Shoot+the+puppy,+jump+the+shark,+Barry+Ronge,+Sunday+Times

Sunday Times, Magazine, SPIT ’N POLISH, 01 October 2006
=Shoot the puppy, jump the shark=


 * //Want to stave off the horrors of the world? Why not put your feet up and read on about the flashing phrases that are forcing their way into the vernacular//**


 * BARRY RONGE**

As I said last week, I am still hiding my eyes from the realities of our dizzy little world. The current political battles around leadership succession in the UK and here in SA are abrasive enough to grind down words like “ethics” and “responsibility” to the point where they resemble ugly little stumps over which we can only trip ourselves.

Then Pope Benedict XVI took on the international Muslim community, panicked, made an apology that was not an apology, and reopened an old religious schism, at a time when the world doesn’t really need any new excuses for a fight. But just at the moment, I couldn’t be bothered.

So I’ll stick to words again this week, as I did last week, but while that column was about words that are fading and dying, this is all about the latest flashing phrases that are forcing their way into the vernacular. I found them in Tony Thorne’s entertaining book Shoot the Puppy.

I have this thing about dogs, so a title like Shoot the Puppy gets my blood up. As it turns out, this is slang idiom for “taking the worst, most unpopular decision”. We used to talk about “grasping the nettle” but be honest — when last did any of you even see a nettle, let alone suffer nettle sting?

But the news that “we are going to have to shoot the puppy” has an immediate visceral sense of radical, unpopular action and bad consequences. It’s not elegant but it gets things said, and the phrase will be with us for as long as “at the cutting edge” or “at the coal face” have been.

Thorne highlights words that started almost as gags but have become part of urban vocabulary. The best example is “metrosexual” which was once a gimmick, wisecrack word, but I now hear it in sales pitches, used as a label for a social demographic and as an admiring adjective that has edged into the territory previously occupied by the “well-groomed”.

I am less sure that its offshoot “heteroflexible” will survive the decade, but it is a fun style word, unlike the similarly devised “pomosexual” which has been described as “postmodern sexuality”. That’s a concept I cannot grasp at all, except to imagine that it means “enforced chastity” and I think both the word and the concept will go at about the same time that the current vogue for men’s striped shirts will fade. That will be, I think, by mid-December. After that only “entreprenerds” will wear stripes. Don’t you love “entreprenerds”? It is my favourite new word.

The well-worn cliché “the cutting edge” is also, says Thorne, being edged out by “the bleeding edge”, signifying ideas that are so far into uncharted territory that they are still potentially dangerous. Indeed, a lot of the new words Thorne offers are still operating at “the bleeding edge”.

He cites the verbal explosion surrounding the word “blog” which has raced into general usage as quickly as most politicians pursue a bribe. It derived originally from the word “weblog” but it rapidly spawned “bloggers” to describe those who create blogs, and they are collectively known as the “blogosphere”. People who compulsively read blogs are “bleaders”. Internet sites that carry lists of blogs are called “blogrolls”. If a blogger publishes a book, it is called a “blook”.

“Avant garde” is out and “directional” is in. There’s a new corporate zone called “disaster capitalism” which means profiteering in the wake of global catastrophes, and “losing the plot” is being replaced by “jumping the shark”. Frankly, I think that at least half of Thorne’s neologisms are “jumping the shark” a little, but I love them. They freshen the language which is better than letting our urbanspeak “commit vanillacide”.


 * //Shoot The Puppy// by Tony Thorne is published by Penguin Reference.


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A208355**

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