In Which the gathering Dark presages, presumably, more thoroughly gathered dark

You guys, when I got up this morning, it was dark. Not that grey insipid morning light which one greets with resignation of a morning toward the end of summer, knowing what it inevitably heralds, but full on, have-I-accidentally-set-my-alarm-to-go-off-in-the-middle-of-the-night-because-it-is-clearly-still-the-middle-of-the-night dark. This is not something which I relish. I like the cold, I do. I like winter. I like rugging up, I like skiing, I like scarves and cups of tea and jumpers and ugg boots (in their place). But there are two things about the coming time of year that I do not like even at all. I do not like getting up in the dark, and I do not like being too cold.

Not ‘too cold’ in the sense of “ooh, it’s not too cold today” in the same way you might describe something of particular niftiness as being “not too shabby” (assuming you’re Australian, of course, I don’t know if the English do this, but I suspect that they do, although presumably less so. Surely no other country can have embraced “average” as in “it’s a bit average” as its highest term of censure. This confuses me every time, and I managed to survive the era of “bad”-means-good), but too cold in that seeping, creeping way, where sitting at your desk leaves you convinced that you’ll just never be quite warm enough for comfort ever again. The kind of too cold where all the sensory input you receive from your extremities is discomfort, and where even a nice-warming-shower or nice-warm-bed has dangerous cold zones so that if you stand or lie in anything but the precisely right space, one bit or other of you becomes frustratingly chilled.

It’s not so bad, really. I mean, I was getting up for a fun reason today, and I didn’t even wear my cardigan most of the day, and I’m sitting here in the quite pleasant breeze as I type this, with no particular urge to shut the window. But it’s the ominousness that gets me. The awareness that if I decide not to ride my bike to uni tomorrow merely on the grounds that it’ll be close to dark by the time I get home, then that’s admitting defeat for a good eight or nine months. The inevitability of it getting much worse before long.

Not even that would be so bad, really, it’s just that I was foolish enough to read a book on the bus for a couple of blocks on the way home, which meant that I arrived home feeling miserably motion-sick, in the dark. There’s something particular about our bus route, I think. I never get motion sick usually, which is why I routinely forget and accidentally read on the bus, but I think that there’s something somehow terribly visceral about the sequence of turns and hills and swinging curves that are dreadfully unkind to the unwary reader. Plus the home-in-the-dark thing. I get used to that pretty quickly, and it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as leaving home in the dark, but at the end of summer I always sort of feel that if I’m going to be getting home after dark, I’d better have had a jolly good evening already.

At this point it becomes very obvious that my idle fantasies of how nice it would be to live in England or Europe and all that are based on the most profound lack of understanding of my own limitations, especially with regard to this issue, on reflection. Still, it’d be a good place to go for a bit of nice subdued summer during a winter, at least. They have buttercups, and downs, and robins which are a good honest red, there. It’s sort of the promised land, really, so long as you’ve been deriving your land-based promises from a very specific subgenre of literature. Not the Arabian Nights, for instance.

In completely unrelated news, though, I’ve just come across a sort of half blog post I must’ve written late last year, and which has, in the intervening months, lost all currency. Nonetheless, I append it herewith, just in case you really have absolutely nothing to do with your afternoon.

A couple of times in the past month I’ve made Facebook status updates about language usage. Because, y’know, I’m a bit of a pedantic dweeb. Amusingly, these have both caused a flurry of comments, with friends weighing in strongly for or against a prescriptivist view of language or whatever (usually “for”, with reservations, because that’s the sort of person with whom I tend to make friends. The kind of people who use the word “whom”, or at least know about it.) It’s funny, even just thinking about these things makes me self-conscious about my sentence structure. Oh no! I can’t end a sentence with a preposition! Not in the middle of a discussion of prescriptivist language! Such tragic irony! And so on. (Although this is one of the few rules of grammar which I think may be bollocks, at least I know about it. I just don’t think it’s necessarily worth bothering with.)

The thing is, it’s all very well to say that it doesn’t matter how you spell things or how you structure your grammar, provided you convey the spirit of the meaning, but it’s just not true. If the internet age has taught us nothing else (apart from “cats, man, what a laugh!”) it’s that text inadequately conveys tone and inflection, and that can be bad. Fortunately, we have punctuation for that. Or at least, for a lot of that (I mean, there’s at least one facebook group about the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!”). Without it, so little of what we mean can be known for sure (inasmuch as anything can be, in this postmodern blah blah blah). This is mainly a problem because we also live in an age of giant advertising and fine print.

Since so much of what is said has no objective meaning, false advertising suddenly stops being a worry for advertisers. Some chicken fast-food joint, for instance, is currently advertising a range of what I understand are basically milkshakes. (Which seems like a distressing juxtaposition to me, but that’s by the by) The slogans all over buses read proudly “full of real bitz!” That means absolutely nothing. Like, not anything at all. That space would equally well say “words about the drink!” for all the accountability in it.

First up, “Bitz” with a z. That’s not a word, so they don’t have to be full of real anything in particular. Secondly, even if we’re charitable and pretend to believe that “bitz” means “bits”, that still means nothing unless you say what they’re bits of. Full of real bits of bark/person/rock/paper/drink; what? Thirdly, we are earnestly assured that the “bitz” are “real”. Are we all on the same page, here? Bitz is not some desirable brand name that we would fear being given counterfeit versions of, as the ad implies. The other sense of “real”, i.e., “genuinely existent” is surely a given. “Full of imaginary bitz” is presumably the opposite, unless it’s “full of fake bitz”. The only words that have any meaning here are the “full of”, and they’re wrong, since the drink is not “full” of the blasted things anyway.

I realise that maybe I’m overthinking this, but how do these people get away with this sort of crap, with excitedly telling us nothing, and spelling words with a Z for no good reason at all? I can’t think of a single non-suspicious reason a company would have for misspelling a word in it’s advertising in that deliberate sort of way. It can only be because the word which means something is unavailable to them, or because they’re patronisingly trying to connect with some imaginary young-and-dumb demographic.

Similarly, I am suspicious of “natural ingredients” in products. I’m pretty much unconvinced by the idea that the word “natural” has any meaning at all, much. Even if it did, the artificial thing isn’t necessarily worse. Lots of synthetic things are structurally analogous to naturally occurring things, just built so as to have less side-effects or whatever. Snake venom is natural. Refined penicillin is artificial. And so on. And not all the Vitamin E in the world, be it natural, artificial, or occultly unnatural, is going to make you look ten years younger when you rub it on your face.

{So there you have it: present me has mixed feelings about Autumn, and past me felt that KFC was suspect. Good to have that established, isn’t it?}