Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                A RANDOM MISCELLANY OF TRIVIAL GRUMBLES

 

 

On Wednesday 30 June I was watching the 6 o’clock news on TV ONE as is my wont. There was an item about how many people in New Zealand had yet been vaccinated against the Corona Virus or Covid 19 or whatever you currently call it. Of course I always feel a little smug watching such items, as my wife and I have already had the two jabs. But as I watched this brief item I was shown not one, not two, not three, not four , but fully FIVE juicy close-ups of hypodermics being plunged into arms.

 Now I’m not scared of being injected in a good cause (not that I ever enjoy the needle going into my gums at the dentist’s), and I wasn’t at all bothered by the two jabs I took against the virus. Among other things, my wife and I are two of the lucky ones who suffered no side effects.

But I am worried by those five close-ups.

Not so long ago, arms receiving the needle were never shown in movies, let alone on TV. Then within, I think, the last decade, suddenly it became obilgatory to have those juicy close–ups of flesh being thus pierced. And it’s never a pleasant sight, even for a non-needle-phobic such as I. It always looks brutal and upsetting. Part of me says it’s akin to the “if it bleeds it leads” sensationalist tendency of TV news. Ya godda show ‘em something violent to keep ‘em watching.

But another part of me says, if this news item were made in the interest of making more people take the vaccine, then it probably had a negative effect. Five close-ups of arms being pierced by needles, and quite a few needle-averse viewers will have decided that vaccination was clearly not for them.

 

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Knowing my form, at this point in one of my “Something Thoughtfuls” you expect me to segue into a long discourse on various other matters related to the topic dealt with above. But I’m not going to give you such. This fortnight’s “Something Thoughtful” is strictly and deliberately a random miscellany of trivial grumbles.

First let me deal with the nouns and verbs. I am still not reconciled to the use of the noun “impact” as a verb. Thus, instead of saying, correctly, “What impact [noun] did it have on them?” it now seems routine to say “How did it impact [pseudo verb] them?” Granted that “impact” has long been a very limited intransitive verb (as in “impacted wisdom teeth”), this is to use it  illiterately as a transitive verb. There are even more extreme examples of this ungrammatical noun-to-verb metamorphosis. “Summit” is a noun and nothing but a noun. But where once it might have been asked of a mountaineer “Did she reach the summit?” [noun] we now get the barbaric “Did she summit?” [pseudo verb] This is on the same level of idiocy as schoolchildren saying “Our team will verse them”, because they have so often seen notice boards scheduling this team versus that team. Worse, it’s on the same level as those who say “abolishment” or “evolvement” or "denouncement" when they mean “abolition” or “evolution” or "denunciation". Or to sink to the lowest depths of Hell, it is like people who say “the 1800s” when they mean “the nineteenth century” or who do not know the difference between “uninterested” and “disinterested”, or  the difference between “on his behalf” and “on his part”.

I will not waste time on orthography. Some people are simply bad spellers. But when I am dictator for life with unlimited powers, I will send to labour camps those Millennials and Generation XY and Z-ers, who do not know how to spell “eh” as in “Bad spelling is pretty awful, eh?” Instead, these benighted semi-literates render the particle as “ay” or “aye” apparently unaware that “aye” is properly pronounced as in “Aye, aye captain!”

And should I say something about pronunciation? The battles here are really lost already. “Data” now tends to be pronounced only American-style (“DAY-ta” rather than “DAH-ta”) and I’ve even come across New Zealand students who are puzzled by the pronunciation of “lieutenant” as “LEFF-tenant” because they’ve only ever heard the American “LOO-tenant”. (My solution would be - go back to pronouncing this French word the way the French do, but somehow I think my suggestion won’t catch on.)

If I’m being picky here, there is one mispronunciation that still worries me. This is the loss of “women”. It appears that women no longer exist. I know this because radio and TV commentators now routinely say such things as “Forty woman have protested against this bill” or “Eighteen woman competed in the marathon”. Time was, this mispronunciation was one of those things that was corrected in primary schools. Now it has become the norm among semi-educated newscasters. Not too long ago feminists insisted on spelling the plural of “woman” as “wimmin” as in “Wimmin’s Spaces” etc. I used to think this was a silly affectation, but now I find much merit in it.