"Scrabble,the Gift of the Gab and Blue Eyed Injustice"Now you guys have known me long enough to know that I love words. I can swim in a book, drown in a sea of words,I still secretly enjoy tv programmes such as
Countdown and am always up for a game of Scrabble or Taboo...not to mention my blogging obsession.Call me 'saddo, but I love the way humanity has canonized random collections of letters and made them express emotions, states of mind, situations in almost every language. I thrive in searching, and eventually finding, the exact word I am looking for and, if the dictionary doesn't provide me with one, sure I'll make one up pretty swiftly (my mates know). Most of the time, because I am a "jolly foreigner", I even bluff so convincingly they believe it is a real erudite term and,for the sake of not embarrassing themselves in front of the rest of the group, shut up and nod in agreement...what a phony! (or maybe I should mention how polite and lovely my mates are to put up with my ridiculous accent and dubious vocab). Speaking of dictionaries, I have recently discovered this awesome online dictionary. It's "mint" as they would say in Salford. Its only downfall is that is an American website (no offence to my transalantic readers) which means that if you are after a definition of "colour" you are going to have to spell it "color" and so on... I don't like this story much, but I first learnt English from the Yankees and I would be an hypocrit to complain. All good and dandy until this morning I was looking for a synonym to the adjective "favourite", which I couldn't find, so I typed in "favorite" and the results were really quite shocking. Besides the expected "preferred", "best-loved" and "beloved" there behold appeared bizarre concepts such as "fair-haired" and "blue-eyed": what?! Where the heck did this idea of the angel-looking features become an idiom for sanctity, beauty and discriminating priviledges?! Besides, who the hell decided that angels are blond and blue-eyed?!This racist and frankly exploitative ex-colonialist ideal makes my skin crawl. Blame it on classical iconography? So what do you make of the wonderfully majestic South American black Madonnas? I rest my case cause I can feel my blood vassels swelling!!!**To be Blog-tinued**
7 comments:
I'm quite disturbed at the synonyms for favourite, too... And I'm a big words fan, I get word of the day emailed to me -- and then email it on to my colleagues.
I am feeling the passion,I am feeling it!Ye,Steve told me about that "word of the day" website and now I am absolutely hooked to it!--keep up the quest and battle for linguistic knowledge!!!
Do you always play Scrabble in Cyrillic? That's just showing off!
Have you found the urban dictionary? More entertaining than useful!
I wish I could tell you I scrabbled in Cyrillic,but I don't --in fact,to be perfectly honest,I am not great at scrabble at all!!
Steve:do I know you? Whichever way,welcome to the blog and thanks for the hint about the urban dictionary it's ace! ;-)
Sorry you don't have a new reader, sometimes it logs me in as 'Steve' as I have a Google account for work stuff. It's rather presumptuous of it not to use my full title!
Gutted!I thought it was an ex-course mate of mine from uni..haven't see him in ages and thought my blog was working as a friends reunited thing..I was actually wandering where my fair-haired-blue-eyed readers had gone!?!
PS:You are not new,but it's good to see ya anyway!
BTW:Yes,Steve,you do bring the concept of "distraction" to a whole new level!I now find myself spending far too much time on this flippin' urban dictionary website!Thanks pal!Doh!
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