May I interject for a moment?

I was feeling particularly murderous today contemplating how it was possible that our society allows stupid people to continue living; they are such a waste of space and a real drain on the general level of intelligence. The way that they can be so unbelievably stubborn in maintaining a detrimental stance in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary just because they have decided they don’t like you, or the way they have of making you feel bad for understanding more than they do and how they make you co-conspirators in the race to stupefy the species by ensuring you dumb down everything you do in order that a three year old might understand it…The minute such a person is identified they should be shot to ensure that no further pollution of the gene pool occurs…

Thankfully J saved me from acts unmentionable by using an interjection in an email which had the very fortunate effect of side-tracking my brain.

The word he used was ‘Meh’. Indicative of indifference in this case I believe. This led me to a chase for the meaning of the word, which led to the discovery that it was an interjection; at which point I was confounded, as I always thought interjections where a kind of variation of interruptions, but I was wrong.

An interjection is a word or short phrase used to express emotion. It contributes nothing to sentence structure and exists solely to describe a feeling e.g. Grr Argh! (mild anger) Bwahaha! (fiendish delight), Phwoar! (desire), Geez! (annoyance), Humph! (disgruntlement), Narf (silly nonsense), Bleuch (something distasteful), Feh! (disgust or contempt) or Meh! (who cares?). And the beauty of them is that they can be used in multiple situations to describe multiple feelings – just change the inflection and hay presto!

I have always thought that the English language was something to be treasured. I adore Shakespeare and love reading the classics like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. I prided myself – somewhat snobbishly I will freely admit – that I spoke good English and had a relatively wide vocabulary in comparison to the general population. Regardless of the fact that my sketchy memory and twisted tongue didn’t always coordinate very well (which resulted in the creation of many new and interesting word combinations - ‘Upendicular’ was a favourite), I always thought that to be able to form concise sentences and use the precise word to describe the exact item under discussion was the height of true language mastery.

Unfortunately for me the attainment of language mastery is unachievable. As it is a left-brain centred and analytical pursuit it does not respond well to emotional interference. Whilst it is eminently possible to adequately describe a towering fury or the feeling of total disgust, you actually have to think to do so, which, when you are IN a towering fury or feeling totally disgusted, is generally impossible. Language mastery fails entirely and spluttering ensues. However, a well placed “For F***s Sake!” or guttural “Gah!” reminiscent of a cat’s hiss, does brilliantly to describe both these states and expresses the feeling behind the words so much better, so much more succinctly and so much more satisfyingly than a descriptive passage ever could. Well, it does for me anyway.

So, these days I have decided I don’t care that much about being superior; I am just going to enjoy my language as it comes to me. Not so cleaver as I though I was hay? So much for my plan to massacre all stupid people.

One last comment: I like interjections. My spell checker does not.

And on that thought, I’ll leave you to decipher my feelings right now by interjection:

Aarrghh! Goddam! Duh?! Sheesh!