very old worldview. The language, somehow, needs to change, or the assault on the citizens will simply intensify. And the reactions we give them will convince them more of their need to act.

Some people of course have the talent required: almost no-one in the MSM: in the blogosphere, Tom Paine, Crushed (although he tends to talk far more personally), DK, and this guy among them. Alas, I'm not one of them. I just sit on the wall and shout. Or cry. That's a more accurate rendering of my use of words.