I'm doing a talk this Thursday at a seminar on Language and the Media (or something like that) related to how words slip and slide and sort of crash around to change their meaning or produce new ones or do both at once. There's really only one point I intend to make, a takeaway for my poor audience, as they say nowadays in an apt example of language sliding all over the place, and that's to try and notice and enjoy the whole crazy process. It's a most rewarding part of the human comedy.
My intuition is that we're hard-wired to enjoy kicking words around and that it takes an awful lot of repression (in the form of what's generally termed 'education') to take that enjoyment away. So let's take it back, shall we? It's a birth right of a sort, after all, and, let's face it, a nice safe way to live dangerously.
Wonder if I'll manage to offend anyone?
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