Edmund Blackadder: This is turning into a really rotten evening.
Amy Hardwood: Yes, well you better make the most of it, because it's your
last.And it's a pity, because it's usually against my principles to shoot dumb
animals.
Blackadder: Except squirrels?
Amy: Yes! Bastards! I hate them with their long tails and their stupid
twitchy noses.
From Blackadder the Third, episode 5, “Amy and Amiability”
(Personally, I find squirrels adorable, but there's no accounting for tastes. )
We all – yes, even you in the back with the fedora and handlebar moustache – have things we can't stand. Things that annoy us, enrage us, – and why? Childhood accidents? Deeply-seated neuroses? Does it matter? I have a whole list.
I can't stand mushrooms. Oh, no, mushrooms in food are lovely – and the sight of mushrooms in grocery stores does not raise my blood pressure. However, when I see mushrooms growing in situ in my backyard, that I cannot bear. Consider if you will, a green lawn, with roses on the side; and then consider the lawn with little mushroom pop-pop-popping all over it. It's like acne, and what has my poor backyard done to deserve acne? It doesn't subsist on a diet of junk food, it gets enough water, and then it gets attacked by these... fungi? The first time it happened, I seethed, I simmered, I fumed – and then I went out and kicked the mushrooms all over the place. Of course, that made it worse, but I did feel a whole lot better (for a while.)
I'm picky about spelling. Not in general – I've corrected essays filled with typos, and felt nothing more than a mild sense of pity for the poor benighted soul who thought Austen was spelt Osten – but there are a few words I cannot bear to see misspelt. For example, when people misspell the English proper name Michael as Micheal, I see red. I mean, c'mon, “Micheal?” It LOOKS wrong, for crying out loud! As an aside – I'm a visual speller. My spelling depends on the word looking right to me. I usually have to write out words like caribbean out a few times before I get it right – carribbean? carribean? caribean? - which means I'd probably suck at things like spelling bees, which depend on having to sound out words. Anyway, “Micheal” just looks wrong, to me. I'd be really interested to know if anyone else gets this, or even spells visually. Let me also just point out that the Irish and Scottish variants of Michael are Mícheál and Mìcheal respectively, according to wwww.behindthename.com, which don't bug me, because, hello, different languages. But when someone mispells an obviously english name, as in, “I used to be a Micheal Jackson fan” - that bugs me. Also annoying is the spelling “Conner” for Connor - though I think this might be simply because C-O-N-N-O-R has a beatiful symmetry that's lost in C-O-N-N-E-R.
The name whose misspelling most annoys me, however, is my own. If we'd kept all the Christmas cards we've received over the years, here are some of the variants you'd see: Sharin, Sharen, Sherin, Sheren, Sheron, Sherrin – I'd go on, but this red haze is beginning to make typing problematic. Spelling errors are understandable when it's a card from an acquaintance of your father's who's maybe heard your name from a mutual friend, and as such is guessing at the spelling. But still, Sharon's a fairly popular name, and you'd figure people would know how it's spelt, right? Wrong. I once had a classmate say, “ You don't pronounce it Sharown, right? More like Sharen? So why not spell it that way?” Because that's the wrong spelling, idiot! If you can learn to pronounce “knight” as 'night' and not 'k-niggit', you can do me the courtesy of pronouncing my name correctly too!
People like Varsha Bhosle, who think that Indianness is the same as Hinduness have my undying contempt. Of course, Hinduism is a huge part of Indian culture – that's undeniable. But why deny the Indianness of religious minorities? Imagine being introduced to someone only to have them say, “Sharon? That's not an Indian name is it?” Well, if you mean to conflate Indianness with Hinduness, then no, it's not Indian. But given that there have been Christians, including my own lot, in India for nearly 2000 years, I don't think the whole “You're not Indian” argument holds much water.
*deep breath* Ah, much better. No more repressing for me – venting is good for the soul.
