Brat and brassic
Learning new words is good. Today I finally tracked down "brat," the one all the kids are using. From the context I assumed some successor to "lit" and "woke," but it's more complicated. According to one Charli XCX it means "to embrace your messiness and vulnerability." Hey, I'm all about messiness. (Vulnerability is another matter.) A brat used to be an incorrigible child, so to call yourself brat is to commandeer a word that others use against you, like "queer." Apparently Kamala is brat.
"Brassic" is more obscure. According to today's Guardian it means flat broke and then some. The new UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has used it to describe the finances she inherited from the Conservatives. Brassic comes from the colloquial pronunciation of "boracic lint," Cockney rhyming slang for "skint." Who knew they were still creating Cockney rhyming slang? Anyway, Britain is (to use a New York expression) on the balls of its ass. (Brassic is also a television series I know nothing about.)
We're going to need new words to describe this year, if we manage to survive it. The Tories routed, the French flirting with fascism before catching themselves, and whatever the hell is going on here. For example:
Remember The Villages, described as America's largest retirement community? Four years ago four residents were charged with voter fraud because they thought it was all right to vote twice for Trump. One resident drove through town in a golf cart shouting "White power!" and was rewarded when Trump posted the video on TS. He won't be posting this Xweet of two hundred golf carts at a rally for Kamala Harris while "Freedom" plays on the sound system. Seventy-five percent of Villagers are registered Republicans. If this trend continues, J.D. Vance will announce that old people should not vote because like the childless, they have no "skin in the game." Only grandchildren and great-grandchildren who will never get to vote if Project 2025 happens.
Here's an eye-catching headline: "Paris Exhibition Celebrates Global Spread of Surrealism." And just in time, I thought, but they mean the art movement in the twentieth century, not the increasingly weird reality we live in. What's not surreal about a major party's candidate for vice president fending off racist attacks on his wife from his own side by saying, "Look, I love my wife so much...Obviously she's not a white person and we've been attacked...but I love Usha. She's such a good mom." And a credit to her race. Meanwhile the stable jenius who chose him was saying, "Government has many more stairs than private. We put up like one stair, they put up like twelve." He'll build a stairway to paradise, such a beautiful stairway you won't be able to stand it. When do the news manufacturers stop treating this old man like an addled Abe Simpson? This is not a game, it's just surreal.
I'm not sure why Magritte's "Dominion of Light" is surreal, but I love it. Makes a lot more sense than Trump.
The Paris Olympics organizers have apologized to "Catholics and other Christian groups" who complained about the Last Supper parody in the opening ceremony. It was meant to raise awareness of "the absurdity of violence between human beings," but it didn't quite land. Still, they should not have run away. With Piaf they should have said "Je ne regrette rien." It appears the performance was actually a parody of "Feast of the Gods" by Jan van Bijlert, and the person in blue was Dionysus. Christians are always looking for something to gripe about.
Comments
Post a Comment