In Which Words and Ladies are both Sadly Mistreated.

What is this thing people seem to do where we use words as if they served a purely decorative purpose and had no actual meaning per se? This question is the subject of today's post, although I'll leave out "literally" and "decimate" just because even thinking about the abuse of these innocent and actually meaningful words makes me twitchy.

Right off the bat, I wish to make it clear that I do this sort of thing as well; I always want to use to word “repine” when I mean “rely on something” when it actually means to pine over something; I don’t know why this should be the case, but it intrudes on my semantic life more often than I’d’ve expected. Still, having admitted that fault, I now plan to completely ignore it and harshly judge others by standards I myself fail to meet. Any questions?

There is a newspaper on my kitchen bench at present open to an article about that football-player (NRL? AFL? NFI) who glassed his girlfriend in the face. Touchingly, but slightly creepily, the aforesaid girlfriend has written him a character reference saying that he “never intentionally hurt her" and so on. Leaving aside only for a moment the weird psychology at work here, assuming the guy is as guilty as he’s been found to be in court, there is a phrase in this reference which irks me. “Greg is one of the most loving, sensitive, yet principled men I have known.”

What? Why “yet”? Do you mean “and” but feel “yet” has more class, or do you honestly believe that being ‘loving and sensitive’ and ‘principled’ are usually mutually exclusive and that his (dubious) juxtaposition of these qualities sets him apart? If this latter is actually what this poor woman thinks, then we may have come to the core of the problem; she’s clearly dating the wrong kind of guys. The kind of guys who glass you in the face or ask you to choose between loving sensitivity and principle. Call me greedy and old-fashioned, but I’ve always kind of fancied only dating guys who combined these characteristics (the lovingness, sensitivity and principledness, not the glassing-you-in-the-face; I’m not crazy about being glassed in the face. In fact, glassing me in the face even slightly is something I’ve always considered to be grounds to strike someone off the list completely).

Really worse, because it’s used in situations where clarity of understanding could be a life-and-death matter, is the “visualise” thing. Surgical reports always use this word wrongly, and quite frankly that freaks me out. Any time I’ve gone to sleep and have been cut open, I want all the people involved to understand one another perfectly. “After making the incision I was able to visualise the liver”. Yes? Well if I close my eyes and imagine, I can visualise the liver right now. This means “to see with the mind’s eye” or “imagine”. If you mean that you could see the liver, then, here’s a thought; just flipping well say “see”. No one will think less of you for using a shorter word on the grounds of it being in any way meaningful or relevant.

And don’t try to tell me that this is “just semantics”, either, because semantics means meanings. And if you don’t think that the actual meaning of what you’ve said is relevant then obviously listening to you at all is a waste of time, since according to that approach all language is merely “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing” (or however that quote goes). Saying “that’s just semantics” in a conversation about meanings or words is like saying “that’s just the holocaust” in a conversation about the deaths of millions of Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, mental patients, unemployed people and miscellaneous Europeans in the mid 20th century. (Godwin's Law! That's right, even talking to myself I get so infuriated by this that it's all Nazism.)

Coming back to the obviously more important question of the acceptance of domestic violence for a moment; have you guys heard that song on the radio recently? The one with the verses describing a ‘he hits her so she hits him and they both up the ante’ scenario and the refrain “a kiss with a fist is better than none”? Oh my, I have even stronger feelings about that sort of thing than about visualising things you can see.

First off; what sort of thing is that to say, potentially and inevitably to the victims of domestic violence? Someone who feels trapped in an abusive relationship doesn’t need that. This is something that could potentially have an actual effect on people’s lives (unlike that Chaser sketch, insensitive as it may have been) given how browbeaten and biddable people often feel in these situations.

Secondly, as a single girl who is perfectly ok with being single and unkissed for lengthy periods of time, I rather resent the implication that this is so pathetic that I should look with envy upon beaten wives. What the hell, you guys?

Less weirdly (but coming on the heels of that song, while I was feeling all enraged, enough for me to notice), I heard a song the other day where a man refereed to his wife as “The Wife”. Does this not weird out anyone but me? Sure, call your wife “wifey” in a jokey way, refer to her as “my wife” to people who don’t know her by name, but why the Definite Article? As if she were some kind of strange phenomenon which were visited upon you, like The Plague. Approximately equally irksome is the thing where people refer to their own and (more creepily) others’ husbands as “Hubby” as if that were his name. Again “my husband” is fine, and “my hubby” if you feel the need to be cloyingly saccharine, but you are aware, aren’t you, that he is an individual with an actual identity and his own name? This used to happen at my work all the time, and always put me in the mood to suggest to patients that Anathema would be a lovely name for a baby girl, just to see what would happen.

Conversely, I’m apparently alone among my friends in not finding it creepy for a guy to call his girlfriend (or wife, fiancée, partner, whatever) “Princess”. I realise that it’s putting her on a pedestal and all that sort of thing, but so does any term of endearment, surely? I’ve always been fond of Beautiful and Gorgeous and endearments, but this doesn’t mean that I’m dating people just because I happen to find them decorative. Maybe this is a hypocritical reversal of my position on Hubby and The Wife, but there you go. Maybe it’s because Princess, Gorgeous, Beautiful, or whatever are always used in the vocative. You don’t say “I’ll talk it over with Princess and get back to you” (a sentence I’ve heard Hubby in all too many times); it’s a private name you call them only to their face. Conversely, “The Wife” and “Hubby” are both used to refer to their signifieds in the third person. That’s the thing. If they were pet names, used to the people, I wouldn’t mind, because I wouldn’t be being made to collude with the oddness, it’d be your own affair.

Who am I kidding? It would still totally bug me. But there you go, sometimes in life, you get to be unreasonable, and there’s no time for that like 2am.


PS: For those of you who are unsure, to "decimate" means to kill on in 10 of. So it is exactly a tenth of the strength of "annihilate". This thing where people say "they were absolutely decimated" is maybe even worse than the thing where people say "literaly" of things they could only ever mean figuratively. If the football team "literally decimated" their opponents, what you're saying is that they genuinely and really, not metaphorically, made their opponents choose one man out of every ten on the team, and then killed those guys. @#$%^&*(