Thursday, August 7, 2014

Language Matters

I've been recuperating from ACL / Meniscus surgery thank you very much soccer the sport I don't totally understand and kinda hate but nonetheless played until I tried to prove my athletic prowess to the youthful forward of the other team.  Prowless indeed.  Knee surgery physical therapy gives you plenty of time to waste while sitting on your tookus so indubitably.........long, drawn out movies are in order.

I am quite fond of a movie entitled Master and Commander starring Russel Crowe as Captain Lucky Jack Aubrey.  The film is based on one of 20 fictional books authored by English Author Patrick O'Brian about the escapades of Lucky Jack's illustrious career.  What makes the movie so great is its detail to accuracy and more specifically language accuracy.  He painstakingly attempts to recreate the language of the Royal Navy in the early 19th Century during the Napoleonic War, something I respect exceedingly.  Accuracy and precision matter in so many things in life.  I couldn't care less that this accuracy and precision involves a movie about a country not my own and a war that truthfully has no actual connection to me as a Citizen of the United States....it matters nonetheless.

Vulgarity, or common as its English way would properly imply, has so much gotten out of hand.  My least favorite thing is a WWII film in which they curse constantly. Guess what?  Those films are historically inaccurate; those boys didn't actually speak like that even in time of battle.  Why not?  It simply wasn't a major part of their vernacular, or any part of their vernacular truthfully.  Directors then say they do it to invoke the feeling of war into a modern audience.  So you're telling me that people getting blown up and dying in terrible, horrible ways isn't good enough to invoke the feeling of war?  The only way for a modern audience to get it is through vulgarity?  May God Save the Queen.

Why does all of this matter?  Far too many people have not stayed the path when it comes to looking at the details and speaking properly.  People curse all the time.  It's in their blood like a virus.  The IdunnowhatelsetosaysoIcurse Virus.  Crutch words are what they have become so much so that the new like is like, you know.....F-Bomb! People cannot think of the most precise word to say so they simply say one of the 7 words you can't say.   Figure them out for yourself....or just search the brilliant George Carlin.  Simply put, I am sorry but bovine fecal matter has nothing to do with matronly intercourse my friend.  Inaccuracy abides Dude.