2007-08-03 - 11:17 p.m.

I was browsing through the Daily Mirror today (for ‘research purposes’ as the popular excuse for naughtiness has it) and it proved to be a most amusing experience. The first piece to delight me was the coverage of the Mississippi Bridge Disaster, bearing the headline, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom! Dropping, Dropping, Dropping’ It’s those exclamation marks that seem so inappropriate and therefore funny. They somehow render the catastrophe mad and childish. The droppings then conspire to make the booms sound like the fanfare for a giant bowel movement. It’s almost poetic in a daft sort of way, like Baldrick's ‘German Guns’ poem in ‘Blackadder’. At first I presumed this was just another hilariously crass moment of tabloid infantalism, but after reading the article it turned out to be a quote from one of the survivors, Jamie Winegar: ‘I just heard ‘Boom! Boom! Boom! And then we were just dropping, dropping, dropping.’ Oh. Oh. Oh. Now, that’s peculiar enough but Jamie isn’t the only one to have adopted this haiku-like way of transcribing disaster. Fellow escapee Peter Siddon is later quoted as saying, ‘I saw the bridge roll. Then it kept collapsing. Down. Down, down.' I didn’t hear any of the sooty so and sos from September the Eleventh Two Thousand and One talk like this. There was no ‘Crash! Crash! Crumble, Crumble.’ When the Titanic went down were there people bobbing about in the ocean muttering, ‘S-s-s-sunk, Sunk, Sunk! Wet, Wet, Wet.’? I hope news readers adopt this wonderful shorthand; it’ll save a lot of yammering: ‘Today in Iraq: Torture, Torture, Torture. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!’ Hey, kids: make up your own! It’s fun!

Another headline that had me bamboozled was ‘Model Rapist’. This is an ambiguous headline designed to hoodwink the unwary reader. It’s brimming with possible explanations: the fellow in question could be a rapist of models, stalking the catwalks to prey upon the coked up parade of beauteous skeletons; then again, it could be some deviant found with his trousers down over his Hornby train set; or, perhaps there’s been a model of a rapist made and it is now on display in a waxwork museum or some other place of dubious reputation? These are all distinct possibilities. My favourite scenario, though, was the idea that a sex offender had been described in glowing terms, an ideal – a model – rapist. I imagined a bewigged QC in the Old Bailey, summing up his case to the Judge: ‘Given the circumstances of this crime m’lud, the defence asks for a degree of leniency. Given the tenderness of intercourse supplied, his usage of a ribbed sheath and the purchasing of breakfast the following morning, I do not hesitate in describing my client as a “model rapist”. The defense rests.’ Disappointingly, it turned out that a male model had committed rape. I felt cheated. Male model is pushing it a bit, mind. This guy is gargoyle-ugly with a ginger fro and a crusty beard. Bewilderingly, he’d been chosen as the face of a shopping centre ad campaign, but has apparently now been ‘axed’.

‘Axed’ is one of those words the tabloids have mysteriously adopted as a subversive assault on adult language. Children become ‘tots’. When they fall off cliffs and things they become the dreaded ‘Horror Tots’. Football clubs do not bid for players but ‘swoop’ for them. If only – haggling over contracts would be far more palatable if cackling managers were simply to snatch potential signings in daring balloon raids. Also, the word ‘comedian’ rather shrouds the comedy part of it from the fish finger-munching reader, so he is given the more literal title of ‘funny man’. No room for misunderstanding there! Scientists and academics translate as ‘boffins’. How did they come up with that one? Who or what is a boffin? Will smokers become ‘puffins’? People do not merely have sex – oh no! – instead they ‘romp’: ‘How dare you accuse me of “romping” with a “blonde stunner”! We were merely indulging in horseplay, damnit!’ People or organisations are not merely criticised but ‘slammed’. This has amusing hints of professional wrestling. Perhaps the violence will evolve to more damaging moves as the years go by: ‘Gordon Brown was power bombed from office yesterday after his tot romps were swooped upon by funny men and slammed by the opposition. The shamed pervert admitted the romps but sensationally claimed that as a tot he was romped with most vigorously by pervert boffins, and was only romping with the tragic tots as research for his future crimes as a paedophile, we can exclusively reveal’.

previous - next