Ugly Words and "Jacked-Up" Concepts

photos from Google Images

Sometimes I feel that someone has vandalized the culture of the American English language, spray painted all over it. Just trampled rough shod all over the beauty, nuances and melodies of our words and expressions. Or ... perhaps I've just been romantically involved...cohabitating... with this seductive, mesmerising and thoroughly precise French language for a long, long time.

The following are some of the words that create a feeling of a whooshing whirlpool of churning acid in the pit of my stomach whenever they are uttered in my presence:

Political Correctness: (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent.

Poppy cock on all of that! The most precise word, which has existed long before the invention of that awkward phrase would be Diplomacy. Simple diplomacy and respect toward other human beings. What does it take to grant everyone their humanity by displaying basic sensitivity? Not that complex, really.

Twitter or Tweet. An insult to birds and human beings. Personally I maintain communications with my friends, relatives and acquaintences, through letters,phone calls, cards, and emails. Birds communicate…at least the ones in my neighbourhood… though sophisticated vocal projections!

Newbie. Sound like a child’s toy, not a human being.

Venue : the locality where a crime is committed or a cause of action occurs; b. The locality or political division from which a jury is called and in which a trial is held; c. The clause within a declaration naming the locality in which a trial will be held; d. The clause in an affidavit naming the place where it was sworn to.

Mostly negative connotations...n'est-ce-pas?

Moi...I as a writer would prefer having a reading in a bookstore or an auditorium, as a painter I would show in a gallery, as a performer I would expect to appear in a nightclub, concert hall, stadium or theatre.

Who needs Venues? Sounds suspicious to me. I'd stay away from 'em, myself.

Foodie. Sounds like a word that a hungry toddler would use trying to get its parents attention.

I feel that one may be a gourmet or connoisseur, otherwise just an ordinary human being who must eat to live. On the other hand if one believes that one "lives to eat" that would mean that there is some sort of medical disorder which should be explored by a doctor of some kind…if you get my drift!

Blog. Such and ugly word. Soulds like something that would be clogging up my drain pipe.. I ‘d prefer to think of your so-called blogs as personal journals and thoughts that you choose to share with me… gifts…offerings. Something precious and beautiful.

Niggah. No matter what the spelling or context, it's ridiculoulsly insulting, unessessary and should eventually cease to exist, along with such terminologies as Honky, Spic, Kike, Wop, Chink, Wog, Bitch….etc.

Going viral : Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses or computer viruses...

Yada... yada... yada...yada...oh, Honey..pul-eese! The word Viral has the most horrific connotation I can image, conjuring up flu viruses, Leprocy, communicable diseases like the Bubonic Plague and A.I.D.S.

The word VIRAL had become infectuous and quite frankly, just hearing it makes me sick !

Transparency: a. Easily seen through or detected; obvious: transparent lies; .b. Free from guile; candid or open: transparent sincerity.

There is a fine line between clarity or honesty and a transparency which could render one completely vulnerable to manipulation and destruction. As in: "he/she is such a transparent fool!"

To Grow Your Jobs, Businesss or Money: If I wanted agricultural advice, I’d consult a Farmer or an Agronomist. Otherwise, I would prefer to expand my business, augment my investments, increase the number of jobs in order to restore the strength of our economy.

Often, even when someone is attempting to defend my position in some situtation I can actually feel that I am being raped by words and jargon.

For example, I recently recived a copy of a letter that my attorney sent to Random House Publishing Group, requesting a reversion of rights in order that I am able to re-issue my novel, Gingernsnaps.  This is an excerpt:

...We write on behalf of Authors Guild member Ms. Dolorys Welch-Tyson, author of the above- referenced work, with whom Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House Inc., entered into a publishing agreement in 1997.  Ms. Welch-Tyson has informed us that she requested a reversion of rights for the above-referenced work in May 2009, but was never granted such by Ballantine.  

Since Ballantine has made clear that it has no intention of exploiting the above-referenced work in any  manner in the future, we ask that it revert rights to Ms. Welch-Tyson immediately. ....




