The joy of butchering language

For as long as I can remember, I have been intensely drawn to language as expressed through slang. That constant, often playful evolution of words and phrases by individuals and groups that can twist or entirely change both the word itself as well as the meaning. This is actually one of the many things that Amily and I have in common, although she brings with her the addition of an almost academic love for how society as a whole changes language as time passes.

While we are all surrounded by the tumult of language growing and changing, participation in that process definitely varies by individual. As I get older I find that my own contributions to language soup increases, but I have had the fortune of being surrounded by an extremely high number of people that have driven the creation of slang within both my small and large social circles.

The first but not most influential force for me was my father. Although largely absent from my life including most of my childhood, the time we did have was filled with a rainbow of completely nonsensical words like “udlyudskudbudly”. While the context of its use has long been lost to time the word itself lives on.

Without a doubt the greatest influence in my life was the neighborhood kids I grew up with. They were collectively absolute powerhouses of redefining the meaning of words, twisting words into variations of their former selves, or just completely inventing new words completely. This collection of tweens and teens were responsible for many of the nicknames we still have today, and shaped my own view of words as malleable playthings to do with as I please.

I think what is so fascinating is the depth and breadth of our playing with words. For me the absolute peak of this was the evolution of “sloppy”. But first a little context. Fantasy (sword and sorcery) games, books, and movies were hugely influential in my neighborhood when I was growing up. We were the right age at the right time to be deeply immersed in the Golden Age of fantasy. D&D was, undeniably, the king of that mountain.

It was through our long gaming sessions that a lot of our most prolific verbal wizardry occurred. While I may attribute this incorrectly because he was the most prolific USER of the terms, I believe the evolution of “sloppy” started with Charlie. He was a very excitable, intense D&D player. Think of how extreme sports fans express their excitement when their team is winning… That is how Charlie played Dungeons and Dragons. It was from these gaming sessions that the journey of “sloppy” began.

At a very basic level, “sloppy” was used to describe the aftermath of a successful combat. It indicated not only that you had defeated the monsters that you had engaged with, but that you had obliterated them into a pulpy mess of gore. It was hyperbolic to say the least, but kids are kids and talking big is what they do.

From there the evolution was swift. “Sloppy” became “shloppy”, a slurring S added to the pronunciation to exaggerate the word and allow you to drag out it over several seconds for effect. The word quickly broadened to mean anything amazing and worth celebration. If it was something fantastic, it was definitely “shloppy”! Perhaps you yourself were just above average, so we might greet you with “Hey Shloppy”! If you were the active bringer of something “shloppy” it meant you were the “shlopper”.

At some point “shloppy” was such a baseline concept that in order to indicate something worthy of extra note we had to introduce “shlopp-o”! From there you can simply tack things on as needed. It might be “schlopp-tastic” or “shlopp-o-riffic”. If you brought it extra hard you might be the “absolute shlopperer”.

Amusingly, 35 years later we still use this as described above. It is a permanent part of the lexicon for the neighborhood kids that remain in contact with each other. But more importantly for me, it ingrained in me not only a deep love for word butchery, but established a heightened proclivity to participate in this creation process that only intensified when pre-Internet dial-up bulletin boards came into my life, to be quickly replaced by the Internet itself.

I could spend hours pondering the impact that Internet meme culture has had on my own relationship with words and phraseology. The internet is cultures layered on cultures of in-groups inside of in-groups. It is the blender in which language goes to die and be reborn. With that said I will touch on my favorites.

At the low end of the spectrum you have your basic abbreviations. I am old and cranky enough to actually remember, pre-Internet, when I first encountered “LOL”, “ROFL”, and “ROFLMAO”. Even in the days of dial-up modems and bulletin board chats the meme machine was hard at work morphing and changing something as fundamentally understandable as “WTF” into a more playfully non-sensical “WTFbbq”. I have little doubt that the first time I saw “ROFLsausce” and “ROFLcoptor” I was captivated.

As you journey from there you may enter the wonderful world of bad / careless typing mistakes being intentionally exaggerated, like “PLZ” being written as “PLX”, which then evolves into “PLOX”. These take on an extra layer of joyful absurdity when you move them from the realm of text and actually pronounce them out loud. For anyone following the current GME stock saga, I can admit that the word “hold” will now likely forever be pronounced as “HODL” and I definitely like the “stonk”.

My absolutely favorite two-phase evolution of all time is the excited and excessive use of “!!!!!!!” being expressed as a careless “!!!1!!111!11!” which then becomes the mocking “!!!one!!!eleven!”. There is such a biting, sardonic wit to this that I find it nothing short of genius.

There is another layer in the game of words that results not from the creation of something new, but rather the revisiting of the old and abandoned. This is actually the basis for my Pedantic Ponderings posts, as words can fall so out of fashion and use that they can become new again even when used precisely in the capacity of their original meaning. They obtain a level of absurdity through obscurity.

Word soup is not for everyone, but for me it occupies a very important place in the mechanisms of silly that I think are the foundation of maintaining joy in ones daily life. The world is all too willing to serve up a buffet of stress, disappointment and dour outlooks on life, and I find that keeping a counterbalance of lighthearted playfulness is critical to the balancing act of emotional sanity. I encourage everyone to find their dumb and absolutely embrace it, nurture it, and protect it. Without that joyful silliness in your life you risk becoming nothing more than another Udlyudskudbudly.

Twitching the night away

Once upon a time I was a young Cranky Old Man, angrily shaking my fist at those kids and their newfangled forms of entertainment like watching live streams of other people playing video games on Twitch.tv. It was a maddeningly absurd idea that made no sense to me. Why would you watch someone play videogames rather than play them yourself?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have come here to tell you that I have been educated, and I am better for it.

