Punters, Pants and Pulp

 While enjoying a breakfast BELT, not the kind I've enjoyed just after sunup on a Thai golf course with a gaggle of punters who were on the piss last night or may still be, I mean bacon, egg, lettuce and tomato, and waiting for the already late furnace repair guy, I got to thinking. 

Woah! Car tires screech. That might be the most loaded opening sentence of this blog ever. "Where's he gonna go from here?" So many springboards in one run-on, terribly awkward sentence! I could define punting. I don't mean the American kind like the MVP's of the first half of this year's Super Bowl. I don't mean the UK kind either like the kind of guy you might call "Delboy" who would have bet on the punters being the MVP's of the first half of this year's Super Bowl. I'll let you look up what "punters" are in Thailand. That's not where I was headed. And before you ask, the furnace is fine. I'm not reliving the nightmare of the broken boiler in my Mokpo apartment that wasn't fixed for weeks and I couldn't shower or wash dishes at home because the water was frozen. That's not where I was going either although it IS nice to have proper furnace heating and not water in the floor that freezes every winter. I know a lot of people like the Korean "ondol" heating but I always hated it. And, right on cue, the furnace turns on circulating 20-degree air so the floors aren't as hot as a black sand Olongapo beach while waist level to the ceiling is cold enough to hang a moose.

What I got to thinking about was something of a recurring thought process. I wonder if any of you ever do this... You're eating a BELT and you start thinking, "If I could bring this back in time and give one bite to the King of England, I'd be knighted!" But then you continue thinking rather than remaining in your happy daydream of the hedonistic pleasures of knighthood you wonder if you could make mayonnaise from scratch. There's eggs in it isn't there? What else? And they had bread back in the middle ages but I don't believe they had toasters. I'd have to fry the bread, probably over an open medieval flame. And the first ingredient of the BELT, the bacon, it's no cinch to smoke pork belly and slice it in thin strips either. The tomatoes and lettuce though... how good would THEY be?!?! I imagine produce has lost a LOT of flavour since then just through culling, pruning, cross-breeding, and genetically engineering for maximum profit at the cost of yumminess. And the eggs. They would probably be BURSTING with flavour! Not so easily fried without a Teflon skillet or plastic spatula to flip the eggs with, but mighty tasty nonetheless. Heck, the chicken that laid the eggs would be too! What the hay, I'd put a hunk of chicken on that sandwich too. And if chicken meat was better you KNOW beef would be too so throw a beef patty on the sandwich for good measure. My mouth is watering just imagining this now and I've already finished my BELT. To be completely honest, two of them. But what would I call this sandwich fit for a king? Let's see... bacon, egg, lettuce, tomato, chicken, and a hamburger patty... ZOUNDS, I'd call it a BELTCH!

I don't know if the name of the sandwich would catch on as well as the taste. Medieval folk had the time to express things in the King's English without representing entire words with single letters or syllables. Indeed, shortening words like barbecue to "barby" or "BBQ" might have been seen as needlessly stupefying one's audience. Oh I might use the acronym BELTCH in certain circles elite enough to understand its meaning, I am, after all, a knight, but I mightn't throw such pearls to the swine-like serfs and peasants England was crawling with in the dark ages.  

Yes, my dear reader, I believe we've hacked our way through that jungle of an opening sentence and rambled and trundled a la Henri Mouhot onto the topic of this post. The furnace repairman was supposed to come between 8 and 9 and it's now 11:22 so I didn't need to put on my pants, I might just as well have worn only...  my pants. English can be mystifying enough a language without adding to its impreciseness with desperate use of abbreviations uttered as statements of loyalty to the members of the groups blessed with their understanding. Regional definitions of punts and pants can frustratingly vary more than enough to befuddle even an accomplished purveyor of this bastard tongue, we don't need you assuming our accomplishment of deciphering seemingly random mashes of letters, or slapping us upside the head with our ignorance of them. Even before I was chasing wallpaper that will undoubtedly raise my station in life by producing several written statements a week the purpose of which is to do precisely what acronyms and abbreviations are often repurposed for - and that is to assure our betters, with just the perfect quantity of sniveling suppliance, that we subscribe to and wish to belong to their clubs, I had a healthy distaste for politicians, philosophers, sophists and salespeople who purposely spoke in elevated language for the purposes of hiding the flaccidity of their message behind the awe at their eloquence. Now the life has worn me down to a nub and I am on the fast track to becoming that which I had grown to hate, it behooves me to find fault in the minor area of the hypocrisy I have embraced... that I have not yet embraced: the overuse of abbreviations, acronyms, and short forms to give the impression of superior knowledge or status. 

I know you probably all use job jargon that can make communication quicker and more efficient. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a person who uses that jargon on people who don't work at the job. But I'm also talking about on the job too. Have you ever watched the TV show called "Bosch?" It is chock-O-block full of what I'm talking about! I watch it sometimes with Rob and Terri and I like it. It's got some good mystery and intrigue. But it's hard not to think of my days working security, or even before that my days building forts and forming clubs as a little boy as I watch. Just start with the name of the show. Try to think of other detective TV shows that were just the last name of the cop or detective. There shouldn't be that many, should there? Let's just list the ones I like: Columbo, Kojak, Banacek, Monk, Shaft, Ironside, Hunter, Mannix, MacGyver, Baretta, Luthor, Longmire, Cannon, I'd even include Holmes, Hammer, Hutch, Hart, Steele, Poirot, Magnum, Rockford, Marlowe, Mulder, Scully, Cagney, Lacey and we can't, I mean we just can't leave out Drebin. 

Do you know some of these names? Most of them? ALL of them? Can you name as many, oh I dunno... world leaders, CEO's, authors, journalists, governors of central banks, people who actually affect our lives? Maybe not. The reason will probably not surprise you either. Another thing I was pondering over the succulence of my sandwich this morning was the word "pulp." I recently watched a movie of that name with a young and sophisticated Michael Caine in it. I grew up in a lushly forested area of British Columbia where pulp was used to make paper. But I'm talking about orange juice pulp. Would any of us know what that is called without TV? I mean we don't really need a word for it do we? We could call it the lumps or something. 

Even the Sopranos. There's another last name show. TV taught us what is cool. It teaches us a LOT of things. All those cops are cool. A lot of them have cool sounding last names. Cannon, Baretta, Hammer, Steele, Magnum, some are kinda violent sounding. 

My point is, who is cooler than a cop? They can drive fast, shoot people, have super close friends but trouble with the spouse, have laissez faire attitudes but when there's an emergency they're serious as a heart attack. What's cooler than that? The way a good, hard-boiled cop or detective talks. How many of you don't know how to radio in a robbery? 2-11 in progress, right? That's like "pulp." We shouldn't know that. But TV taught us that. Here's a long laundry list of the abbreviations, codes, and acronyms used by cops and FBI that appear in Michael Connelly writing, including the show "Bosch." And there's a pic of Michael Connelly trying to look as cool as Bosch. 😄

I guess I just see all these acronyms, short forms, abbreviations, TicTalk as a bit immature. People trying to act cool. These days we're socialized to use this lazy language by social media as much as or MORE than TV, but us old folks know this pattern. It is something that makes me smile when I go to work and listen to all the jargon thrown out at meetings to make the new teachers aware of both their wormy little existence as well as the superiority of the speaker. Like we don't know the club password yet. I see it in a lot of other places too. I feel like it's a kind of microaggression that is largely unchecked because we buy into the "coolness" of it. We use those short forms cuz we wanna be cool too. 

I don't know. I'm probably overreacting again.