A New Year’s Resolution (Please Don’t Laugh Out Loud)

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new year for me. And I’m…

I don’t generally make New Year resolutions. I usually just carry forward the resolution I made back in 2006, which was to learn how to play ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ on the electronic keyboard. It’s been eight years and I am proud to say that I have successfully cultivated the ability to open my keyboard songbook to exactly the right page, without even having to check the index for the page number first. So there. Also, ‘maple leaf rag easy for beginners tutorial plz help’ shows up on my YouTube suggestions now. No small feat.

This year, however, is different. This year, I do have an original, contemporary resolution. Three, in fact. They are:

1. Do not use ‘like’ in written or oral communication unless required for the purposes of comparison or the description of a feeling of moderate affection or for usage in the idiom ‘like attracts like’.
2. Do not use ‘LOL’/ ‘lol’ in written or oral communication, except in conjunction with ‘lipop’.
3. Do not use emoticons. No exceptions whatsoever.

Recently, my mother most kindly pointed out certain inflections in my speech:

Me: “So I was like…”
Mother: “STOP SAYING ‘LIKE’, STOP IT, STOP IT!”
Me: “Lol dude, chill out”
Mother: *disowns me, weeping*

I’ve been using “like” an awful lot these days. I begin, conjugate AND finish all my sentences with the word. It’s been impinging on any semblance of communicative skills I like (oh God, there it is again) to think that I possess. For example:

What Mushroom Sup wants to say: “The blinding sun cut through the azure skies, and a whiff of waffles hung in the air like ivy creepers to a brick wall.”

What Mushroom Sup really says: “It was like…the sun was like totally harshing my mellow, dude…and like, it was SO like…WAFFLE-Y. Like really, dude.”

I don’t even know how to stop doing it. I know I should be able to, since it’s my brain and my vocal cords, but sometimes I feel like how Stephen Hawking would feel if his speech synthesizer went rogue.

What Stephen Hawking wants to say: “Eureka! The Secret to Life, the Universe and Everything is this fabulous little molecule that I created using general relativity and time-space continuums and this miniscule quantity of dark matter that I made earlier.”

What Stephen Hawking actually says: “Fart jokes, lol”

[Also, heartfelt apologies; that’s the closest I could get to Science jargon. And yes, I watched Interstellar.]

And don’t get me started on ‘lol’. I blame this entirely on social media, but now, instead of actually laughing when someone makes a joke, I just say “lol”. I don’t laugh. Yup, I say ‘laughing out loud’ but don’t actually laugh.

[Also, this is irrelevant but ‘lol’ looks like a the head and arms of a little stick figure man doing the ‘Walk like an Egyptian’ dance, while in the process of drowning. You’ll never un-see this.]

Anyway, I think this presages the beginning of the end – people replacing actions with labels or words describing the action instead. Picture a world with people sitting around saying, “walking”, “dancing”, “eating”, “selling soul to devil, brb” etc. This is okay to an extent – actually, it’s pretty much the plotline of ‘127 hours’ – but imagine the state of professional sports.

“Sprinting super fast”
“Sprinting faster”
“Laps you, lol”
“No, you don’t!”
“TELEPORTS”

But you know what’s even worse? Not even saying the words. Which is exactly what has happened with the invention of emoticons.

Every single social media website that I am a member of is always flooded with a barrage of :), 😀 etc. Sometimes I feel obliged to use them myself. “Happy birthday. Period” sounds a little bit curt, I know, and I’m tempted to put that nose-less smiley there just to…mellow the harsh a little bit. But that’s just the easy way out – I could mellow the harsh just as well with a “…and have a great day!” But I don’t. Because I’m lazy and a colon + closed parenthesis is so much easier to type, you know. Saves me a lot of time – valuable time I could use to squeeze at least seven more ‘likes’ and three ‘lols’ into my sentences.