I love videogames. I have for a very very long time, and can actually trace that love to a specific magical moment in my childhood when a bunch of neighborhood kids decided to valiantly investigate the strange fancy brown house with high fences and a house alarm that, at the specific moment, was blaring loudly for everyone within 3 blocks to hear.

We discovered two things that day. Firstly, the home owner was deeply amused that half the kids in the neighborhood had come to the rescue of his house which had merely been the victim of his own momentary stupidity. And secondly, the homeowner was in the possession of this thing called an “Atari” that could play a game called “Pong” on the largest television any of us had ever seen.

We were invited in as a thank you, and nothing would ever be the same again…

Years passed and life happened, and in 2020 Amily and I found ourselves in a very specific set of circumstances. We did not watch traditional television, preferring only to stream specific content that interested us (resulting in a basically commercial-free life), we were afforded the opportunity to bunker at home 24/7 due to a pandemic, and we were anxiously awaiting the release of the next World of Warcraft expansion at the end of the year.

It started innocently enough. We began looking for games worth playing that were co-op, and so we dove into lengthy video reviews like this one from TheLazyPeon. While it did lead us to buying the game, we also found that the commentary itself was absolutely hilarious. Watching the review was itself immensely entertaining.

So we began to explore more…

Enter Mike “Preach” Lamb. A YouTube content creator for the WoW community turned Twitch streamer. I knew of Preach, but as I did not abide this videogame streaming nonsense I had never watched him. However Amily and I found ourselves with gaps in our dinnertime TV viewing options and Preach had gotten access to the World of Warcraft expansion Alpha and was streaming it. So… What the heck, lets see what the game looks like at this early stage and get a some idea of whether our excitement is at all appropriate.

So we watched, and enjoyed, and quickly out-viewed his immediate content leaving us back at the point of having gaps in our viewing schedule we were looking to fill. So we began to explore the old recordings that he had archived. Drama Time was a fun and hilarious distraction, so we began watching that, but we knew that even with years of content we’d bleed that source dry quickly, so we kept looking around. We began to stumble across game titles we found interesting, that we’d had curiosity about at one point but then forgotten about. So we began to watch those as well.

We also found that in order to avoid burnout, or because of temporary closure of the testing servers, Preach would fill in his own streaming schedule with games he wanted to play. And we would watch that too.

And we both quickly realized that these games were all extremely interesting, often VERY compelling, but that we’d never play them. We’d miss out on all that these games had to offer, and would be left in the dark when it came to the cultural impact these games had, many actually being genre defining games. It was also extremely hard not to find Preach himself to be a hilarious source of entertainment in his own right, and to enjoy the interactions he would have with his regular viewers.

At that point I went from doubter to absolute believer, and Twitch (or at least Preach) became required viewing for whenever possible. Through him we have experienced so many amazing game moments that we would have never had otherwise. We’ve laughed with him, mocked him, yelled at the TV about how thick he was being, and just generally had some of the most amazing gaming sessions we’ve ever had, all through his efforts.

My list of positive take-aways from 2020 is painfully short, however this is one of them, and one that I am deeply grateful to such a shitty year for giving Amily and I. It is a treasure we will keep with us for many many years to come.

Pedantic Ponderings: Combobulation

We begin this year with a revelation… a proclamation… nay a declaration, that the world yet again forces upon us a wrong that must be righted, an injustice that must be justiced! And so I come to you dear readers, to ask for your aid.

We as a people have drifted afar from something that must be re-claimed before it is lost to us for all time. I am of course speaking of the art of combobulation.

We know how to discombobulate, and we certainly retain the ability to recombobulate… But no one combobulates. Candidly, based on how 202o panned out, it is clear to me that our lack of combobulation is a key factor in our societal decline.

I would encourage you to combobulate. Engage in conversation and announce to those you are speaking with that you are very combobulated by their points. Combobulate your friends, your family, and all of those you love. In fact lets make 2021 the year of combobulation.

The Lost Year

As 2020 comes to a close, I wanted to join the chorus of voices rising together to bid the year a heartfelt “Fuck you, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”.

For a blog with no posts between March and December, it would be easy to believe that there was nothing to post about, which of course we can all agree is undeniably incorrect. The truth falls closer to there being too much to write about and most of it falling squarely within the boundaries of hot-button topics that I have spent the bulk of 2020 trying to avoid being engaged in conversation about.

Just as Amily and I largely disengaged from active socializing to the best of our abilities (because of THAT, THOSE, and THESE AS WELL), I actually made a conscious decision around August to just wait out posting anything here as a bit of a depiction of how I have viewed the year and our place in it. In a very real sense, the lack of posts says as much as anything I might have written during that time.

Rest assured, that much like a bad habit, I am very hard to get rid of, so we can look forward to 2021 being filled with all manner of musings and general nonsense from my end of the equation… Assuming that 2021 isn’t actually 2020’s more abusive older brother…

Pedantic Ponderings: Gruntled

Why is no one ever described as gruntled? Why have we abandoned such a perfectly serviceable word to the forgotten depths of the Merriam-Webster graveyard?

We have no problem describing people as disgruntled. We can splash it on the front page of our newspapers, we can print it on shirts and scream it through our megaphones… We know what it means, it resonates with power and drives us to fist shaking fury.

But why? If the level of our gruntle has no value to us. If we are not announcing our gruntle and celebrating our gruntle and asking people each day how gruntled they are… Why do we only focus on how disgruntled we are?

Perhaps the answer comes from the wise words of a killer artificial intelligence in a stiff black suit:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world would dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

Mind you… He didn’t use this opportunity to call us gruntled either… Clearly another flaw in the Matrix.