The New Negative

This isn’t an article about batteries or charging points so tech geeks, put away that box of tissues and hand lotion. This is about negation. About how negative it is. And how something needs to be done about it.

Now don’t waste a second wondering why that would be a bugging thing in the first place. It was you society dearest that got the ball rolling on this issue. By shunning the very qualifier that existed for certain attributes and qualities in people and non-people, we were left with little but rather vague sounding terms and arm gests that took hours to describe what the previous terms accomplished in a matter of seconds.

Let me explain. The ambiguities of trying to describe a bald man as follicly challenged without using any allusion to the word hair or something that refers to it could quite understandably leave you gasping for words. Similar etiquette and social respect had to be accorded to other people. The result is that nobody can be defective or crazy anymore, they are all special. But how else do you effectively and quickly refer to a fat man sitting across the room without the word tub or lard-bucket. And what self-respecting homo-basher wouldn’t want to call the next limp-wristed queen exactly that!?

If you ask me – even though you aren’t, consider this rhetoric then – there is a certain sense of pride to be had from possessing such marks of obvious identification. Bald, bespectacled and with pierced ears works fine for me, even if so I would so like to suffix Adonis and God-like to that. I don’t need someone getting iffy because they called me bald. In case others hadn’t noticed, I am.

But that isn’t the issue. I am saying it’s OK. I am agreeing, for a change. Be politically correct, all you fucktards! In fact I will join you and add to the pool of already increasing confusions with something that I am surprised still hasn’t rocked the world of literature and language. But then, my contributions couldn’t afford to be any lesser.

I am talking about words that denote the negative: impossible, undoable, undone, unimpressive…you know the road – all of them. In the current context I think they are too negative. They should be toned down a shade to accommodate for some respite. Imagine the impression left on a young impressionable kid who is told that something is impossible. It almost blocks his imagination from ever walking down that road again in the near or even distant future. You’d sooner boot him in the cerebrum or drop him on his head and produce a lesser drastic growth retardation.

And here is my solution.I propose that we replace or prefix, as sounds sensible, the letters ‘um-‘ to connote the negative but with some leeway for free thinking.

So something umpossible would imply a really tough or a hard-to-believe thing, a thing that nobody has achieved or managed to prove till date, or even come close to it, till, one day, God, just to prove that he does exist and doesn’t really need toilet breaks except for that he enjoys the smell of pine products they use in the bathroom, sends us a sign in some form or another – the fastest 100m dash, the greatest medal-winning Olympian, the man who survives without eating – just so to prove that he does what love claims to allegedly do (make the world go round that is) and thereby, by virtue of one eventful showing, shifting the task in question out of the realm of the impossible and into the possible.

So, to keep from being proven wrong in the future by some super form of being, it might be a good idea to call something, simply, umpossible. That would mean it can’t be done so far but hey, who knows!

By that logic things could now be umsightly, umnerving, umcoherent, um-everything basically. Stating or implying the pessimistic and the sceptic but not without some reserve for a reason to root for the home team.

And this is not a tiny movement on a blog. Think of the bigger implications. No more malfunction lawsuits as six sigma becomes a thing of the past. Umtrained would automatically be more qualified to fly than an untrained pilot, thereby taking the numbers of Potential Pilots through the sky, pun intended, thereby leading to reduction of their rather overblown salaries, eventually leading to a reduction in ticket prices. If the plane lands safely somehow, you arrive richer by wealth and preserved in health.

But the biggest implication would be religious. Wait for this, Umbelieveable, in my opinion, could be the one word that unites Catholics and Protestants over the whole saga, right from Annunciation and down to Immaculate Conception and Resurrection.

Let all that sink in. Umconvinced still. Well it is a step up from unconvinced so I will take it as a compliment. Try using it and let me know the results. This is an honest effort at redefining language. I am not trying to be a smart-ass here. Yep, yet another first. Meanwhile, um outta here!