50 GSCENE
HEART & SOLE
WORDS
WHAT’S IN A WORD?
BY DARREN SOLE
First of all, Happy New Year, and I hope that your 2014 will be chock
full of health, wealth and happiness.
One thing that is guaranteed, is that your next 12 months will be
stuffed to bursting with words. And not just welcomed, fluffy ones like
nipple, pinot and flump, but words you won’t want to read and words
you certainly won’t want to hear. Forget about the usual monotony of
bosses who drone, parents who crone and lovers who moan, I’m
talking about utterances of the unmentionables; the other words from
the ether, the ones from which we can’t escape and that batter our
lugholes on a daily basis.
Back in 2013 for example, if your bread wasn’t ‘artisan’, your dance
wasn’t ‘twerked’ and your pork wasn't 'pulled', then you definitely
weren’t ‘YOLO’ing, especially if you didn’t capture it all for posterity
with an obligatory (official word of the year) 'selfie'.
And every year, the volume of this noise grows, as more and more
persistent syllables, deep in the bowels of the alphabet soup, push,
shove and muscle together, to break free and come up for air, making
newbie nouns and voracious verbs, that overshadow us, shape how we
live and ultimately, survive us.
As a comedy TV writer and producer, I have a modest insight into what
kinds of words push people’s buttons because I make a living (inbetween train-sitting and celeb-stroking) creating, writing, and
marking others', bum, nob and fanny gags. But in my lair of the shiny
floor, no matter how high the s ܚX