You see?

Exploit: 1) To make use of selfishly or unethically: a country that exploited peasant labor. See Synonyms at manipulate. 2). A vulnerability in software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise attacking an Internet host over the network. The Ping O' Death is a famous exploit.

or, course there is always the other way of looking at it:

Exploit:
1) To employ to the greatest possible advantage: exploit one's talents; 2). To advertise; promote.

Should I call the cops, or what?



“…the need to examine, analyze the language we see and hear… for the connotations all too often diverge wildly from the denotations, and, if we are unaware of that, our thinking can be hijacked.”


                                                                       ~Jerry DeNuccio

Expat Angst: Why Occuppy Wall Street? Part 2...

...Or the 2,000,002nd Reason I Left!

"Bye Y'all"
painting by delorys welch-tyson

Let me pick up where I left off…


Now, when there are two paychecks in a household a family unit might develop an erroneously inflated sense of economic worth. Suddenly the family finds that they are paying outrageous prices for small, often unnecessary things. The traffic suddenly decides to bear surrealist prices for flotsam and jetsum: whether it’s a ten-buck cup of coffee or a one bedroom apartment facing an alleyway in Manhattan for $4,000,000. The family begins to believe they are entitled to things that no longer have the value they had in their parents’ generation. No one is going to sell you an overpriced house or apartment to you if you are unwilling to buy it. It’s quite simple really. It simply requires a collective American and realistic philosophy regarding what something is actually worth and why.

Where once, one could achieve a decent education for a moderate price at a State University or for free at a City University, now everyone is vying for an overpriced ivy league education in order to major in philosophy or basket weaving, then wonder why they can’t find employment when they graduate.

google image

Whose fault is this?

Perhaps one should look around, while occupying Wall Street, to see who really might be occupying their jobs if they can’t find they can’t land one in their chosen field.

I realize I’ve been absent from the United States for quite some time, but I remember that all of my professional service providers, whether they be lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, editors or bank employees were all college graduates. People with college degrees (usually some kind of liberal arts endeavor) who worked for retail establishments were all occupying temporary gigs until they could figure out what profession they would pursue. I’m assuming they were all American people. Of course I never checked their birth certificates…so who knows.

Perhaps I’ve just been gone too long. I have no idea what my American brethren are talking about, anymore.

**Perhaps I should just find a venue where they’re trending, to grow my knowledge of things going viral so that I can offer more transparency to my dissed homies!

**(See my blog post: Ugly Words and Jacked-Up Concepts)

Expat Angst: Why Occupy Wall Street?

Recently I received a letter from a male friend in response to a blog I wrote concerning the precarious state of the European Union. My friend, a native New Yorker, is an educator, activist and Fulbright scholar and has for decades lived on the West Coast, in the San Fancisco Bay area. Here is an excerpt from his correspondence:


“I'm not sure what steps concealed the deconstruction of the middle class in Europe, if there has been such a deconstruction; but I know this one for the US. First we added a second working adult to the definition of middle class - so that two incomes were needed to produce the lifestyle previously accomplished with one. Then we offset flattened salaries with housing inflation so that the middle class could maintain once again the same lifestyle by borrowing off of its housing. And we lowered the costs of most everyday products by having them made in places where people earn only a couple of bucks a day for their labor. All the time, the share of the assets owned by those at the top, whose tax burden we steadily reduced to the point of starving government.”

This is my response:

When I was growing up in a moderately middle class black American family in New York City, my parents and their peers lived with a particular philosophy.

Although, both of my parents worked, my mother remained a homemaker until the last of her children reached school age. There were three of us. Their philosophy was that in a family, the role of the father’s income was to determine the standard of living in a family; the wife’s income would contribute to the quality of life. You see, this way, if one were to loose his/her job, the other could be able to kick for the duration, with minimum and workable adjustments in its day-to -day standard of living requirements.

