Percy Moo as Einstein

Percy Moo as Einstein
Dog=Einstein2

Saturday 25 April 2020

Coronavirus, My Dogs and the First Gulf War

Working up a hunger to finish
off the sofa
Discussing the plight of our cosseted canines in a post-COVID world - if such a thing will indeed exist in the short- to medium-term, a friend of mine commented that if the lockdown is lifted in various steps, it will give our doggies and moggies time to get used to our prolonged absences again, instead of just one day our getting up early getting ready and shutting them in for what for them must be an eternity. It might even prevent them from eating a sofa or two mightn't it, Blas? My  friend talked about "preparing them for the eventual restoration of 'normality"'.  Please excuse the proliferation of apostrophes - anyone would think I'm a grocer.

Having eaten the sofa, what's
  next on the menu?
But, Dear Reader, a grocer I most definitely am not. More of a jobbing linguist than a professional purveyor of vegetable viands to victual the culinary consumer. Anyhow, back to business. The word normality, is a good, solid, legacy word that has stood us in good stead for many a century. During the First Gulf War, I heard for the first time the somewhat mangled, rather ugly neologism (at least for me, although The OED states it originated in the mid-19th Century) of normalcy. No prizes for guessing from which ex-colony that one came from, y'all. I first heard it fall from the lips of General Norman Schwarzkopf. indeed it fell on my ears with all the euphonious grace and subtlety of one of his bunker-busting bombs. Come to think of it, it's a pity they didn't have any bunkum-busting bombs to shatter the lies, half-truths and sheer warlust that led Tony Blair (a poodlesome person himslef) and his cronies to back George W Bush's second Iraqi adventure. 

Long after both conflicts, the BBC - probably on R4's excellent Word of Mouth, hosted by the genial, witty, entertaining and all-round good egg, Michael Rosen -  brought to my attention that normality is what life is/was like before epoch-defining catastrophes, such as the EU, COVID or a Labour government, and normalcy is the post-cataclysmic semblance of relative normality - at least in British English. Iraq, therefore is a great example of what seems to be an eternal state of normalcy.

I could now go on to rant about how the Americans mangle our language, have no idea of grammar and can't even spell correctly, This is probably a manifestation of most Americans' inability to think clearly and rationally, but as we already know all of this is true, why bother? Sometimes, however, they do produce some quite wonderful creations. I might even write a blog about it, but, Dear Reader, that would be a whole nother thing. 

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