WORDS, FORGOTTEN AND BRAND NEW

I went to support a local theatre last week and watched some improvised comedy. A nice young chap asked the audience to suggest for his character, a super power that wasn't really that powerful. I was about to proffer "The USSR 1969-1989, the Detente to Perestroika years" when someone else called out "the ability to spoonerize". The young drama graduate spent the subsequent few minutes playing a giant spoon.

This was actually quite entertaining but it did fortify my conclusion that young people know a great deal less than they should. Of course Adam, being both a liberal and paying giant sums to send his teenage sons to private school, stood up for them and said this was not true: they simply know different things - like how to upload photos onto Flickr from an iPhone while masturbating in zero gravity, the middle names of all the characters in TOWIE and where to find the funniest video footage of a cat smoking a pipe while driving a taxi on YouTube. Call me an old fuddy duddy but when did knowing what words mean become old-fashioned.

Then I realised that in the modern information age, words can change meaning faster than Cheryl Cole changes hair extensions (apparently the only people in the whole of the the USA who can understand a word she says are Appalachian hillbillies who cannot even understand each other). "Protecting civilians" used to mean setting up a cordon sanitaire around a group of innocent people being beseiged by invaders. Now it means bombing regimes in Oil- rich nations distrusted by the West into rubble.

And talking of protecting civilians, the marvellous job done by Dutch UN troops back in 1995 at Srebrenica is in the news again after the successful capture of Bosnian Serb General, Ratko Mladic. Taken alive, no less, not dumped in the Indian Ocean in his pyjamas. Alive but too ill to face trial...

Because Mladic, upon his arrest "Mubaraked". New word, this: "to Mubarak" is to collapse ill, certainly too ill for trial, after previous good health, at the precise moment of being held to account for a lifetime of untouchable wickedness. It is named after the fallen Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose sweet pink heart trembled too fast and gave way when he was about to be put into a Sharm el-Sheikh dock on account of being a murderous, toturing pig. Days later the phenomenon repeated itself when Mrs Mubarak was arraigned for trial for being a torturing murderous pig's wife, thereby having blood on her handbags. Mladic, a hitherto robust psychopath suffered it this week in Belgrade but there are antecedents in the UK.

Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw sent torturing, muderous pig, General Augusto Pinochet back home to Chile to put his feet up with a glass of chilled Frontera Carmenere after an enfeebling Mubarak episode in his Virgina Water mansion while awaiting extradition to Madrid. And staff-sacking, convicted thief and fraudster Ernest Saunders wheedled his way out of England's own Devil's Island hell hole, Ford Open Prison after Mubaraking his way ito the history books as the only man ever to completely recover from Alzheimer's Disease.

Kindly and civilised man of letters, FC Naylor, says carry on the trial over their quivering, breathless bodies, the homicidal fucks. (And shove the criminal Guinness plutocrat back inside, to boot.)

Please don't tell me off for my bad language, I think I've got a head coming on.

FC Naylor




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