We’re gradually moving towards a universal language. And I’ll admit, the world does need one so that non-English speaking nations can collaborate easily on massive international projects and the like. But do you want that language to be emoji? Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon would be accompanied not by “A great leap for mankind” but by “:O #amazed”. The famous ambiguous stanzas of Frost’s poetry would be replaced by “:S” (an emoticon that I do not understand at all). Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” would become “;)” and Gandhi’s last words would be “:/ Not cool, dude”.

So this is a humble plea to humanity: Don’t let words become extinct. Because that would make me, like, really, :(.

This is how it all starts…

Um, hello.

I’m not really very sure about how one begins one’s first blog. My mother suggested a friendly greeting. I’ve decided to take her advice because she’s possibly the only person who will read this blog, and I must respect my only fan.

Note: My mother has just read this, and says that I can’t call her a fan until she reads a few more of my blog posts and is convinced of my authorial ability. Till then I can only refer to her as an ‘unbiased critic’.

Anyway, thinking of a friendly greeting was harder than I imagined. The first thing that sprung to mind was, ‘Dearest Diary’, but that would be an open declaration of dissociative identity disorder. It would also make this blog seem like it’s going to be filled with stories of flying ponies and pink, um, things favoured by tweens…which would attract paedophiles like moths to a light. So I began to think about ways people greet each other. The list was quite depressing.

The first was “hey” (volume, pitch and duration of time differ according to IQ level, gender and occupation). But I can’t really use “hey” in a blog, because it needs to accompanied by certain vocal trills in order to be effective. For example, if I were Paris Hilton, the ‘y’syllablle would have to be so high-pitched that only dogs could hear it. If I were to stress the ‘y’syllable for an inordinately long stretch of time, I’d probably be a cow.

Now that I think of it, in that case, I’d probably be saying ‘hay’ and not ‘hey’.

Variations of “hey” include “hey you” and “hey there”. But “hey you” is only appropriate if it’s followed by, “Are you looking at me?” and a punch in the nose, while “hey there” goes hand and hand with a friendly slap on the back.

“How’s it going?” is another type of greeting employed by several. But this, to me, seems rather vague. My immediate response is usually, “How’s what going?” The answer is generally, “It.”
A little more prodding leads them to come up with a very unclear explanation of what “it” might constitute. “Things,” they say. What do they mean by that? And what do I say? “Hmm…ah yes, the things. The things are doing fine. The things are really great. I love the things.” That sounds a teensy bit wrong. And creepy.

You could avoid all the unnecessary conversation and simply reply with the universally accepted response, “It’s good.” But then you’re obliged to ask, “And how’s it going for you?” If they too use the accepted response, the conversation is shot to pieces. You stand there, smiling politely and staring at your shoes, hoping that somehow, your shoelaces will get a life of their own and start spelling out words and coherent sentences which might help you resurrect the conversation. This continues until your fellow conversationalist says, “Well, I’ve gotta get going now, see ya,” and scampers away, hoping to never “see ya” again.

But perhaps the most banal and inane greeting of all is the colloquial, “What’s up?” I’ve spent many a restless hour pondering the appropriate response to this question. The internet throws up a number of responses – this is apparently a question that plagues many. Some replies such as ‘the sky’ and ‘the ceiling’ take the question quite literally. A few of the less intellectual replies involve uncalled-for references to body parts that would not be mentioned in polite conversation. Until now, I haven’t discovered an intelligent/ witty response to this nebulous greeting. Recently, I came upon a friend whom I hadn’t met in a while. “What’s up?” he greeted me. My brain was so befuddled by this question that I eventually responded, “Fine, thank you. And how are you?” He looked at me sympathetically, like I might be slightly slow. Which is exactly how I felt.

However, the most despicable of them all is, “Sup?” This contracted version of the already minute “What’s up?” was concocted simply for people who are too lazy shape their lips into two syllables.
Nowadays, I like to reply (wittily, if I may say so myself) “No, thanks; I just ate lunch.” But since most people don’t get my subtle reference to “sup” originally being a contracted form of ‘supper’, they look at me like I may not be completely right in the head.

So, at the end of my search for the perfect greeting, I decided to return to square one. To the first greeting used by the English-speaking world. The first word we say when we answer the telephone.

Hello.