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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, June 16 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Awesome and then some So I'm walking down the street and I run into this guy with his dog and I say, by way of a pleasantry "How are you doing?" "I'm awesome," he replies. Awesome? No, dude. The Nahanni canyons are awesome. Kiri Te Kanawa singing Handel's Let the Bright Seraphim is awesome. Man of War equals awesome, as do Michelangelo's David, the Aurora Borealis and the Edmonton Oilers in the early eighties. You, on the other hand, are a guy walking a dog. No one can claim awesomeness; it has to be bestowed. Plus, awesome is...well, awesome. Jaw-droppingly, gob smackingly eye-ball-bulging, heart-in-the-throat humongous. You don't say "Awesome!" when somebody stands you to a beer or comps you a ticket to their nephew's second cousin's house party. There are plenty of regular words for that, like "Nice," "Hey, great!" and "Thanks a lot, eh?" Awesome is a major word. Don't let's piss it away on mundanities. And yet there's a bestseller out there called The Book of Awesome. It celebrates life's little victories like: "When you push the elevator button and it's already there." "When you take your underwear from the dryer and it's warm." Please. Those are...nice little moments. Touching. Cute. They are several light years and forces of magnitude away from awesome. Poor old awesome. Quite possibly the most overworked and denatured word in current English usage. Such a shame to take a perfectly majestic concept and horsewhip it to the edge of extinction. Especially when there are other perfectly good, practically unused words packing oodles of mojo and gathering dust Take 'bugger'. It's a word we Canucks share with English speakers in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and even Malaysia. Granted, it's still a little incendiary to toss around at a church social but the word has shed much of its pejorative sting. (It never truly deserved its unsavoury sexual connotation by the way. The word comes from the Old French Boulgrerie meaning 'of Bulgaria.' Back in the Middle Ages French authorities labelled religious heretics 'Bulgarians.' They later expanded the epithet to cover pretty much any 'unnatural' act committed by anybody. Sort of the way U.S.right wingnuts refer to anything French these days. Plus ca change.) In any case 'bugger' no longer makes people automatically think of the 'squeal like a pig' scene in Deliverance. As a word it's still feisty, but less offensive than in the past. Indeed, in Australia and New Zealand it's practically a term of endearment. Even here in Canada nobody bats an eye if you grumble about politicians buggering around with the words to O Canada. Dylan Thomas named his mythical Welsh town Llareggub - and what does that spell backwards? Bugger is a useful, no-nonsense nugget of language because it is versatile - and handier than duct tape and WD 40 combined. You can have a nasty bugger, a mean bugger, a silly bugger or an ugly bugger. A clumsy bugger can bugger up arrangements; a lazy bugger can bugger about doing sweet bugger all. And if there's a nosey bugger in your life, no need to bugger around. Just tell him to bugger off. And those are just your garden variety buggers. Last week in a thrift shop I picked up a wee book penned by a droll Canuck name of G.J. Emerson which annotates all kinds of exotic buggers I'd never even thought of. It is called The Basic Bugger Book and it outlines the qualities of Pushy Buggers, Pious Buggers, Officious, Obnoxious and Competitive Buggers, while not neglecting Buggers of the Yappy, Stingy, Smooth and Vicious persuasions. Mister Emerson posits the notion that the world needs a system which classifies human beings according to the type of bugger they are. "All in all," he writes, "the term 'bugger' offers ideal flexibility and variation." Just so. As Mister Emerson points out, there are good buggers and bad buggers out there. For every pushy or sarcastic bugger in your life you probably know a friendly bugger, a helpful bugger - even, if you're lucky, a lovely bugger. And would it not be lovely if we could rehabilitate 'bugger' and stick it back in our lexicogical quivers where it belongs? Lovely? Why, it would be awesome. reliable · responsible · recyclable YOUR OFFICE SUPPLY STORE INKJETS · LASER · RIBBON CARTRIDGES COPY & PRINT CENTER 410 TORONTO ST., NEWCASTLE · 905-987-4781