Snuff movies

Although my nicotine cravings have been steadily decreasing, today I had several big ones. I have a tin of snuff on hand, rather like AA members keep a bottle of booze in the house. First stage - I opened the tin and smelt the snuff. Actually, it smelt rather disappointing. I can see how the smell of a fine wine or a good single malt might drag someone of the wagon, but snuff didn't do it, so it was back to my Buffy DVD.

Second stage - I went downstairs to get some more of that good old Black Bush (you don't expect me to give up all addictive substances at the same time, do you?). Coming back, I get hit by a 6.3 craving on the Marlboro scale. I take a pinch of snuff, put it in that sexy little crease between my fingers and raise it to my nose.

I stop, and dash it away (actually, that's an exaggeration - I put it carefully back in the tin, as wouldn't want to get snuff all over the place). Now comes the point that gives me cause for concern. I have no problems with the idea that when avoiding a substance which some psychologists have reckoned is almost as addictive as heroin, I might occasionally be tempted to indulge in it. I'm giving up smoking because I think it might be good for my health - it's not like I've taken a Magickal Oath or anything. No, what worried me was the feeling I got when I dashed - OK, carefully wiped - the snuff away.

I felt a triumph of the will. I don't mean nice Thelemite "Every man and every woman is a star" True Will kind of thing, I mean Leni Riefenstahl. For a few milliseconds, I actually felt superior to all those degenerate Jewish Bolshevik Slavic Homosexual nicotine addicts.

I will take some snuff. Not because I want to now (the craving passed some time ago) but because pride destroys compassion. I could go on about my ambivalent attitude to compassion, but it is enough to say that for me it the reverse of nicoteine: something I hate but value, as opposed to something I love but do not value. It's a bummer, because it will set back my detoxification by a few days, but it is better than feeling self-righteous.

Then it's back to some righteous Buffy!

Forewarned is four-armed

I have finally finished "F". I wrote earlier that I didn't expect to be too long on the F-words, since there was a dearth of prefixes beginning with F. Of course I had forgotten about the good old Anglo-Saxon prefixes for- and fore-. In fact, most of these words didn't make it into the abridged dictionary because once you have an idea what "fore" means, you can usually work out words that start with it (though not always - take "forsake", for example). Some of the "fore" words are also pretty silly. As maggie_lucy pointed out, "forewarned" is redundant, as there is no point ina warning that doesn't come before that which it warns of. Can you imagine being afterwarned? "Look out, you've just been hit by a brick!"

Pet linguistic hates

Everyone has words of phrases they hate. I've been meaning to write an exhaustive list of my pet linguistic hates for some time, but the problem is that there are too many of them. So here are a few to be getting on with.

Safe haven

A haven is a harbour. Obviously harbours are supposed to be safe; consider the absurdity of the phrase "dangerous haven". Of course in practice, safe havens are not always safe; for example, during the Bosnian war, a UN "safe haven" was about the most dangerous place to be, showing that when the phrase was not redundant, it was untrue. Having been brought into disrepute by the UN, "safe haven" resurfaced in the context of Iraq and other evil countries; Saddam, for example, was accused of providing a safe haven for terrorists. Given the Bosnian interpretation, this ought to have meant that he encouraged fleeing terrorists to take refuge in Iraq, then handed them over to be slaughtered by the Americans.

People of ...

I don't know where people of confused syntax get the idea that the phrase "people of some abstract noun" is less condescending to whichever group you are referring to, so that "person of color" is somehow a nicer thing to say than "colored person". "Colored" was always a euphemism; changing it from an adjective to a noun doesn't change anything. However, I can accept that that particular phrase has entered our language, and that terms for racial groups are in any case transitory owing to the politics of etic and emic definition and whatnot ... but there is no way I am going to accept "people of poverty", which I saw on an otherwise admirable website. I suspect it is an attempt at recreating (in a suitably degendered way) the elan of phrases like "man of means", "man of substance" and so on, but I'm sorry, you can't put a positive, upbeat spin on poverty. These are not "people of poverty", they are just poor. And if you don't like the word "poor" because it has negative connotations, that's tough, because being poor is not a good thing. Ask any person of poverty.

P(a)edophile

One of the problems with euphemisms or attempts to "reclaim" words is that people aren't fooled for long. In the case of "paedophilia", they weren't fooled for an instant. There was already a perfectly serviceable word for someone who has sex with children: "pederast". Unfortunately, rather than sticking with "pederast", the public adopted "paedophile" (with or without the A) but with the meaning of "pederast" (a paedophile is strictly speaking someone who likes children; the term does not necessary mean having sex with children any more than an bibliophile has sex with books). Worse still, the semantic field of paedophile is now being expanded to mean anyone who is attracted to someone noticably younger than them, hence a reviewer's description of the casting of Keira Knightley as Guinevere as being for the benefit of teenage boys and "middle-aged paedophiles". Now beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but age is not; if she counts as a child for her middle-aged admirers, then she does for her teenage fans as well (Knightley is nineteen, by the way). If there is really a need for a word other than "heterosexual" to describe middle-aged men who find young women attractive, someone should invent one, rather than stretching an existing word wider than a catamite's behind.