The other day I came across a ridiculous German word.
Der Eierschalensollbruchverursacher.
It’s an item of cutlery, somewhat like an elongated spoon you might utilise if you chose to sup with the devil. In fact it’s a device for removing the top, or bottom, depending upon whether you are a “little endian” or a “big endian”, of a boiled egg. I came across it while watching a video posted on U-tube by one Liam Carpenter. Mr Carpenter is an Englishman who went to Germany to play professional basketball. I’m not sure that his career on the basketball court really took off, but he has made a name for himself by making short, humorous videos, mostly making fun of the cultural differences between the Germans and the English. For example his English persona clearly finds the existence of an Eierschalensollbruchverursacher to be inherently absurd. It says something about the German stereotype of the national devotion to efficiency. Vorsprung durch Technik. Equally absurd as the entity is its name, apparently cobbled together, literally something like “eggshell designed to break causative agent.” Of course, long words in English can also be cobbled together. They usually have a Latinate provenance, and often they are tongue in cheek. Floccinaucinihilipilification bears a double irony, because its meaning – a belittling – is in inverse proportion to the word’s length. But the seemingly limitless German penchant for concocting long words is entirely devoid of irony, and this is what the English find so amusing. Well done, Mr Carpenter. Humor hilft immer. Or, as the Reader’s Digest used to say, laughter is the best medicine.
Perhaps by way of contrast, Taylor Swift is coming to play Edinburgh, as part of her “eras” tour. Apparently the world tour has already grossed over a billion dollars in ticket sales. Ms Swift appears on the cover of Time magazine. I don’t get it. I went to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday night to hear the greatest music in the world played by the greatest musicians in the world to a hall half full, or half empty, depending on your temperament. It occurred to me that, although I would have recognised Ms Swift by appearance, with her trademark signature red lipstick, I had no idea what her voice sounded like. So I went out and bought her latest CD, The Tortured Poets Department. I wondered if that title owed anything to one of my favourite films, Dead Poets Society. Perhaps membership of the department allows, and predates, admission to the society. Anyway I quite like the CD, and now I would recognise Ms Swift’s voice. It’s a nice voice. (Good heavens. Am I becoming a Swiftie?) The musical language is diatonic, and very simple. The lyrics are clever. But I don’t really get it. I don’t get the hype. It’s not the Beatles. The Beatles, at least the early Beatles, had joy, even when heartbroken. But the world of the tortured poets is indeed tortured. Frankly, it’s miserable, and maybe that’s why Ms Swift has struck a chord. Teenage angst has reached a new and even lower depth of despair. It also seems to be temporally perpetuating itself; Ms Swift is, after all, 34 years old, but she’s still singing “F*** it if I can’t have him. Down bad. Down bad.”
I could perfectly believe that youth is more miserable than ever. Look at the world we have bequeathed them. It’s not just the global warming, the pollution of habitats, the mass extinction of species, and the destruction of the natural world. All these are bad enough. Infinitely worse is the implication that it doesn’t matter, because we can all live virtually. All of our problems can be sorted by access to a tablet. Presumably that is why everybody is wandering the streets in a trance, staring at a mobile. I heard an artificial intelligence guru on the radio say that pretty soon all our “menial” jobs would be undertaken by robots, ergo it would be better to make all the “menial” employees redundant, and give them a basic wage. The head of “smart places at FarrPoint”, one Steve Smith, wrote an agenda article to the Herald earlier this month, entitled “Could AI help find answer to social care problems?” He wants to install a device into the kettle of an elderly person, to alert family if the loved one is no longer making a cup of tea. “Smart technology” writes Mr Smith, “assisted by artificial intelligence, has the potential to revolutionise social care by improving quality and efficiency, while also empowering people to live independently for longer.”
That sentence could have been generated by a piece of AI software. It’s a portent of a dystopia; a vision of Hell.
jamescalumcampbell 