Greetings and welcome,
to another of my Fuzzy Friday open thread diaries for Street Prophets. Friday is my day to stand ankle-deep in my litterbox and yowl. I'm struggling with a part of me that would like nothing more than to continue yowling about the same ol' stuff as last week's yowl. I very much enjoy yowling. I particularly enjoy yowling about labels and how very little they actually tell you about the person who chooses to wear them. When I yowl about labels I usually attract the notice of people with their own labels to stick on me-- which is, in fact, hilarious to watch...
Or maybe it's not, in fact, hilarious. Maybe things like a person's very individual sense of humor aren't governed by "facts." What makes me laugh might just be tedious and boring to you. Some of what makes me laugh might even offend you. Humor is entirely subjective-- well, that's what I think anyway.
One of my particularly favorite labels, one I've been clinging to, has begun to make me laugh. The more I think about it the funnier it seems to me. Here is a word, a simple word made out of the usual multi-lingual soup that English sips from. It has become so laden with baggage and misunderstanding that I'm shedding it. It makes me laugh because I was such a pedantic purist about the definition of the word for so long, but then I watched this video:
And I decided that those are good thoughts. This is a man the same age as my eldest brother. Maybe it's generational-- this respect for the subtleties of language. Listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson has made me feel foolish for clinging to my label. If my silly label has become so broad and all encompassing that it's starting to smother me I should have the sense to get out from under it-- to peel it off and perhaps even avoid any new labels for awhile. As I'm overly fond of saying, labels are cheap and self-adhesive. If you're going to embrace a label I think it best to have some manner of control over how that label is used. If it has mostly become a banner paraded about by people who hate and fear and spew ignorance-- maybe I don't want to be associated with it. I shouldn't want to be associated with it.
I'm too old to argue with the crumpled kittens anymore. I just don't care about "linguistic purity" enough to show my coffee-stained fangs or extend even one of my neatly trimmed claws. My playthings just don't hold the same attraction that they once did.
Let the kittens play with it. They've unraveled that old ball of yarn already to the point where it won't roll off my tongue. And the last thing I need is to try to swallow that tangled mess. It would leave a bad taste in my mouth and I cough up more than my share of hairballs as it is.
Speaking of hairballs, if you'd care to step over the elegantly whorled ginger hairball below, I'd like to share some more language that really made my day yesterday. And just in time for Christmas!
For those of you who don't know, I'm a hairy old citizen of the USA who followed his heart to Prague and married her over twenty years ago. We have two kids of the adolescent variety who have a better grip on the bi-lingual nature of their family than their parents do.
And with that information in mind-- yesterday my younger son came home from school laughing about something. He was eager to share and I didn't even have to wait until he had his shoes off before he was telling me about his English class (English is mandatory in the Czech school system as is a third language from a limited selection after-- I think, the 6th grade... but now I've already made you wait longer than I did to find out what was so funny). His teacher had decided to start showing the class a YouTube video of the 1984 film version of the classic Charles Dickens tale: A Christmas Carol. In a misguided attempt to add extra value to their listening to the spoken language the teacher was inspired to click the little icon at the lower right of YouTube videos which allows subtitles or closed captioning to be automatically generated and displayed. It is indeed a wonder of modern technology. I'm hesitant to embed the video here because these things have a tendency to disappear from YouTube and leave my old diaries with odd little blank windows. But maybe if I included a few still pictures of the player in action you'll also become inspired and try it out for yourself. If however, you've known about this for years-- why didn't you tell me?
[Note: I've included the captions as hovers for those of you who might be having trouble making out the writing on these low-res images.]
The story should be familiar enough to all of us. The scene opens with young Fred inviting his uncle, Ebeneezer Scrooge, to Christmas dinner:
The grumpy old miser scorns the invitation and a debate on the merits of Christmas follows:
Scrooge acknowledges Fred's talent for rhetoric:
Fred concludes his rousing defense of Christmas and Bob Cratchit, the clerk exploited by the miserly Scrooge, applauds from the shadows of the dimly lit office only to be scolded and threatened with dismissal:
Scrooge leaves the office for home grumbling about the traditional practice of paying a man a day's wage for not working on Christmas:
I was informed that the class only survived ten minutes of the film.