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Things are fit and fine
There are people in the world who lie awake at night worrying about nuclear holocausts and discovering cures for exotic ailments and making their next ten million dollars and buying houses with west wings in Emirates Hills.
- PUBLISHED: Fri 4 Nov 2011, 6:25 PM UPDATED: Tue 15 Aug 2023, 11:16 AM
And it worries me exceedingly that I never dream lofty when the lights are off. I dream silly, inane stuff.
The grandeur and majesty of great thought has passed me by when the lights are off. Bet Plato and Socrates and that whole gang didn't have that problem. They soared, I merely skim.
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I lie there thinking why is it that 'awesome' is good but 'awful' is bad and if some of whatever it is, is a plus thing how can all of it be so terrible. Go on, ask yourself the same question, and see if you can come up with an answer. Then I think okay great, let it go, we cannot get everything right, but how can a 'fit' be a disease and also mean that you are medically in good shape. How can you be ill and well at the same time, does it make any sense to you?
When they were sort of beavering away getting the language into order and writing it on tablets or chiselling it in stone wasn't there someone around who said, I say chaps, this is a bit much, I mean, the same word can't mean exactly the opposite and you don't have to be mean about it, I am just making a suggestion?
And didn't the chief language maker say, hmmmmmm, you have a point.
Probably someone butted in and said, oh, you, always creating trouble and splitting hair…
…hairs.
What?
It is splitting hairs, not hair.
No, it's not.
Yes, it is…
No, it's not, when you argue you split one hair.
What if there are several arguments, then it's hairs…
And you are reading this and saying, what's with this guy, get a life, there are huge problems out there in the real world, these are not problems.
Obviously, we are not on the same page, you are probably thinking how the global economic equations should change. See, you aspire. Me, I am working myself into a lather about the word 'fine'. How can it mean the sun is shining on the one hand but, on the other, you get fined for not being fine. And I can never understand how anything can be fine about being fined.
Are you fine?
No, I am not, I just got fined.
Cheer up, you'll feel fine when you have paid the fine.
Fine, just get off my back, I'll pay the fine.
See what I mean.
Then there is 'order'. I order you to carry out my orders to keep everything in order. Say that again.
That's the problem. You guys lie in bed and think of the board meeting and the impression you are going to make on the boss and tuning your Powerpoint presentation and there I am being trivial. Like take the word, 'bash'. It means hammering someone you don't like, come on bash him hard, but it also means having a good time so how can you have a good time if someone's determined to knock your teeth out? Are you having a bash being bashed? This sort of thing may not trouble you but I drive myself into a frenzy. Do you know that balmy is a pleasant day as well as the derivative for being nuts. Like the balmy (changed to barmy for rhyming purposes) army that follows England's cricketers around, regardless of how balmy the weather is.
Take base. It means solid, a foundation, something to build on. It also means pathetic, the pits, ugly, disgusting, now how do you reconcile the two?
You just don't, you just squash the pillow and wonder why they named a month after an army on the go.
bikram@khaleejtimes.com
