You know a lot of people say things like “The English Language is an Amazing Thing”… which, true, it is. I had a friend in college who was a Japanese playwright, meaning she was Japanese and wrote plays, not that she wrote Japanese plays… because, said she, she just couldn’t write good stuff in Japanese. Too structured. Too many rules. In English, you can just make shit up.

Which brings me to the point that although the English language IS an amazing thing, the people that speak it are just downright kooky, which I think counts for a lot more than the language itself. That’s like blaming the car for the accident and not the drunk who was driving it.

Old BookHere’s one example of said kooky behaviour: we say shit all the time that we have no clue what it actually means, or sometimes we know what it means, but don’t think about the words that make up the expression. A good example is “you can’t fool me… that’s the oldest trick in the book”. Unless you’re a whore, you probably don’t actually have a book of tricks, and even then I guess you’d have to be an old whore to have an old trick book, unless you inherited it from another old whore, in which case I guess you could be quite spritely. And even if you are an old whore with an old book with tricks in it, there’s really no accounting for why your old tricks would be fooling anyone. Except their wives, maybe.

Now let’s forget the whore for a second and assume there’s a book of dastardly tricks out there, designed for fooling people. Where the fuck is it and how do I get a copy? Because I’m telling you, I fool no one, and it’s starting to get on my nerves. Besides, the expression (that’s the oldest trick in the book) seems to imply that the oldest trick in this mystical trick book is somehow the worst, so I’d really love to get a hold of the methodology for some of the newer tricks…. some trick so tricky that no one has seen it before… except maybe the guy that wrote it in the book.

And who is the guy? The trick-collector-writer-downer-in-the-trick-booker. Because I’d like to find him, beat him up, and steal his job (and his book).

See… English speakers are a bunch of crack-heads.

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