PLACARD – Acronym derived from the helter-skelter schedule of the modern child: Piano Lesson, Acting Class, Algebra, Revision, Dinner. The PLACARD existence is victimhood by the clock, a generation denied the random ease – or innocuous maladies – we’ve come to take for granted.
Enslaved to his advancement, the PLACARD child can only fit in a [...]
From Slanguage we move to Modern Maladies – a sampling of diseases I invented for the GP’s own Focus Magazine. Drop by in the next few weeks and you’ll learn all the icky and intimate details of every latter-day lurgy from Adaparazzi to Zusceptibility, with Diyitis in between.
In fact let’s start there:
DIYITIS – Common in [...]
SIZEIST – a mindset governed by physical truths, at the expense of any other dimension or capacity. Sizeism occurs from the crib, where growth percentiles from Baby Health Centres incite an unhealthy obsession in new parents. Five years on, the child will suckle on sizeism via class-photo preparations. Here lanky Emma (not her real name) [...]
DRILL – to seek information below the information swamping us. To drill is to scorn brain-candy, and hunt real food, a leap from laptop to Archive Library. Drilling is probing for the source, a spurning of the trivia that acts as knowledge. Singers who died in the bathroom? Judy Garland, Jim Morrison and Elvis… Yeah, [...]
SLOWCORE – musical genre given to fugue and deceleration. Scorning the mayhem of metal, or the effervescence of pop, slowcore is a bath of sparse acoustics and downbeat chords designed to leach away life’s helter-skelter. Exponents of slowcore music, otherwise nicknamed ‘heroin folk’, are Cat Power, Codeine, Low, Machine Translations and (historically) The Smiths and [...]
MEDIA MUMMY – a member of the teeth-and-tits brigade in most PR firms whose chief task entails the 24/7 vigil of talent-minding. Despised by journalists, the media mummy is consistently blond (by birth, bottle or both) with embalmed smile, and a gift for asphyxia-by-chat. Part chaperone, part bully, this groomed companera will open access to [...]
QUEL – suffix rife among story-tellers vying to prolong a singular success. Once upon a time, Jaws begat Jaws II, but such linear limitations have cramped investors who’d rather deal in prequels (as those vengeful Siths) or threequels (visit Middle Earth) or even interquels (where an auteur can flit amid backstory and the public’s bookmark [...]
BROKEBACK – regarding a love outside the bounds of John Howard’s Mateship Parameters. The term salutes Annie Proulx’s cowboys – Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar – who chose to exercise duties further to their job description while tending sheep in Wyoming. Two male squash partners, for example, may embark on a brokeback weekend, while [...]
JANUARY JOINER – fickle enthusiast of fitness centres who signs up, warms up, goes hard, then goes home, permanently. Often arriving with a post-Christmas blush (and ham-helped love handles), the January joiner will enlist in a series of Step, Pump and Body Attack, only to fade into sloth by Easter. Otherwise known as a New [...]
HYPERTASKING – the simultaneous handling of chores, messages, media streams, sudoku puzzles and conversations than no Jacobean brain could count, or grasp. Tagged as multitasking on speed, this super-overload is a symptom of our wifi era where mobiles and Blackberries are juggled between podcasts to tackle office memos, daycare fees, internal audits and Tuesday catch-ups [...]