Getting Hip with Language

 

Sunny seems to be just as relieved as I am to see that the mouse population in the barn tack room has been cancelled.

I've seen her out and about and happily socializing more than usual over the past few days. 

Maybe the stress of dealing with all those little monsters taking over her abode has lifted a dark cloud for Sunny.

And, I know that, for me, the dread of opening the door to the tack room to see the collateral damage in the mouse traps is diminishing. 

And, Ahh! I feel pretty hip. 

 Now, I can use the term:  cancel culture!

Cuz I have officially become an experienced cancel culturalist. 

 I've been engaged in just that practice over the past week with my frequent loading and reloading of the mouse traps. 

The goal:  to cancel out every mouse that dares enter Sunny's domain. 

And, it looks like I've succeeded.  

Nice to see Sunny happy and social again. 

I have a feeling that the mice, during their takeover of the tack room, were engaged in their own brand of cancel culture. 

Drive that cat crazy so ya can eat all her food and then poop in her dish when you've emptied it. 

Well, in this case, the two-legged human enemy came along with an arsenal of mouse-cancelling artillery, and it worked, at least for the time being. 

So, both Sunny and I can go on to bigger and better aspects of our lives, like "quiet quitting." 

I can quietly quit worrying about how many dead bodies I'm gonna carry out of the tack room while Sunny can quietly quit stressing over her Meow Mix always disappearing before she gets a chance to eat it. 

I kinda like that term "quiet quitting," and I'm thinking that maybe some of us have been engaged in the practice for a long time. 

I read an article this morning not long after I "woke" up about "quiet quitting." 

Seems quiet quitters impose their tactics on jobs, with relatives, with friends, etc. 

Has anybody out there noticed someone quietly quitting on you lately?

Better wake up!

You see, like "cancel culture," I must have been asleep when quiet quitting came onto the scene.

Then, one day I "woke" up and there it was---talking heads suggesting that all the wokes in the world were on a roll doing the cancel-culture stuff.

What are the wokes, I wondered.  

Was this a dream?  

Did  I miss something one day when these words and phrases I'd never heard used in such ways suddenly burst onto the scene as weapons of political destruction?

Just call someone a "woke," and you'll get 'em where it hurts.  

Never mind that the someone hasn't the foggiest idea of what you're talking about, but, by golly, you hit 'em way below the belt. 

Problem is they were so naive, thinking you'd mistakenly used a verb principal part as a weird noun that they had no idea you had insulted them. 

Same is true about the verbal attacks we see infiltrated within the overly redundant 20-word talking points employed these days in most of our political discourse.

Would you believe this person that's running as an Independent is really a Democrat and a "woke" and a leftist on top of that?

How sacrilegious can it get! That candidate needs to go directly to jail and definitely not get elected.

I wonder if being called a woke when you have no idea what a woke even is could be grounds for a slander or libel suit. It must be really really bad with the less than complimentary tone in which it's used. 

In fact, the way it's used these days makes it sound like the person is the lowest form of slime ball on the face of the earth. 

I remember when we were kids and someone wrote the F-word on the side of the white portable building on the Lincoln School grounds.  

At the time, we had no idea that it was a terrible thing to say, let alone to write it on a building. 

One Saturday night at our home on North Boyer, we three older kids made up a game.  Someone would say a word and then someone else would have to think up as many words as possible that rhymed with that word. 

We soon figured out a strategy---that the speediest way to get the most words was to just go down the alphabet. 

Eventually, someone threw out the word "duck."

It took a only couple of words yelled out to rhyme with duck before my dad came into the kitchen and firmly cautioned us never to say THAT again. 

It took me a while to figure out which of the words brought out his ire. 

Then, I remembered all the recent stir about the word written on the portable at school. 

Hmmm!  That must be a bad word, I reasoned, and, as time went on, my assumption proved true. 

Well, that four-letter word "woke" seems to be just as bad these days.  

I do use it when referring to coming awake from a sleep and I'm wondering if a "woke" may be someone who has awakened to the quiet quitting and the cancel culture and all the other bad things in the world. 

I guess I'll figure it out some day, but for now, I'm happy for Sunny and I'm happy for me that my recent employment of cancel culture has worked quite well with the mouse population at the Lovestead. 

And, with all that, it's time to quietly quit my silliness and get on with the day. 

Thanks for your patience with today's mutterings.  

Happy Tuesday.