In addition, the philosophy was that a family should never purchase a home where both full salaries would be required in order to qualify for a mortgage. This would often mean that one have to live in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, Stanford, instead of Greenwich, Pasadena instead of Beverly Hills, Oakland instead of Sausalito, if you understand my meaning. This way, one wouldn’t accumulate unnecessary overhead, thus limiting the economical mobility of the family which the mother’s additional income could provide. The mother’s income was to be used primarily for quality of life issues such as planning for higher education for the children and also for the cultural enrichment of their intellectual and spiritual growth.

My family’s philosophy evolved in a culture… a black American culture… where historically both the female and the male worked outside the home for its survival. (Of course, I realize that I’m talking basically about my own family and their peers, not the general American community, black, white or other.)

When the American male ethnic majority, through their women’s coercive tactics, reluctantly gave into their demands for the right to work for economic compensation, no theory was put in place as to how this would work in order to maintain the financial equilibrium of a family unit.

A backlash then ensued which granted women unequal, inferior, pay for equal work and at the same time required that in order to achieve a decent standard of living it would be necessary to find access to more than one paycheck for each housing unit, in most areas of the United States..

Would you like me to continue?

Blaxpat Quote for November: Living Abroad

Some have said that, as a foreigner, it's difficult making friends abroad. This is what I tell them:

"The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don't need any fingers."
                                                                                                     ~ Larry Flynt


Alors...bon séjour!

The Occupy Wall Street Movement?

Being far, far away and all, in France, surrounded by EU madness, I am completely baffled by what this Wall Street Movement in the States is really about.

I’ve been wondering, though, if perhaps the brochure, from the Wall Street English Institute, below may be at the heart of the matter?

Really…they gave me this!

They claim that they are endorsed by Cambridge University!

Une Connerie Extraordinaire!

The most politically questionable sculptural installation project in Europe in the last decade has to be that of the completion of the Fountain du Soleil and the Sept Scultures Illuminées de Sept Continents. This monument to something not yet clear to me, now defines the Place Massena, which is in my opinion …the heart and Soul of the City of Nice.

Had I considered myself pudique I hardly would have settled in France…particularly Nice... but this most recent project has tested the limits of my comprehension.

At the centre of the Fontaine du Soleil… standing haughty and very, very, white (marble) in all of his “butt naked glory” at the entrance to the Old Town of Nice is Apollo!

photos by dwelch-tyson

All of you know him, I’m sure: the God…Greek God, I emphasize…of light and the sun, truth and prophecy, enlightenment medicine, healing, plague, music, poetry, arts, archery…everything… and I suppose our very existence as well.

He is the son of Zeus and Leto and twin brother of the “chaste “(ah…hem, look, I didn’t write this stuff. I wasn’t even born yet) huntress Artemis. Surrounding Him are five bronze statues of fabulously buffed naked men and a voluptuous broad or two...one toting a baby... accompanied by their animals. Allegedly, these Greco-Roman mythological folks represent the planets, Earth, Mars, Mercury and Saturn.

Yeah, right!

The inauguration took place on June 20th of this year (I happened to be in New York at the time and missed out on the “festivities”). Apollo is now back at his old location at the Place Massena after almost 40 years of censure.

It was rumoured that he was banned  back in the 70s for being “overly well endowed”. This I find hard to believe because, in my opinion ( based on, of course, quite limited experience in these matters), he appears to me to be in completely perfect proportion throughout…if you get my drift.

But then what do I know? I’ve never been with a Greek!

So, back then,  after considerable controversy, Apollo was exiled to North Nice to the Sports Stadium, Parc des Sport Charles Ehrmann.

To my way of thinking, a sports stadium seemed to be a far more appropriate place to reside, outside of perhaps as a centrepiece for a Gay Disco, for this particular Deity.

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google image

This Apollo now complements the contemporary art installation commissioned from the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa which frame the tracks of the Tramway.

Plensa’s towering seven white resin sculptures, which punctuate the square, are of naked men. These men are sitting on 10 meter high poles. Each man lights up the night with a play of light which bounces from one statue to the other signifying communications between the seven continents. 
This interplay of light flashing reduces the Tramway to a dubious image of an ominous phallic image snaking its way though core of Nissa La Bella.

