I'd best invent something to talk about...

Yeah, I've got no idea what I want to talk about today, but I felt a semi-obligation to post something of merit (haha). Should I talk about words? Or how much I need to shave? Or how irritating changeable weather is? Or the fact that it's 70 years since the beginning of WWII? I'm obviously not going to do the last one, because that would undermine precisely what I wrote about last time I noted down something worthwhile. Hmm, maybe I will just say what I've done today and then speak about how that has impacted on my week? Probably not; the only noteworthy thing I've done today is signed up for Spotify Premium - which, I have to say, is fucking excellent (splice-tastic). It's so nice to not have to listen to adverts, and to have almost limitless music to choose from. I love it. Now all I have to do is wait until Apple decide that their monopoly doesn't need stretching any further, and allow Spotify to run an application for the iTouch or iPhone. Then I'm set. That'll be a good day. It won't ever happen; it'll be an electronic Santander.

Oh, here we go. I Googled the word "diatribe" the other day, to see if I would get a hit within the first... five or so pages (I didn't); I assumed I wouldn't, but wanted to see what the top results were. Ignoring the obvious entries for Wikipedia and Dictionary.com et al., there were some fairly surprising results. Loads of other share the name of mine (without the "needless") and they're all getting substantially more hits than mine is, so that they appear somewhere high up on the list. That's where I am aiming to get. It should be a world where "needless diatribe" is a Googlewhack and y'all gotta bow down at the altar of erudite musings. That'd be good. I'd like that. Then all I'd have to do was work out the logistics of how to make this a viable career: set for life from then on.

I was watching Eddie Izzard last night (this morning, actually, as it was around 3.15am), and he was parodying the dog-food Mr. Dog (now known as Cesar) and how there must have been a strokey-beard meeting where they decided on the new name. It was quite amusing, but more amusing was the fact he said: "[As an executive] We have sold but two cans of Mr. Dog." This made me laugh uproariously for about five minutes. I love the archaic use of words, the phrases that would be out of place in any modern dialect; I like to imagine that somewhere in the upper-echelons of society there remains a patois of snobbery where toffs guffaw over this kind of statement: "Alas, Johnson, I have shot but two rabbits, and erstwhile though it was, mayhap our luncheon become sparse and utterly plebeian." Haha, that would be so awesome.

Strangled route to something that the previous paragraph has reminded me of (posh people>last night's Come Dine With Me>vitriolic douchebags>swearing) - the issue of swearing. Now, as my reader(s) (it's funny because I could easily address them all by name) will know, I am not averse to using expletives every now and again. In fact, you could easily suggest that I fucking love swearing; it feels fantastic, and there are certain situations which other words simply wouldn't suffice. Unfortunately, I think swearing is becoming too saturated into our lexicon, it's becoming commonplace to hear children cursing ("Idle swearing is a cursedness"), as well as the older generation (always in line with some myopic bigotry). I think that utterly undermines the point of swearing; overuse undermines meaning - once a word becomes so utterly profligate it loses all the meaning it is meant to imbibe. You hear "cunt" so often that people have forgotten why it's meant to be offensive; honestly, ask anyone but a die-hard feminist, and they'll say some rubbish about it "being lewd, crass, and offensive"; they won't be able to supply a real reason for why it's offensive anymore. It has taken the place of words like "twat" and "prick", the evolution of language has phased out the light-hearted asides, and replaced them with the once-caustic, now-redundant, words that we have now.

That really angers me: How are you meant to convey a real sense of emotion with a language that is becoming ruinous through proliferation? Swearing is the equivalent of when you have to write the same word over and over again; try it, "petrol, petrol, petrol, petrol, petrol, petrol, petrol", it starts to sound meaningless and laughable. That's what swearing has become. You're left with three camps: The "swear at any opportunity morons" who think that just because the window is open the house deserves a declamation of "cunting fuck"; the "Obstreperous resistors", who won't swear for any reason (I hate people who won't use words); and the "Preserve language front!", who think that a stubbed toe, or being pushed down the stairs probably does deserve a huge call of "bollocks". I'm in the last group, though I do occasionally slip into the first when I am feeling particularly unimaginative - it's the same online, as well as using too many commas because I keep pausing to think about what I'm saying, I swear too much too.

Come on fuckers, let's preserve our language, and don't let laziness assuage your readiness to lend a cunting hand.

Wankers.