metaphorically speaking...

I love the English language. I was fortunate to have been schooled by an Irish nun and brought up by parents who spoke and wrote the language in the most proper of manner. My late father would not hesitate to correct grammar and pronounciation, holding fast to his own colonial schooling. The British way was the only way or I'd risk grating him so badly he might have had to smack me over the head for attempting Americanize (with a Z, no less) my speech. Til today, my mother still speaks in full sentences, with punctuation marks in all the correct places and every effort to ensure that T's are crossed and I's are dotted... ok, so that's not quite a clever metaphor but that's not the point of this blog entry.

English is the language that I live IN. Everything about my being is defined, described, felt, remembered, recounted, dreamt up and shot down in English. Even speaking in another language or dialect requires the point to be made in English, albeit in the head, before a process of translation occurs in the brain... the translator not unlike like a nifty application that you can add to Mozilla Firefox to do cool things.

So, in a way, you could look at it in another way and say that English is everything to me. And because it is so much a part of me, I like the tinkering with words and the phrases that emerge to say something relevant in a particular moment, which hits home a point with brevity and wit. Which explains why I like watching Rowan Atkinson in Black Adder or have a simple enjoyment of British wit, by the way. Ironically, I'm a lost cause with poetry... it dramatically sheers over the top of my head...

What I had never realised is that I it was a sub-conscious challenge to myself to always find a way to say things in a different way, different manner and using different words all the time; nuances in shifting a punctuation mark, double entendres, the economy of words heavily laced with meaning, vivid visuals impacted by words and disguised barbed wittiscm that is lost on all in a crowd except those who matter. Ok, ok, sometimes it's lost on them too. But it thrills me and I love it.

Anyway, back to here and now and why I decided to write this particular entry. Along the way, I have crafted a few metaphors and phrases of my own and before I lose them to the vast expanse of a nebulous past space, more popularly known as loss of memory, here are a couple:

"Be there and be hip or be square if you skip" - my weak attempt at speaking young-lish

"If love was simpler, would it mean as much?" - my reply to a friend's comment about love being complicated

(unfinished)