Murphy's Law

 

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Newspeak

Or

Murphy’s Vocabulary

        Paranoia is the suspicion that the world is out to get you; it’s antonym, confidence, is when you assuredly know that it is.

        Murphy’s Law says that ‘anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’ and it’s antonym Yhprum’s Law (Murphy spelled backwards) says that ‘anything that can work, will work’. Of course, Murphy is the one we believe most often and if you’re a Murphy-phile you can even take your outlook a step further with Finagle’s Law which says that ‘things will always go wrong with the worst possible outcome at the worst possible time’. BTW, there’s Sod’s Law as well, but things, at this point, are starting to confuse me, so we’ll skip over that one.

        On language: I’m sure that bards and poets roll and roil in their ghostly graves and cringe in their monolithic mausoleums listening to the butchering these modern times and mentalities have inflicted on our expansive and handsome language. Expletives and our use of modern idiotic catch phrases, euphemisms, and the uses of spelling and punctuation proliferate as if people had primary school educations in Outer Mongolia and were left back for not shaving and are grist for the mill.

        Short bursts of expletives plague our linguistic existence—here’s a question--what generally is the expletive that kicks into our brain pan and escapes our thoughts and mouths when someone speeds up from the right lane, cuts us off to make an illegal left turn at a major intersection, while on their phone (and it’s not a cop) and the traffic and weather is moderate to fricking challenging? Yes, it’s the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot reaction; WTF or What The F*ck! and not something like “you Goddamned, motherless, pox-faced, Neolithic mutated dim-witted scrotum; you unsightly, moronic, product of incestuous semi-primal inebriated sludge gastropod gnomes; may syphilitic goats defecate primordial mucus on your tent floor should the occasion of your next undeserved life’s possible positive achievement occur!.”  No, just WTF! (warning: that other stuff will get you sent straight to HR).

        Other arresting thoughts and reactions are: “Nobody Warned Me! (UH OH!); “Why Didn’t I think of THAT?” (DUH!); “I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This” (Face Grimace); “Oh My Frikkin’ Stars!” (Eye rolling) and finally “Nice Turn Signal F**kface!” (Banging on the steering wheel).

        Fact: your grandparents lived in a world where plastic was a novelty. They also lived in a world where recreation was an outdoor activity. Also, on the not so positive side, a world that disposed of its waste indiscriminately (which they then passed on to you).

        You could also understand every word they used verbally as they issued Shakespearian-like threats: “Oh thy vile troublesome blackguard of a rodent, thy dodge is a bitter sweeting to my patience; canst you naught attend patiently my deepest furies, cease the undoing of my goings and cast me not as a fool whilst I harry with alacrity the smote of aspen sapling against thine alabaster fundement”

        Or as they would say in my family: “keep it up, you little twerp and I’ll break off your arm and beat you with the bloody end” or “I’ll knock you so hard your head will ring like a ten-penny nail hit with a greasy ball peen hammer”

        Another thing is acronyms and initialisms; Okay, believe it or don’t: two days ago I read an article in the NYT (No More FOMO for Plus-Size Travelers 7/8/2023) telling the world that fat people on these particular vacations (and these bipeds were referred to, blatantly, unapologetically and repeatedly, as ‘fat’) no longer had to worry about FOMO. “The poor bastards, I hope it’s not contagious” I thought, “is FOMO some kind of fat affliction?” No, for those as uninformed as I, FOMO is short for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’. The article was complemented by photos of fat folks having a grand time because these fat people no long had to worry about accommodations, connections and whether there was shopping where they were going in case their fat luggage was lost or delayed.

        Further investigation in to this FOMO thing hipped me to MOMO or the Mystery of when you think that you’re missing out on something but you aren’t sure what you’re missing out on. And then I saw that further still there was the FOMOMO (!) and with that, I yelled “well, WTF!”-- shot the computer, set my hair on fire and regurgitated in the waste basket.

        Initialisms like snafu, fubar, and bohica (look ‘em up) came long before omg lol lmfao fs ltr sfw and hmu and have, I think, greater panache thn thir cnterpts. I think it’s kind of lazy to write ‘wr ru?’ or omw or “dm me?” C’mon, in my day (when actual composed letters were the thing) a guy might write on the envelope HOLLAND or SWAK or here’s one from a girlfriend “CHINA!” (come home I’m naked already!) See, YAKS (you ain’t know shyte).

        All in all, it’s a perfect BOGO BYOB Catch 22 NIMBY. Fact: as far as correspondence goes, we actually don’t write letters anymore (maybe a few do). No one actually ‘writes’ anything, we use the computer, we use our cell phones, we text, post, emoji and send pictures; sometimes we talk. And, we counter in kind with another emoji or a like (thumbs up), a heart, care-hug, sad-face, laugh or angry; and that says it all. I have almost 600 ‘friends’ on FB that I only see on screen and I don’t know half of them. We send our holiday, birthday, congrats and condolences over the Ethernet (IEEE 802.3.) and we’re caught between Scylla and Charybdis with only Hobson’s choice as a result. Let this be a lesson.

        It doesn’t get any easier and I’m getting more flummoxed by the day; I think I’ll just go outside and eat some worms.