Gambrinous – being full of beer.
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Category Archives: The Word
Laughing my Arse Off – A Taste Of Metaphors
Oh, I am on a roll tonight: three Metaphors before I’ve even started.
I’ve been reading a few books about language and linguistics recently. I’ve vaguely contemplated a stand-up comedy routine using the subjects – a few ideas have popped into my head – but I don’t think the world is ready for it. Unless comedy is broad enough to cover the unfunny, that is. But I do have a joke. Well, more of a witticism:
I hate metaphors: they get on my nerves.
While the tumbleweed rolls past, I just found out that there are many forms of metaphor. There’s the active metaphor, the complex, compound, dead, dying (of course), and so on, until everyone falls asleep (oops, another metaphor, probably the dead variant).
Not many people care about them, though, and understandably so. But it makes me happy. Except when it comes to metaphors. Grrrrr.
Spotlight Continues
It’s been “official” for a a few weeks already, but today it was made even more real: I’ll be co-author of another English school textbook.
I was at a meeting this morning with the book publishers, Natur och Kultur, to meet a couple of teachers helping us complete the workbook to accompany Spotlight 5. The textbook is ready to print, and Fiona and I (being the authors) will soon take a look at the workbook, editing it as necessary.
We were also there to discuss Spotlight 6. We’ve come up with a few ideas for characters, and the grammar we wish to take up. This time we’ll have about a year to complete the book, unlike Spotlight 5, which was finished in a mere 6 months. Our editor said that we performed an impossible task, taking half a year to do what we did. An exaggeration, but nonetheless appreciated.
So, once again I am to undertake a challenging, but extremely rewarding, task. The enormity of what I am doing has kind of sunk in, yet it is still madness that I, of humble origins and no proper education, have been given this job.
We Are Newsworthy
Well, it took forty years, but I finally got myself in one of the national newspapers. Best of all, I did it without sadistically murdering someone and eating their pubic-hair, which appears to be an increasingly easy way into the headlines nowadays.
Nope. Jo, Freya and I got into the DN Sunday supplement for just being, really, though more specifically for being vegan. But don’t let the Sunday supplement suffix fool you, my non-existent readers; the DN is a newspaper of distinction here in Sweden, equivalent to The Times, Telegraph or the slightly inferior Guardian. And although the Sundayness of it implies a jauntier, lifestyle feel, one should still consider it a worthy contribution to the journalistic world.
Lotten, our neighbour and (after her decision to base an article on us) admirer good friend wrote an article about four families and their different ways of saving the planet. Not that I’d ever seen myself in the same light that some do Superman, and I would never vocally make such claims, though it is of course well-deserved (if not a bit embarrassing) to receive such accolade from the rest of society. I would obviously not even try to compare our “work” with the great names (like Gandhi), though unlike Gandhi we continue our fight without the fame-game he and his ego were involved in. No, we are more comparable with the likes of the Nobel Prize winners (which Gandhi has never won, by the way), I would say, than to the star-struck elite who go on and on like a broken record about their “plight”.
The article did a very good job of making us (and thereby vegans) look normal, approachable and a little bit cool. I’d had a good idea of what I wanted to get across, which, despite the lack of column space, I think we manged to do quite well. Anyway, hats off to Lotten, who did a splendid job.
I Can Take You All On (Nobody Heard That, Right?)!
I kept a diary when I was younger. It was an unsuccessful attempt, partially because I got fed up after a few months, partially because it was a diary. Diaries, at least those not written German-born Jewish girls living in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, tend to be dull affairs, trivial matters of one’s own mundane life with little or no insight into one’s own way of thinking. Mine certainly was. I think the problem stemmed from not really understanding what future purpose my future scribblings would have, and only having a diary that offered four or five lines per day (an invitation to writers’ block if ever there was one).
When I started this blog I had neither the experience of putting my thoughts to words, nor a reason for doing it, and it shows. Even when I found the purpose (for future-Freya) it took me a while to think in blogging terms, though I now feel happy with most of the entries I screeve.
There is, I have found, another reason to blog, one which a pen-and-paper diary can never compete with: public, yet craven, slagging off.
Venting one’s spleen on paper is all very well and good and psychologically la-di-da, but it’s like swearing loudly in the bathroom: no-one, with the possible exception of one’s nearest and dearest, is going to know.
My gibing Lia recently is a fine example of self-serving slagging. I can, safely and reasonably anonymously (or, at least, difficult to reach from overseas), use someone’s innocent – yet incorrect – statement as a source of my own apposite amusement. Doing so in a public forum such as the Internet makes the whole experience that much more valid, as I openly taunt ignorance, and, at the same time, leave myself open to the same type of wickedness from the countless number of people who think my views are ludicrous and my comments asinine. In theory, anyway.
I intentionally keep my blog as low-profile as I can. I do not make any of my writing more publicly available than this site permits. So, while it is in a very real sense open to all, my anonymity remains intact, hidden amongst the millions of other web-pages out there; thus, I can slag off whatever/whomever I choose, with minimal fear of reprisal.