I have been informed that the work is called “Conversations in Nice.”

Yeah, right!


It’s not the Apollo statue itself which perturbs me, it is the cumulative message of the entire centre city installation!

When a friend, appealing to my own personal sense of swagger bragged to me, years ago, how her Niçois population was rather “butch” I had no idea that this was what they were referring to.

Considering the sorry state of Greece today, it hardly seems fitting to have that kind of karma dominating the downtown area of a major French city!

Running Late!

Google Images



View from Windows on the World Restaurant

  I realize that this is October 11th…an entire month after most expats have posted their remembrance of 9/11. Finally here is mine.

So sorry about running late!

We had already been living in France, in Villefranche Sur Mer, for over two years on that fateful day when we were running late for an appointment in Nice.

My husband called me into our Den, pointed to the TV screen and said, “Look at this! What do you think of this?”

We both stared… horrified… at the image of a blazing tower of the World Trade Center. The news announcer had said that a plane had flown into the building.

Realizing that, as native New Yorkers, many of our friends and relatives were still living in the New York City Metropolitan area and that it appeared that they were now under attack, we looked at one another…speechless…and frightened in a manner we had never experienced in our entire adult life.

"Perhaps those N.Y.U. film students are up to their old shenanigans again…seizing the TV stations...or something...,” I quipped, in a misguided attempt at adding levity to our state of confusion..

What one earth was going on?



Should we call home?



We did. All the lines were busy.



We were running late for our appointment in Nice.



We turned off the TV got in our car and immediately turned on the news on Riviera Radio, just in time too hear the announcer state quite flatly that ‘the Twin Towers were no more!”

Impossible!



That massive structure… the Titanic of Manhattan (I had prophetically called it for years), could not possibly be gone! Transforming from a flaming inferno of death and destruction... to now toxic rubble. After all, we had just had dinner with friends at its restaurant, Windows on the World, a couple of years earlier for my birthday!

Impossible! Ridiculous!

Those film school students should be flogged, I thought again, just not wanting to believe.

We went though the rest of the day, after our appointment, running errands and buying newspapers. Not a single person we encountered in our local French Riviera towns seemed to us to have heard or read anything, despite the screaming headlines. Not one person broached the subject. Not a twit or tweet…so to speak.

Anyway when we finally got through to various friends and relatives in New York City, over the next few days, this is what we heard:

“I was running late…looked out my window and saw a plane flying into one of the towers…”

Another:

“I was running late, I turned on the TV to see that a second plane had already flown into the World Trade Center building. I realized I would not be going to work!”

Another:

“I was running late. My view from Jersey faces lower Manhattan. When I looked out my window, I saw smoke. I put on my binoculars to see what was happening. There was no way I was going to work that day!”

Another:

“My husband and I were running late on the Long Island Railroad. When we arrived at Grand Central there was pandemonium. Everyone screaming about a terrorist attack in lower Manhattan. I realized, then that I had no physical courage.”

And another:

“I was running late. When I arrived at the lobby of my apartment building, my Doorman said that there had been an attack on the World Trade building. Obviously I wasn’t exacting going to go to work. All I know is that I better get paid this month!”

And finally…

"I was running late to my job at the World Trade Center.. If I had arrived minutes earlier, I would not be here talking to you at this very moment because I would have been in the building's elevator when the first plane hit the building!”

My conclusion is that, as my Mom would say, I am "truly blessed” to have had tardy friends and relatives!

For the record though, despite surviving the worst catastrophe in North American history committed on North American soil, the general fall- out resulted in a certain amount of alienation from friends Stateside.. An alienation which generally grows between those who have physically survived a holocaust and those who only experienced one in theory or by distance.


Those survivors in New York had to continue to work and breath in contaminated air. All had to work, in various ways, through posttraumatic stress disorders and a lingering and haunting fear that there had not yet been closure in the assault.

Nevertheless we all still live…except one friend who I lost three years ago to the long-term effects of having to continue to work at her office near Ground Zero.


She had been running late that day as well.